What a 3-Time Olympian Learned About Building a Lasting Legacy | Tracy Evans-Land

Welcome to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavlosky.

Welcome back to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Pavlosky. Today's guest embodies something I've spent over 30 years studying up close. What happens when an elite athlete turns competitive fire into purpose? Tracy Evans Land is a 3-time U.S. Olympian in freestyle aerial skiing and one of the first women in the world to land both both a triple twisting double somersault and a double twisting triple somersault in competition. And that's a tongue twister, in fact, Tracy.

Sure is.

When her competitive career ended, she didn't step away from sport. She built 2 ventures around it. First came Athlete Source Casting, connecting athletes to opportunities across film, television, and media. Then after a volunteer trip to Rwanda in 2008, she founded Kids Play International, a nonprofit that uses sport to advance gender equity in communities rebuilding after genocide. Nearly 2 decades later, KPI's programs reach thousands of children and families across Rwanda and Cambodia. And Tracy has been recognized by the International Olympic Committee as one of only 5 Olympians honored worldwide for use of sport as force for life. Today, we talk about founding, funding, and sustainable purpose-driven work for the long haul. Tracy? Great to see you as always. Thank you for being here.

Thanks, Alan. So, so awesome to be here today. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, and it's funny because we go way back to many years ago when you were really getting KPI off the ground, and you were nominated, I think, 3 years in a row for a humanitarian award I was involved in giving out. And you were so gracious always in participating in that, and super excited to have you here.

Likewise. I always say it's my passion, my vision, but there's a Big, big team behind me that makes it all happen.

Yeah, for sure. Same for me. Let's get into the questions. You competed in 3 Olympic Games and were among the first women to land some of the most difficult combinations in aerial skiing. They were also some of the most difficult to pronounce. What did the pursuit of excellence teach you that still shapes how you operate today?

Yeah, I love that question. I really am a strong believer of the values, the Olympic values of excellence, friendship, and respect. Excellence— what I love about the word excellence is not just doing your best when everyone's watching you. It is most important that you're doing your best when nobody's watching you. Are you still holding yourself accountable to the same standard that you do when people are watching? I think that is just so, so key in life, not even just competition, clearly. Friendship is really about listening and learning about new cultures. People, different ways people believe, think, and act. You don't have to agree with everybody. That's definitely not it. But it's the art of listening. And then respect. And respect is about respecting yourself, respecting others, respecting the rules on the field, respecting the rules in life. Those values, I think, are so transferable to anybody, like I said, whether you're on the field as an Olympic athlete or not. But I also feel like that discipline and that work ethic that I really learned around preparation, practice, performance, and then processing or reflecting on how that went. And then always coming back and thinking about, OK, what can I prepare better? What can I do better? How can I practice doing that and perform? And that cycle is really such a cycle that I really have wanted to pass along to others, less-resourced youth, whether that's abroad or even here in our own country.

Well, elite sport demands total commitment for a short competitive window. How do you think about what comes next? And even while you're still competing, what is it in yourself that allows you to see forward even though you're involved in a really very taxing occupation?

I think that is a really big ticket question for all athletes is basically, how do you still, especially in your later years, Stay very committed to the training and the performance side and the practice performance side. But then how are you also, as a veteran athlete, looking at how am I going to transition out of sport? Because the physical side of transitioning out of sport is actually not that hard. Your body gives up. It's just time to move on. But that mental side, which is a whole other podcast in and of itself—

For sure.

But that mental side of it is— yeah, exactly— is very, very difficult for athletes. And look, I feel like I have been very fortunate in my career. I have a very strong family background, a very good support system. I have a degree. I'm very forward-thinking about what I wanted to do when I got done. But that did not make it any less mentally taxing. And like I said, when you have every single day structured for yourself year after year for 10, 15 years, anything like that is hard to break that cycle around. But for myself, I did take a break after the '98 Games. And my brother had a sports marketing company. So I went down to Los Angeles and actually opened up a branch of his sports marketing company called Athlete Source Casting.

Mm-hmm.

And so that gave me a 2-year break to kind of figure out— it gave my brain an absolute break on thinking about competing. Aerials is very mental. It looks very physical, and it is, but it is Yeah. Jumping is also a very mental sport, especially pushing, as a woman, the triple jumps back in my era of jumping. But also, it just gave me a break to think about something differently. And I think because of that break, I was able to come back for my last 2 years of competing going into the 2002 Games in a much more balanced perspective. And also, as a veteran athlete, I wasn't there to try to get the numbers in. I was really like quality of jumping and was able to just be able to have a different balance on how to train and also You know, have a way to give your mind a break by doing something else. And, you know, I also took the LSAT at one point because I was thinking, hey, maybe I'll go to law school, entertainment law, contract law. But I didn't end up doing that because the athlete source casting side, when I retired, just ended up being very successful in those 2 years. And I was able to just continue to build that business.

