Spirit of a Team: Successful Ceos and Coaches Share Their Strategies for Achieving Excellence

Experience the leadership and life paths of the top football coaches from high school to college to the NFL mixed with CEOs who have succeeded in business on the field, as Coach Lee Owens interviews all of them to give readers a look at the path to excellence.

Coach Lee Owens (Ashland University, Ohio State University, and Massillon High School), has been writing this book for the past forty-five years. During his coaching career, he had the opportunity to take over six struggling high school and college football teams. Each time the challenge was different, but the message was the same. He told each team they would be champions, and each time it happened.

The blueprint for achieving team excellence works in the locker room, but it can also work in the boardroom. Motivating a team of football players is no different from motivating a team of salespeople or motivating your team at home.

The Spirit of a Team gives readers real-life examples of how actual CEOs, coaches, and players used these skills to achieve success in the biggest arenas of business and sport. Lee Owens and Larry Phillips sat down with multiple individuals who exemplify leadership. Read the stories of Matt LaFleur, Luke Fickell, Dwight Schar, Sue Ramsey, Steve Clinkscale, Nate Moore, Matt Kaulig, Carl Johnson, Dan Niss, Bob Sebo, and more. Their stories are not only inspiring, but also a validation of the building blocks to team excellence that The Spirit of a Team outlines, mixed with Coach Lee Owens’s twenty-six years of coaching experience and Larry Phillips’s thirty-five years of journalistic insights.

Ohio High School Hall of Fame football coach Lee Owens is a motivational speaker and team-culture coach. Coach Owens is a leader and a winner. He has built winning teams and won championships everywhere he has coached. In 2023, Lee retired from coaching after winning his sixteenth football championship. During his career, he took over struggling football programs at six different schools and led teach of hem to championship seasons. His football coaching stops included the legendary Massillon Washington High School and Big Ten powerhouse Ohio State University. His résumé is punctuated by coaching NFL Hall of Fame football players Jason Taylor and Orlando Pace. Owens was recognized seventeen times as Coach of the Year and three times as a finalist for the NCAA Division II National Coach of the Year. In addition, he was selected the 1985 Ohio High School Coach of the Year and the 2012 Ohio College Coach of the Year. Beyond the gridiron, Owens became one of college football’s truly impressive inspirational speakers.

Larry Phillips is an author, editor, and writer with more than one hundred writing and editing awards at the international, national, and state levels. He has been selected Ohio’s Sportswriter of the Year and Sports Columnist of the Year by both the Associated Press and the Ohio Prep Sports Writers Association. Today he is the editor of three online news agencies, Richland Source, Ashland Source, and Knox Pages. Each is a hyperlocal online news agency in North Central Ohio. Larry is a thirty-five-year veteran of the news writing industry who graduated from Ohio University with a journalism degree in 1989. He has worked as a news reporter, sports reporter, city editor, news editor, lifestyles editor, sports editor, and managing editor in the Thomson and Gannett newspaper chains. He has authored two books, Ohio’s Autumn Legends, Volume I and Volume II, on a personal passion topic, Ohio high school football. Larry and his wife, Laura, live in Mansfield, Ohio, with their two children, Bryan and Sydney.