Joyce Anderson of Honest Game: “When humanity struggles, we develop grit and compassion for others”
An Interview With Phil La Duke
Two words: grit and compassion. When humanity struggles, we develop grit and compassion for others. I’m confident we will come out stronger from COVID-19. We may have to take three steps back but eventually; we will take one giant step towards progress. On 9/11, I was a college student at Columbia in New York. It was a horrific day for everyone across America, and for those living in NYC, the events hit very close to home — literally and figuratively. Despite the terrible events, Americans came together to lift each other up. It was emotional and inspiring. I believe we will have this same uplifting time after we defeat COVID-19 but it is going to be on a global scale, rather than just a national one.
I had the pleasure to interview Joyce Anderson, Co-Founder of Honest Game. Honest Game, a public benefit corporation, is an edtech / sports tech tool that helps student-athletes keep track of their eligibility to participate in college athletics. The Chicago-area startup was founded by two women, Kim Michelson and Joyce Anderson, both of whom have deep experience with the US college athletics admissions process. Anderson is the college-bound student-athlete advisor at Evanston Township High School, a public high school of more than 3,500 students in Evanston, Ill., just north of Chicago. She is also president of the board of directors for Girls Play Sports, a nonprofit that supports girls’ leadership by way of sports participation, and is on the NCAA Eligibility Center High School Advisory Board. Her co-founder Michelson in 1987 became California’s first female student to compete on male varsity teams, basketball, and baseball. More recently, she served as executive director of the Beyond Sports Foundation, a Highland Park, Ill.-based nonprofit working with high school student-athletes from underserved communities.
This past March, Honest Game won the Chicago Bulls Venture Competition, powered by early-stage venture capital firm LOUD Capital. Their win was announced on center court during what turned out to be the last Bulls home game of the 2019–20 season.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how and where you grew up?
My parents immigrated to New York from Taiwan in the early 1970s. They divorced when I was five. My brother, sister, and I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs and attended a predominantly white school. Despite racist instances of being called “chink” or getting spat at and told to “go back to my country,” we had a strong education and upbringing. I started competing in tennis tournaments at age 10 and from then on forward, pretty much specialized in tennis from then on. It was an incredible escape and allowed me to channel my competitive drive. The sport taught me how to lose, how to win, how to be a team player, and how to lead. I gained confidence and learned discipline, goal setting, and persistence. I was fortunate to experience all the benefits of college athletics as a four-year starter at Columbia University. Without sports, I would not be who I am today.
My co-founder, Kim Michelson, was the first female in the state of California to participate in boys’ varsity baseball and basketball. She has a twin sister and lost her mother as a young girl. She’s a cancer survivor and a fierce competitor!
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
As a child, I was an avid reader. I was inspired by strong female protagonists. Some of my favorites were The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Island of the Blue Dolphins. These were about independent-minded girls/women who were left on their own to survive and do what was right, despite all that nature and society threw at them. To this day, I hold on to these iconic figures and strive to follow a moral compass while being an independent-minded and resilient person.
Do you have a favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life or your work?
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Gandhi
While I’m far from a hero compared to so many, I do try to make a positive impact every day, however small. There have absolutely been times in my life when I focused on myself and what I needed to accomplish for my own goals. As the years went on, however, I realized that without purpose, I felt little worth in my personal goals. Purpose was the premise behind my past work as an attorney and the premise of my more recent work in coaching and education. Purpose is what culminated in the birth of Honest Game. I resigned from two jobs that I loved to start Honest Game with my co-founder Kim to use our unique skills and experience to bring equal opportunity and access for thousands of student-athletes who have dreams of a college education and beyond.
Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. You are currently leading a social impact organization that has stepped up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to address?
Honest Game builds individualized academic roadmaps for high school students who want to play sports in college. Every year, more than 800,000 high school students are barred from college athletics due to academic mistakes. In the top 50 urban communities, nearly one of every two students who miss out on college athletics due to academic ineligibility. That’s millions of dollars of scholarships denied to those who need it the most.
Honest Game aims to level the playing field by providing short-term goals and clear guidance for students, and all the adults in their lives — coaches, counselors, parents. Academic requirements can be tricky and if students are not aware, they can make innocent missteps that result in denial of scholarships and recruitment. Mistakes like taking the wrong English class, for example, could render a student ineligible. Oftentimes the mistakes are not discovered until it’s too late to correct the issue. We track students as early as an eighth grade to ensure students are on track and can identify issues early, which encourages informed planning and academic success. In the end, using college athletics as a motivator will inspire young student-athletes to dedicate themselves to their schoolwork — and ultimately improve overall student learning outcomes!
In your opinion, what does it mean to be a hero?
I believe that heroes can be in the form of anyone who chooses the benefit of another over their own. In this pandemic, we have heroes everywhere we look — from the healthcare workers risking their own lives to save others, bus drivers risking their health to assist essential workers in the commute, grocery clerks stocking shelves providing food for their communities, and parents who are struggling financially and emotionally, yet still are providing a loving home for their children. We all have an opportunity to be a hero every day.
In your opinion or experience, what are “5 characteristics of a hero? Please share a story or example for each.
- Sacrifice: When given two options, choosing the one that may be harder for you if it means someone else will benefit.
- Solving a problem: When someone is in a difficult situation, and you help them fix it.
- Doer: When others standby and are comfortable with the status quo, a hero speaks up and takes action.
- Risk: Heroes take a risk in order to enact change.
- Not a hero: Someone who does the right thing and avoids the recognition, because it’s not about the recognition but the principle.
If heroism is rooted in doing something difficult, scary, or even self-sacrificing, what do you think drives some people — ordinary people — to become heroes?