Yeah, for sure. You've talked about how your mother encouraged you to take that first volunteer trip to Rwanda in 2008. What did you actually see there that changed the direction of your life?

Yeah, I always joke, I always blame my mom for how Kids Play was inspired because she encouraged— she's a nurse, has done a lot of public health medical work all over the world for, gosh, 30, 40 years now. And she just said, you know, go on a volunteer trip. You love to travel, you love new cultures, kids. So I went to Rwanda and we did a sports camp. And the first day, of course, the team that was there wanted to play soccer. And because that's the sport of Africa, it ended up being extremely challenging. And in hindsight, it really shouldn't have been all that unexpected. Girls and boys have very, very segregated roles and responsibilities in developing countries.

Wow.

So when girls and boys played soccer, the girls basically— I always said they look like orange cones as the boys just raced around them. Nobody wanted to play with each other. No one was talking to one another. But you have to remember, soccer also has a lot of ingrained norms and traditions around who should be playing it, who is good at playing it in that continent, quite frankly. And girls are definitely not— not it. But the next day, we actually played— we pulled out baseball. Didn't know what to do with a bat, didn't know how to put a glove on, knew nothing about it. So of course, it levels that playing field pretty quickly. But I think this is where sport is so powerful. is that this is now where you see so organically how gender, social, cultural norms are broken down between boys and girls. Because now, they didn't know anything, boys and girls, is, you know, who should be better at this sport, if girls even played the sport. They were simply having fun together, helping one another, laughing with one another. That organic interaction was so cool for me to see compared to the day before, simply because it was a lesser-known or not known for— in baseball, not known sport. So, you know, again, you know, sports played obviously a very big part in my life, but I don't think I really understood that true power of sport until I saw that kind of interaction. Thomas is a little boy that I met on my trip, and he came up to me at the end of the trip and said, I see that girls can play. And for me, for this 10-year-old boy, we were there for just about 2 weeks. But for him to shift the way he thought about the contributions or capabilities of a girl really, really hit home with me. And those words have always stuck with me. And that was simply because we introduced a bunch of new sports to them. And they just, by the end of the trip, there's that teamwork that was happening, the leadership, the conflict resolution, the strategy. ...strategy around it was also very cool for me. It was definitely one of my so-called aha moments. And lastly, you know, honestly, my Olympic experience, of course. I mean, I think all those lessons, like I said, that sport teaches you in competition are very transferable to life.

Mm-hmm.

Like I said, the Olympic values and those discipline— that discipline that comes along with it, that was what I really, really came away from that trip that inspired me to want to be able to create something for kids that were less resourced. I mean, developing countries, there's no after-school programs. There's no YMCAs, Boys and Girls Clubs, school after-school sport programs. There's nothing. So that was a gap that I saw. I thought sport could really play a powerful part in helping these kids.

How difficult was it to go from that 2-week trip into deciding to start an organization that would last for decades?

Oh my goodness. You know, I naively came back and said, let's do volunteer trips. So we got another volunteer trip the next year, went back over, and I found out very quickly that was not very sustainable. It's great for the volunteers, but it's not year-round. There's no depth to it for the kids. So I came back from that trip and honestly, you know, a big piece of advice is I always say is surround yourself with people who know more than you do.

Mm-hmm.

I had Athlete Source Casting. I wasn't looking for something else to do in my life, so to speak. So I really came back and just kind of thought about who would be able to help me think about what a mission would look like, what a vision looks like, what do I want in a program, and how would you start it up and all of that. And I did. I was lucky. I got connected with a few different people just through LinkedIn, through networking, through my Athlete Source Casting. People that I knew and just networking in general through my career and people that I knew, other people that had foundations and talking to them. Because I also was just looking at like, maybe you just partner with someone else. There's no reason you have to create your own foundation to make impact in this world at all. But anyway, I did. I ended up connecting with an incredible company called Edgework Consulting that helped me build the program Theory of change, the model, the program structure. It's very intentional. And just how to build and really train the coaches to actually deliver the program to the kids. Because it's not about us going over and training the kids or delivering the program to the kids. It's about definitely local ownership is massively important in this.

