Andy Papathanassiou

Foreign.

Welcome to the Mike Hartman Show. Mike is a performance coach and former Stanley cup champion with the New York Rangers. Topics on this show are focused around stories, mindset and champions. Mike will also go into details about helping you with your pain points and struggles and finding motivational solutions on how to have the mindset of a champion. Now, here's your host, Mike Hartman.

Welcome back to another episode. Today my guest is Andy Papathana. See you. Andy did whatever he could do to get in the door with nascar. He literally broke in. So you're going to hear his story.

It's amazing.

He's also besides that played division one football for four years. But it was amazing on what he did and his concept to bring in athletes to to work in the pit crew in nascar. This is a great episode. Enjoy the show.

Hello, my name is Andy Papathonaseu, which is a big long 14 letter Greek last name which happens to shorten up very nicely to Andy Papa if Papathonase is just too much for you to handle. And I have a consulting company called over the Wall. We consult on high performing teams, leadership, innovation and my company is based off of my 30 years in professional motorsports. 28 of those years was spent with NASCAR dynasty level organization Hendrick Motorsports. Some of the drivers that have been through Hendrick during my time are drivers like Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, both of them multi time champions. Dale Earnhardt Jr. One of the most popular drivers ever to come through NASCAR 2020 series champion, Chase Elliott and all combined Hendrick Motorsports has over 300 series wins and 17 championships and I was there for 16 of those championships and most of the wins and I have the distinction of being NASCAR's first pit crew coach. So what is a picker coach and why does NASCAR have them and why did they used to not have them? That's I think for a little bit later in the discussion. For right now, my story we've got to go back before nascar, before college, high school, we, we've got to land solidly in, in first grade and my I'm the firstborn son, oldest son of Greek immigrants and my family settled outside of New York City in a small town called Emerson. Go Cavos. And back in first grade I auditioned for the school play which was Peanuts, the Peanuts characters. And I got the role of Snoopy. And I wore a costume, it was really a onesie that one of the moms sewed a hood on with big floppy ears and I had a solo. I sang Supper time, which believe it or not, they're still talking about. And that was really the first time that I had the recognition and eyes on me and I liked it. So this performer's life was something I identified early on, that, that was something that I enjoyed. Now we're going to move the story along pretty quick, so we're going to jump to middle school. As I mentioned, my family grew up. We grew up in a town called Emerson, New Jersey, which is a small town, small school district. And by this point I was one of the biggest kids in class. And the days of onesies and hoods with floppy ears were behind me. And I was starting to get into sports. And it was this same desire to be recognized, to be known, to excel, that got me involved in my high school sports programs. My town had youth baseball programs and wrestling programs. And those were some of the things I was involved in before high school. But then when it came to high school, being one of the bigger kids, I played football, did it with all my friends and also that freshman year to get ready for football because I was a tall, skinny kid at this point, I was about 6:3,185 pounds. So to get me ready for sophomore year when, when the freshmen get to play with the. The varsity players, I went out for track and field. I was a shot and discus thrower. And lo and behold, I was challenging for not only the best thrower on our team with a bunch of bigger and older kids, but I was actually challenging for the freshman state record. I ended up not getting the record my freshman year, but certainly had some innate ability in throwing the shot. And really, I always look back on that because I did it for completely different reasons. I wasn't necessarily interested initially in throwing the shot. Probably if anything, I was going to play baseball like I had done all through my. My younger years. But when I started to show some skill and some ability to excel, it was really completely by accident. It wasn't anything I went for, but it was something that found me. So I would certainly say, especially in today's world of specialization and doing one thing practically from the time kids can walk one sport. I think specialization at that period of someone's athletic career, the beginning days, is very overrated and certainly on some level detrimental. And I can use my own experiences looking back and the fact that probably the best sport I ever played, I wound up as an All American. I was the New Jersey state record holder probably for a dozen or so years after that fact. I broke a record that was held by Elvin Bethea, who was a New Jersey high school athlete. Ended up being a pro football player, but he had the record I think for 15 years or 20 years before me. So it was certainly something that was unanticipated. You wouldn't have guessed it with this skinny six three, 185 pound kid. But it ended up being probably the best sport that I played through high school. So along with that I was a starter on the football team. I wound up being an offensive and defensive player on the line, both sides, and was good enough that I caught the eye of some colleges and had the chance to be recruited and wound up being a Division 1 player at Stanford University. So I was at Stanford on a football scholarship. I threw shot and disc as well, but I was there primarily for football. That was what was paying the bills and had a good career through College, was a 45 game, four year starter on the football team and I made the Pac 10 at that time, the Pac 10 Track and Field Championships for the three years that I went out for track. Now Stanford's a very interesting place, being one of the best schools, if not the best in my opinion in the country based on its diversity, based on all the different high level activities, including athletics, that you can, that you can participate in. In a place like Stanford, you find out really quick how important it is