Purpose. Humanity. I believe we are all capable of being heroic. We all have a moral compass. We all have the instinct to do the right thing. The question is when presented with an opportunity, will we listen to that compass over our own self-interests?
What was the specific catalyst for you or your organization to take heroic action? At what point did you personally decide that heroic action needed to be taken?
Sport has been a part of our lives since we were children. In a lot of ways, sports raised us. For the past 10 years, Kim, my co-founder, and I have both been involved in nonprofits, education, and youth sports. Specifically for the past six years, we have guided student-athletes through the college recruiting and eligibility process and realized that students and their adults needed an automated system to help with understanding and tracking academics for college sports. Even with diligent advising in our bubbles, students continued to fall through the cracks. In January 2019, Kim came to me and together we hatched a plan to take what we were doing in our small communities and scale it with technology to help level the playing field for student-athletes around the world.
In the midst of COVID-19, the NCAA and NAIA scrambled to introduce waivers to allow for the extenuating circumstances: the ACTs and SATs were canceled, and schools were going pass/fail instead of lettered grades. Both institutions enacted new rules, which would affect the graduating class of 2020, which was only a couple of months away from graduation.
At one school, Honest Game identified 21 seniors who got their full eligibility back. We identified the students’ changes in eligibility within a couple of hours versus the many days it would’ve taken without our automated College Athletic Report on EligibilityTM (CARETM for short). We knew information needed to be communicated immediately so students and families could make quick pivot decisions during the recruiting process. This demonstrated the value of our exact purpose for all students — before, during, and post-pandemic — to be able to make informed and realistic decisions in real-time.
Who are your heroes, or who do you see as heroes today?
Barack Obama and Billie Jean King are two people who put themselves in complicated positions in order to make a change for the better. They could’ve spent their time out of the limelight and lived comfortable and easy lives. Instead they put themselves out in the world, spoke up for what they believed in, while taking criticism and attacks in order to make the world a better place for others.
Let’s talk a bit about what is happening in the world today. What specifically frightened or frightens you most about the pandemic?
What frightens me is the possibility that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Has the pandemic forced us to lose our American innocence and carefree spirit? At the end of 2019, I traveled to Asia with my family. Most children and adults there wore masks and gloves throughout the city. I was dismayed that the children were scolded for taking off their masks or for touching the railing in the subway. The country had been through SARS/MERS and so they had adapted to a new restrained way of life. I fear that because of COVID, we will have a shift like that here.
Despite that, what gives you hope for the future? Can you explain?
Two words: grit and compassion. When humanity struggles, we develop grit and compassion for others. I’m confident we will come out stronger from COVID-19. We may have to take three steps back but eventually; we will take one giant step towards progress. On 9/11, I was a college student at Columbia in New York. It was a horrific day for everyone across America, and for those living in NYC, the events hit very close to home — literally and figuratively. Despite the terrible events, Americans came together to lift each other up. It was emotional and inspiring. I believe we will have this same uplifting time after we defeat COVID-19 but it is going to be on a global scale, rather than just a national one.
What has inspired you the most about the behavior of people during the pandemic, and what behaviors do you find most disappointing?
I find it most disappointing that some are looking for a scapegoat — someone to blame for COVID-19. Of course racism rears its ugly head again. More so than in the past, I worry about a possible violent racist encounter that could happen to my mother, my father, my siblings, or my children.
In Evanston, our small community north of Chicago, I have already seen inspiring moments of hope: neighbors lifting each other with front-yard musical performances and sharing of incessant baking. Every small gesture means a reason to smile and be grateful. Overall, it has been inspiring how most Americans have accepted the shelter-in-place orders. I didn’t think we would take the pandemic seriously or accept such strict orders the way other countries have, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.
Has this crisis caused you to reassess your view of the world or of society? We would love to hear what you mean.
We are now in week 10 of the mandatory shelter-in-place with our three young boys. My husband and I are juggling our full-time jobs at our respective startups while also managing our children’s’ e-learning and emotional well-being. It has been a comedy of errors.
Yet every day, our privilege is amplified. We struggle with our family’s challenges in the safety of our home, while essential workers — many of whom have no choice — continue to risk their lives and their families’ health for the greater good. The divide of wealth, privilege, and race in American society continues to grow. And while most of us were aware of it before, my hope is that we as a society will be increasingly inspired every day to do something about it.
What permanent societal changes would you like to see come out of this crisis?
A balancing of racial and economic equity in American society.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
When you are working your tail off day in and day out to ensure you complete a job well done, remember to ask, “what is it for?” If you don’t have an answer that satisfies you, think about using your efforts and talents to do something that makes you feel good about what you do every day.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I’d call for access to real and positive organized sports for all children at low or no cost, with the recognition that there are certain stereotypes in most cultures — even in America — that sports are not for girls. Let’s allow girls to have a safe space of their own to be competitive, athletic and strong.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
I’d love to sit down with Billie Jean King, one of the greatest leaders in the women in sports movement. We’d have a genuine chat about how she thinks her mistakes have influenced her life and how her actions have influenced others. And of course, I would want to talk about how Honest Game’s mission can continue to bring equity to sports.
How can our readers follow you online?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joyce-anderson-7440a23/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimmichelson/
Thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.
About The Author:
Phil La Duke is a popular speaker & writer with more than 500 works in print. He has contributed to Entrepreneur, Monster, Thrive Global and is published on all inhabited continents. His first book is a visceral, no-holds-barred look at worker safety, I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety. His most recent book is Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention listed as #16 on Pretty Progressive magazine’s list of 49 books that powerful women study in detail. His third book, Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands is expected in June followed by Loving An Addict: Collateral Damage Of the Opioid Epidemic due to be released in August. Follow Phil on Twitter @philladuke or read his weekly blog www.philladuke.wordpress.com