Yeah, for sure. Kids Play International recently went through a long-term redevelopment process that you and I have discussed. And its new focus is on sustainability, for sure. What prompted that, and what did you learn about building something meant to outlast you?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think after 16 years of being in Rwanda, which I can't believe it's been 16 years, but nonetheless, I think the biggest lesson for me has been that a founder's success isn't about staying indispensable, so to speak. I think it's about building something that really is strong enough to keep growing far longer after I've been the center of it, so to speak.

Right.

And I think that that's what sustainability is all about, is being able to, of course, empower others to be able to run this long after I'm gone.

Yeah. You know, in general, being you and I both run businesses too, you know, your ultimate goal of a business is to make yourself obsolete. At least that's what I was always taught in business school. So I really believe that. And especially when it comes to nonprofits that do such amazing work, it's so refreshing to hear about people that have the right approach to that, to making sure that it's not dependent upon you.

Well, and I think also as an athlete, there's obviously a lot of athlete foundations. And I think, and clearly mine is not a name recognition from my athletic career, but I do think that it's just important regardless if you're, you know, a well-known athlete, your foundation is based off your name, or whether it's not. It is about making sure— I think the best leaders are ones that are able to delegate. They don't need to hold everything. close to them. And it really is about just being able to empower and trust and build a really strong organization that can thrive without you being the center of it.

Yeah. Going back to the model, KPI's model is intentionally mixed gender. Boys and girls in the same program. Why was that non-negotiable for you?

Well, you know, a couple different reasons. One is that social change and shifting the way somebody thinks or acts and believes, it just doesn't happen overnight. And it is so important to make sure also when you are trying to create change that you include everyone. Equality means not one group, one— another group. It means everyone. And so for me, it was about not just— yes, definitely empowering girls because they are not given the same opportunities as boys in developing countries. But you can't empower girls without educating boys, and you can't empower boys without educating girls. So it is really about that cross-ability to, again, be able to, like, build those better, healthier relationships. And I think sport clearly does that so organically.

Yeah.

And from such a young age that it just— for me, you know, there was a couple things. It was that I definitely wanted it mixed gender because, like I said, I don't think you can make true change without having about everybody contributing. I wanted to work rurally because that is also an area that the resources are just so much less than being in an urban or a city area. I wanted a program that went for many, many years. So our kids enroll in our program at age 7, they don't graduate to 18. There is a long process of being in our program, and the standardized curriculum we have moves from, you know, pretty simple to a lot more complex as they age through our program and graduate out. You know, I always say I always wanted to go deep and not broad. I would rather change fewer lives and really say I've changed them rather than just saying I touched many. So, part of that philosophy is how at least our model was built. And those were some non-negotiables for me.

You know, it strikes me, and I'm going to just kind of dovetail off of that with you, going deep and not broad. You say it, you don't necessarily need to affect so many people. But don't you believe, like I do, that when you go deep and when you make a massive impact on a small number of people, that it exponentially spreads based on their ability to get other people moving in the right direction?

You just explained our model, to be honest. So the nucleus of our program, our Let's Play Fair program, that is where we've got about 550 kids between Rwanda and Cambodia. That's really not that many people when you think about it. But that ripple effect and the fact that we have every Sunday— so our Let's Play Fair program is an after-school program 4 days a week. We have a community-based program every Sunday that gives the kids in our program the opportunity, especially the older ones, to take a leadership position in sharing to the entire community. We have at least 500 or more kids from age, you know, 6 to adults, parents, everybody coming to this community day every Sunday.

Wow.

to learn about kids' play, to be educated around, you know, health and hygiene and sexual reproductive health, all sorts of things. And it's all done through sports. So it is about that ripple effect. When you really give these smaller group of kids a larger dose of our curriculum, they become great marketing mouthpieces for everyone in their school, at home, in the community. So that is 100% of how we work. 100%.

That's terrific. Is there a moment with a specific child or coach that captures why this work matters to you so much?

Oh, wow. Goodness, that gives me a little bit of goosebumps. You know, like I said, we've been in Rwanda for 16 years and Cambodia for 7. And we now, like I said, with this long, you know, kids being in our program for 10-plus years, we have some amazing case studies that we can point to and say, full circle moments. I will say, I think one just happened in June. I was getting ready to leave from the volunteer trip that we were just finishing up, and I had one of our program coordinators come in and say, hey, there's 3 youth, kids that are here that would like to talk to you. And I was like, oh, wow. Yeah, I will say I'm always a little skeptical because typically they want something.

Mm-hmm.

And they came out and they said to me, I just want to let you know because they were graduating out of the program. They were going to become alumni. They said, KPI has raised us. You're like our mom. And those words right there to me was like, wow. Like they said, you know, you believed in us like year after year, even when we don't believe in ourselves.

Huh.

