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Hanna Howard
Athletes, particularly those who participate in team sports, are, by and large, highly adaptable creatures.
It’s an essential ingredient to competition, that is, adaptability, what with all that can go wrong that’s all out of one’s control.
The random, bad bounce or deflection, for example. It’s as if the ball has a mind of its own. Weather conditions. We know Mother Nature does have a mind of her own. Injuries are another. So, too, are the always-unplanned equipment malfunctions.
Then there’s the referee who needs a new eye-glass prescription. Bad calls … it happens. There’s also the element of surprise the opponent springs on you. Where on God’s green earth did that half-court trap come from?
As one of our area’s great philosophers once said, “that’s the way baseball go.”
It stands to reason that the participants learn to adapt to ever-changing circumstances.
Hanna Howard knows all about it. A former basketball player at the University of Portland, her professional ambition — since her days in middle school — was to be a coach, which she achieved. She had assistant coaching stints at University of California at San Diego, Utah State, and Fresno State before rising to associate head coach for the TCU women’s basketball team.
Two years later, Howard today is the chief operating officer of Fort Worth-based Valor, a specialty asset management company with expertise in providing mineral management and oil and gas outsourcing.
The best clairvoyant with a crystal ball would have had trouble prophesying that.
“How the hell did that happen?” she jokes, while accurately anticipating the question.
The other reality of sports, well, certainly in the business of coaching sports, anyway, is being let go. Professional life as a sports coach is one of being a vagabond, a nomad. They move from place to place because opportunity knocks. Or because opportunity has come and gone.
That latter is what happened at TCU. Howard was the first to be let go, in 2022, on a staff that was on the brink of all being let go. She was likely let go to show the administration that “change” was taking place, that the head coach was shaking things up in order to advance the program. “We’re not happy with the status quo.” In short, one is let go to save the ship, that is, the rest of the coaching staff. (Howard did not say that. I did. But that’s another reality of college athletics. You see it all the time.)
In fact, the entire staff turned over in the spring, the very next year.
Not surprisingly, particularly with a person who has competed at high levels her entire life, the layoff “stung.”
She also had two young children she did not want to uproot. It was time for a change.
“I'm so thankful that I had that opportunity get out when I did because I think it gave me an opportunity to kind of leverage some relationships,” Howard said. “The Fort Worth community loves TCU coaches. And, so, I had a lot of people, I think, that were looking out for me and wanted to see me land on my feet when I made that decision that I wasn't gonna keep chasing the profession.
“I coined the phrase to myself: I'm ‘betting on Fort Worth.’”
One of those advocates was Greg Morse, the CEO of Worthington National Bank. Morse arranged for Whit Smith, who owns WhitneySmith Company, a consulting firm that provides a wide range of human resources services and products, including executive searches, to conduct one of those professional attributes assessments and evaluate where those traits that had served her so well as a coach would translate in business.
Coinciding with those activities was knowledge within WhitneySmith that Valor CEO Joseph DeWoody was seeking to bolster his executive staff.
DeWoody, Howard said, “said something to the effect of, ‘You know, I think I'm at a point where I need a coach to coach my company.’”
There was a match with Howard for this out-of-the-box vision. She was initially hired as chief growth officer at Valor, brought on to craft strategy to grow sales. Soon after her hire, she was moved to chief of staff, switching jobs with a colleague.
“Well, she and I were here for a month and we kind of were looking at each other and we thought we should switch roles,” Howard said. “I thought my strengths laid more in the chief of staff role. So, we presented it to Joseph and he's, like, ‘Right on, couldn't agree more. Let's make the switch.’”
Less than a year later, Howard was promoted to COO. In this role, she is responsible for overseeing the full operational and administrative side of the firm, including strategic planning, staff development, and project management.
“Hanna is both a natural-born leader and a trained one — nature and nurture — and that was evident immediately upon meeting her,” DeWoody said. “When you combine natural ability with intentionality of improvement, it creates a special combination. I believe there is a small set of the population that truly has the ability or desire to create a significant impact. Hanna is in that group and that was clear when we initially met.”
Howard is also in a group that Valor obviously values. Including Howard, there are 10 former college student-athletes on the roster at Valor. DeWoody is another. He played football at Baylor.
The topic of hiring student-athletes is top of mind. Many have expounded on the subject, including Tiffany Pak, a former student-athlete at Georgetown University who in 2018 authored Fit for Business: Why Your Next Employee Should be a Former College Athlete.
Pak cites an Ernst & Young study of top women executives across corporations and found that 94% of women in the C-suite played sports, including 52% at the university level.
A recruiting officer for Northwestern Mutual in Greenville, South Carolina, told a Wofford College publication said that “more than 90%” of the office had some athletic experience.
Vaughn Calhoun, assistant vice president and dean for the Center of Academic Success at Seton Hall University, wrote on LinkedIn the attributes of college athletes that transfer to the board room.
Mental toughness, adaptability and coachability, work ethic and being good team players are all essential ingredients, he argued, including understanding one’s individual role and how it fits into the overall big picture. They’re resilient and strong communicators, and they also understand how to compete, said Calhoun, who added that he also believed student-athletes better understand the value of failure and the opportunity for growth that comes with it.
Elyse Dickerson, CEO of Fort Worth-based EOSERA, credits her experience as an athlete for her company’s success in the ear-care space. As an example, she and business partner Joe Griffin needed $50,000 to run human clinical trials.
A pitch competition in Dallas was paying a top price of $50,000.
“This is where being an athlete and super competitive paid off,” said Dickerson, who earned 12 varsity letters while a student at Fort Worth Country Day, Class of 1993. “I went to my business partner and said, ‘I’m going to win that thing.’ I spent months on this eight-minute pitch. I ended up being one of the five finalists and got to pitch in front of a panel of judges, and we had literally eight minutes. It was a big room full of people and a panel of judges.
“I got up and pitched, nailed it, and we won the $50,000.”
Coaching merely adds to those traits that translate, said Howard, who added that she hopes to be an example for other coaches looking to make a change.
“In essence, I was on an executive team. Even if I wasn't the head coach, we were running a business. Running a college program is like running a business,” she said. “Whether it's recruiting … recruiting is sales to be honest. I mean, that's what you're doing when you're recruiting; you're trying to outsell your competition. And recognizing all of the skills that came from managing a team and managing personalities and recognizing roles that players needed to be in.
“It all kind of started to really make sense for me — how this is really actually a natural transition. I'm not saying that it's an easy one to find because I think it took Joseph being willing to kind of do something outside the box, but I do think that there's a real strength that coaches can bring to the business world.”