to apply yourself, to work on your skills and to do a lot of things and find out what you really love, what you're passionate about and what you're good. That because very early on at Stanford I bumped into people that had, and these are 18, 19 year old kids, they toured the world as concert pianists or they'd written a book. Tiger woods went to Stanford. Reese Witherspoon went to Stanford. This was after they were, were already famous. Now don't forget my special skill in getting in was the fact that I could get myself really big and crash into things really hard. So I told myself early on, Andy, you better get your act together because all of these other people that you're meeting, these amazing people, these are going to be the folks that you're competing against when you no longer are playing sports. So it was in the best possible way a wake up call to apply myself to activities beyond sports. And I graduated with my bachelor's in economics and my master's in sociology with an emphasis in organizational behavior. And while I knew that those degrees were going to come in handy one day, being a Division 1 college football player and having achieved a certain level of success and being a player and a starter on the team, my goal was to be A professional athlete. Now, there's always going to be some friction when the desire of a dream runs into the headwind of reality. And for me, the reality was it just wasn't going to happen for me in football. A combination of factors which really just totaled up to me not being good enough to play. And there was certainly an exclamation point on that when soon after graduation, even if I wanted to attempt to make some sort of a stab at the NFL, I wound up rupturing a disc in my lower back, which required some pretty extensive surgery. So here I was, flat on my back, while my friends, at this point, some of them even playing in the NFL, were moving on with the next phase of their very successful lives after college. And I was helpless with pain and numbness running down the left side of my leg. I was jobless. I was actually coming back from an interview for a job, living in and around school in Northern California. And the twisting motion of getting out of the car in the driveway ruptured my disc and just snapped me right to the ground. And I wound up crawling from the driveway into the house. And really, I was fortunate to have a house to crawl into due to the kindness of my adopted Greek family. The carbos that I met my freshman year in college. They'd given me a room in their home so I'd have a place to rehab when I would get out of the hospital. Otherwise, I would have been some version of homeless, bumming around on friends couches until I got back on my feet and could look for a job. Definitely not a good time in my life. One of the things I did, once I got out of the hospital and was in the early stages of rehab, I would make lists, things to help keep my spirits up, places I wanted to go, careers, the type of person I wanted to be. And on the list, I still included professional athlete. Now, given the fact that my chosen sport was football, and I already said that wasn't going to happen in football, the chances of me being a professional athlete were very slim. But folks, I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you when your goals and dreams drop off of your list entirely, your chances of accomplishing, accomplishing them go to zero. So, however unlikely professional athlete I kept on the list, one of the days early on in my rehab, I was watching TV and I came across a NASCAR race. Now, I wasn't a fan. I didn't know anybody that worked on a team or worked on a pit crew. But having nothing better to do, I laid there and watched, and I watched long enough to see a series of pit stops. And, well, what I saw was this team in uniform performing this coordinated activity, changing the tires and filling the car with fuel, and all of that throughout the race, with one team ultimately helping put their car in the winner's circle. So victory lane and high fives and champagne and beer spraying around, and it looked like everyone was having a really good time. So right there, watching that race, I put NASCAR racing on the list. And I thought, maybe my dream of being a professional athlete isn't quite dead yet. Now, one of the things I did when the race was over was I tried to find out about nascar. And I learned it wasn't. You couldn't look it up back then. There was no Internet, so I must have called around. And what I found was that although the series was based in North Carolina, they did come out once a year to race in Northern California in what's now called the Infineon Raceway. It used to be called Sears Point in Sonoma, and that was the very same time of the year, about the third weekend of June. So that was good timing for me. It served as good motivation for my rehab through the winter and the spring. And five months later, early that June morning, the first day that the NASCAR teams were going to be practicing on the track, I decided to hop in my car and go confront my NASCAR destiny. When I got up to the track, even though it was three days before the race, there was already a lot of activity. The teams were already getting ready, getting ready for practice, getting the cars ready. And my goal was not just to buy a ticket and sit in the stands. I really wanted to try and experience this NASCAR sport that I had seen on tv. I wanted to get as close as possible. And on that particular day, I happened to be wearing this red nylon windbreaker. And I found a group of crew members that were similarly jacketed in red. It wasn't the same color red, but it was close enough. And my plan when I saw them was I was going to jump in the middle of that group and try and sneak in the racetrack with them when they walked in to begin their. Their day. And at 6 4, probably £240 at the time, that's exactly what I did. Now, it wasn't a really good plan. It wasn't particularly smart or innovative, but it got the job done. And as this group of red jacketed crew members move towards security and haphazardly flash their ID badges at the security guard, I just fell in line right with them. And walked right through the gate. I even took it so far as to pretend I was having a conversation with one of these guys. He had no idea who I was. But all of that all combined worked to get me inside the garage area, so I had