And those 3 that came are all going on to university. They said, we would never, ever have even had the opportunity probably to even graduate high school, let alone think that we could go on to university. That to me, our ultimate goal is to encourage these kids to stay in school, learn those hard skills through school, be enrolled in our program to learn those soft skills that you learn through sport and whatnot. And, you know, again, communication, leadership, conflict, all those amazing things you can transfer into life. But those things, that combination is what we call becoming a champion in life. And that helps them be able to reach higher levels of education, be able to build those job readiness skills that allow them to become more employable. So hearing from alumni that are going to be graduating out that this is exactly what has happened, And my mom said, I sent you on a 2-week volunteer trip, Tracy. 16 years later, like, this is what's happened. And I couldn't have had a better journey of using the Olympic platform. That is the best thing the Olympics have ever given me, is simply being able to think about everything sport gave to me and transferring that onto others.

Mm-hmm.

And especially kids that just honestly would never have thought living in a A hut, a one-room hut with like 8 to 10 people in it, would ever be able to actually go to college being the first person in their family to do so. I will say, I'll give you a quick stat, which is also we're super proud of after 16 years, is that in rural villages— so we've got 97% of our kids graduate high school. In a rural village, the average is only 37%. But those kids enrolled in our program, because we do just really encourage, obviously, the education, and we also cover the expenses for them to stay in school, especially girls. Girls are plucked out of school at age anywhere from 7, 8, 9 years old to work in the field to bring up their younger siblings. So to me, that's being able to see education both on and off the field is massive. And to be able to really see that happening and that impact. The impact is, you know, it says it all. It really does. We can talk about the programs all day, but it's about the impact. It's about what actually happens and the lives that are changed that makes the most.

I mean, having known you for a long time and known what you've been through in this journey, I mean, I just got the goosebumps. You talk about goosebumps. I just, I feel like I've kind of watched as this has all played out, and it's energizing to see how passionate you are about it. It's just amazing.

Thanks.

Yeah. I'm going to get to my legacy question because this, after all, is Legacy All-Stars.

Sure.

When you think about legacy, both as an athlete and as a founder, how has your definition of it changed since 2008? Wow.

Gosh. I don't even know if I was thinking about legacy in 2008, quite frankly. I was just like, is this even going to run for a year? But, you know, again, I think it goes a little bit back to legacy isn't really about remembering what I It's more about being able to keep it going after I'm gone.

Mm-hmm.

I think that's pretty basic. I think most people would probably say that. But I think for me, it's when that child, like I just talked about, is able— who came through Kids Play and is able to grow up believing in themselves, be able to achieve something that they've never, ever thought that they would ever achieve. becomes a leader, then is able to then pay that forward, that same opportunity, give that same opportunity to another child.

Right.

So that, again, that ripple effect, I think, really is what legacy looks like to me, being able to always continuously pay that forward. And again, I think when the organization doesn't need me to be the center of it anymore is really when I think I've my job. That's how I at least perceive it at the moment. You may ask me in 5 more years what legacy looks like, and it might be different. But—

I will.

Yeah. I think that's something with— I always say this to my team as well. I am one of those that nothing is ever going to be finished perfect. There's always something we all can do better. And I think as an athlete, that is what is so important is always pushing somebody to think about— like, I always say, poke holes in my idea, whatever it might be, because that's only going to get me to think about things differently.

I think you explained it. And I think one of the things that resonates with me so much, because you and I have talked about this, is just putting systems in place that will allow it to continue regardless of whether— I don't mean to be morbid, but I always tell my teams and my organizations, if I get hit by a bus, I want this to be able to continue. And so ultimately, I think that's what's really important.

Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's always a time when there's a staff change or a turnover or whatever, and everyone's like, oh, what are we gonna do? I'm like, you guys, the program's been around for 16 years. It's not that fragile. Or, hey, I'm going on vacation. Y'all are gonna be just fine. And when I come back, I'm like, see, you didn't need me. You don't need You guys are all doing great. So, but I think it's just always making sure that you're also sharing with the person, not only obviously what they're doing well, of course, but being able to share also like, hey, this is an area that I think you can also, you know, there's some growth in and areas to always be able to improve in. Just always think there's something we can always continue to work on.

I think that's a good place to call it an end to the questions. I'm so pleased that we got a chance to get together and talk about this. Tracy, thank you for showing us what it looks like to compete at the highest level and then spend a career making sure others get the chance to compete, not just in sports, but in life. And Kids Play International is proof that legacy isn't a single victory. It's something you build one community, one season, one person at a time. I'm Alan Pavlosky, signing off for Legacy All-Stars.