PCA February Partner of the Month: Jordan School District

This month we sat down with Bryan Veazie, District Athletics and Activities Director at Jordan School District in the southwestern portion of Salt Lake County, Utah.  

PCA: Bryan I am thrilled to meet you and wanted to say how excited we are about the article in the Utah Desert News which provides an overview of the partnership between the Jordan School District and PCA. https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/11/26/high-school-jordan-district-team-captains-workshop-positive-coaching/

PCA:  Before we talk about the article, can you tell me how you came to your role?

Bryan Veazie: I was working full time and also coaching high school sports as a paraprofessional. I quickly realized how much I wanted to teach and coach full time. After much consideration, I asked my wife what she’d think about me taking a significant pay cut, going back to school to get my master’s degree and teaching certificate, and becoming a full time teacher and coach. Always so supportive, she said “I’ve been wondering when you were going to ask. I think that’s where you belong. What do we need to do to make it happen?” So I made the transition into education and taught and coached for years. Eventually I came to realize I wanted to be in a position to expand my sphere of influence to support more programs and more kids.  I went back and got my administrative license and certificate. Soon after I became a high school assistant principal. I worked as an assistant principal for six years and then as a high school principal for five years. In July of 2023 I was appointed to the newly created position of Director of Athletics and Activities for the Jordan School District. 

PCA: Are other school districts modeling the role that you have?

Bryan Veazie: I would say that the Jordan School District is definitely leading out in setting the standard of not only having a stand alone director of athletics and activities, but having someone who has had a high level of administrative experience in that role.

PCA: What have your priorities been in the new role?

Bryan Veazie:  After getting the job, my first priority was connecting to and networking with the Utah High School Activities Association, National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, National Federation of High School Sports, district athletic directors across the state, our board of education, school athletic leadership teams,I started identifying the strengths and needs of our athletic programs throughout our district. I wanted to understand how I could best serve and contribute to our schools in meeting the needs of their athletic departments. I wanted to identify best practice in education based athletics. Through that process I discovered the Positive Coaching Alliance.

I did research on a variety of different platforms, products, and programs and liked the structure of PCA, the simplicity of the partnership, and the variety of options that the partnership provided. 

I wanted to take advantage of some of the leadership training workshops and resources that are available. This past summer we did a workshop for school administrators, athletic directors and athletic administrative assistants. We went through a workshop with Tyler Johnson at PCA. From there I set up a structure within our partnership to where this year we’ve offered a sports season specific workshop separately for coaches and student athletes. We had all of the fall coaches attend the coach workshop. We also invited student leaders and team captains from all fall sports in all our high schools to a student leader/captain’s academy workshop. We did both of those workshops again in the winter for our winter sports and have scheduled them this February and March for the spring coaches and student athletes. 

Next year we want to continue the trainings, but I also want to find ways to incorporate a parent workshop into the parent meetings that occur at the beginning of each sports season.

PCA: How was the process working with PCA?

Bryan Veazie: I basically went to the PCA website and explored that extensively, clicked on each dropdowns, read through all the literature, studied the resources, looked at the online courses and workshops. Once I was convinced that it was a good fit for our district needs, I reached out to PCA. We had an initial meeting and then I had a few additional conversations with PCA throughout the process. Once I worked with district level leadership to secure funding, we established the partnership and moved forward with the workshops.

Another thing that I like about the partnership is with each workshop they offer 20 of their online courses. We’ve been able to use that in two different ways. First, if coaches are excused by their administration from attending the In person workshop, we can assign them to attend the online course that best aligns with the workshop. The second thing that we’ve done is inform school principals and their athletic leadership of the courses available. As they run into challenges or concerns with how coaches are running their program, with how their student athletes are participating in the program, or even with how the parents are supporting the program, they can choose to assign these online courses to individuals based on need. The key is that we are providing ongoing professional development for our coaches and trainings for our student athletes and their parents that help individuals better understand their role in education based athletics and how to most successfully achieve their goals within that role in the most positive way.

PCA:  So tell me how the article in the Utah Desert came about?

Bryan Veazie:  So, first and foremost, we have an incredible communications department led by Sandy Riesgraf and Doug Flagler, who are always very supportive in helping us get the word out about the great things that the district and the schools are doing. At one time Fox 13 News was doing a broad story on the stresses and pressures that teenagers face in society today. They heard about the PCA partnership and wanted to know if they could do a longer segment that also focused on the stresses and pressures in athletics at the high school level.  We pulled several different athletes in for them to talk about their experience with high school athletics and the challenge of balancing the time, energy, and commitment of sports with all of their other commitments. It was a great story and several who participated in it were able to talk about the benefits of what they had learned in the PCA workshop and helping them have the most positive experience possible participating in their sport. A reporter from the Deseret News found out that we had done the story with Fox 13 and that we were getting ready to do another PCA workshop. They were interested in covering our partnership and the workshops we were offering as an article in their newspaper. We invited the reporter to come to the PCA workshop and then invited him to pull out some of the athletic directors, that were there to support the kids, to get a report on their experience of participating in the workshop and how they felt it would benefit them and their student athletes moving forward. And that’s ultimately where the article came from in the newspaper. 

PCA:  We can not thank you enough for the time your team took making the article happen.

Bryan Veazie: We love our partnership with PCA and we’re excited to continue on with it. I’m really encouraged about the prospect of providing workshop opportunities to the parents of our student athletes. We would eventually like to extend the workshop opportunities to our youth programs that feed into our high schools. Ultimately, our goal is to find ways to create healthy and positive cultures within our athletic programs that focus on what is best for kids. We want them to maximize their potential for success, both on the scoreboard and in life, through their experiences in athletics and through the critical concepts they and their coaches are learning through our partnership with the positive coaching alliance.

Learn more about how you can bring PCA to your youth sports program.