Pete Jacobson has been a wrestling coach in New York for 21 years at Edgemont High School. For the last seven years, he has also had a speaking and consulting business, WinSmarter.com, where he works with coaches, teams and entire athletic departments in a variety of areas including frameworks and systems for developing strong leadership throughout one’s roster; building relationships with alumni and other stakeholders; fundraising/development; and other related topics. He also works with the National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA) as a facilitator for their Scholastic Coaches Leadership Academy – a structured coaching development program designed to teach coaches all the skills they need “outside the wrestling room” to build a strong program. Dr. Dan Gould helped develop this program for the NWCA.
Dr. Ian Cowburn is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Coaching in the Centre for Sport Coaching at Leeds Beckett University. In his role he engages in teaching the sport coaching undergraduate program, primarily around coaching pedagogy, coach learning, and positive youth development through sport. He also contributes to master’s level teaching, and supervises MPhil, PhD, and Professional Doctorate students. As with many ISYS graduates he is engaged in research in a few different areas, both directly as a researcher and as a research student supervisor.
Dr. Scott Pierce is an Associate Professor at the School of Kinesiology and Recreation at Illinois State University. He is from New Zealand and completed his PhD at Michigan State University and the Institute for the Study of Youth Sport in 2015. His research focuses on understanding how we can support youth athletes in the development of psychological skills and life skills in sport and the transfer of life skills from sport. Scott is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC®) and currently works with state and national high school athletic organizations, as well as Division I and Division III collegiate athletics programs, developing and implementing programming for resilience, leadership, mental performance, and life skills development for student-athletes.
Ramon Diaz is a clinical therapist in private practice in Morris, IL. He specializes in working with sport performance athletes, developmental neuropsychology, nervous system and mood disorders, and infant and adolescent mental health. He’s a former D1 football player that played for Northwestern University from 2005-2009. He is currently working on his PhD in Neuropsychology and plans to focus most of his research efforts on the neuroanatomical and neuropsychological substrates of chronic stress on the vagus nerve in primates.