breached security. Technically, you can say that I started my career by breaking the law, because that was my first official act in nascar. And I found myself in the garage area. So I needed to put part two of the plan in motion. And before I got spotted and kicked out of there or worse, I started asking teams if they needed any help for the weekend. And I managed to find a team willing to let me help out. I did a decent enough job on the first day that they set me up with passes, and I was good to go for the rest of the weekend with them. I even got to put on a spare crew uniform and participate in the race on Sunday. And I saw so many amazing things that weekend leading up to race day on Sunday, where I got to experience my first live Pit Stop. And just as I'd seen on tv, to me, it looked like a football play. It was this coordinated group activity, and it was a ton of fun and. And amazing. Now, I wasn't an over the wall. That's NASCAR vernacular. I didn't go over the wall to service the race car as. As part of that crew, but I was one of the behind the wall support people. I actually was handing in the second can of fuel to our fueler at the time. So it was a great experience. I wanted to turn it into more than just an amazing weekend. So I asked the team at the end of the weekend what their thoughts were about trying to get a job in NASCAR and specifically on a pit crew. And they said, look, you live in Northern California. You don't know anything about nascar. You're certainly not going to be hired by any of these teams based in North Carolina. So you need to get yourself around where the NASCAR industry lives, and that is in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. So similar to any other industry cluster like country music in Nashville or Silicon Valley in Northern California, for tech, NASCAR is in and around Charlotte. So given that advice, a few months later, that's exactly what I did. I gave my notice at the company where I was working. I packed up my stuff and headed to North Carolina without any promise of a job, but with the hope of getting involved in nascar. So I actually went back to that same team, volunteered with them, even though a number of the people that I'd met in Sonoma had already moved on, there Were enough people there that remembered me that, and I was persistent enough because really they just wanted to tell me to go away. But they were nice enough to let me volunteer. And after volunteering for a little while, that turned into the opportunity for a full time position. Really nothing special, just the opportunity to be a garage hand, a helper, utility person. And my pitch to the team was that while I'm trying to figure out where I belong in the business and doing whatever needs to be done in the shop, let me practice with the pit crew and I can learn one of the positions. I have this former collegiate athletic experience. Let me learn one of the positions and I can contribute there on the team until I figure out where it is that I belong. And that's the first time I bumped into what I'm going to call the, the NASCAR paradigm or the, the culture, the pit stop culture that was in place at the time. And that culture said that you didn't waste your time practicing because the crew members that made up the pit crew, these mechanics and metal workers and fabricators, had a vast amount of experience. They, they were utilizing the same tools. They built and maintained race cars with their bare hands, an amazing skill. And they weren't going to waste time pulling off a tire and putting it on. They would just get together on, on Sunday, on race day and, and give it their all, give it their best. But they were relying on their extreme level of craftsmanship. Now, for me, coming from the world of Division 1 college football, which is very regimented practice and game planning, I knew that any group, no matter how good the individuals were, they're going to benefit from practice and repetition. And so I guess you can say that my greatest value to NASCAR initially was the fact that I knew nothing about it and could look at this very familiar pit stop area with fresh eyes and a new perspective. So very much the disruptive thinker, the outsider. I was really just trying to get and maintain a job. But, but I could only see it the way I saw it. I could only see it based on my experience, which was not in the NASCAR world, it was in the sports world, the athletic world. And as a result, the first person I ended up coaching in NASCAR was myself. I taught myself in my spare time, before work, lunchtime, after work, taught myself one of the positions, certainly with the help of some of the crew guys that were, were rooting for me to, to help out on the team. And I practiced myself up good enough where I became the Jackman for that team and then for one additional team and I spent the rest of 1991 as the Jackman for the number 10 car. Bob Whitcomb Racing Purolator was the sponsor. It's a team that doesn't exist anymore. And from there my next job was with the 1992 series champion, Alan Kulwicki. Very interesting story. Tragically, he died in a plane crash in 1993. But Alan was an outsider himself to racing, was an engineer by degree, came down to to North Carolina from Wisconsin, was a driver owner and was in his first year with a full time sponsor and managed to win a championship. Now, I wasn't there for the entire year because two thirds of the way through the season, that's when I got my opportunity for a position at Hendrick Motorsports. I was interviewed for one of the crew members being assembled for what was going to be Jeff Gordon's brand new race team, which was going to debut in 1993. And my role specifically was to coach the pit crew. I was in the shop, I was one of the crew members, but with the unique opportunity and the unique title of being the pit crew coach. And that's really when my NASCAR adventure kicked into high gear. That dupont team with Jeff Gordon as the driver and Ray Everham as the crew chief, which is the NASCAR version of a head coach, that was where we really did so many things differently, including how we dealt with the pit crew. By the design of the team, the pit crew and shop crew were going to be separate. And with it being my responsibility to build and train the pit crew, which was again a new concept in nascar, this idea of training and practicing, I wanted people that had an athletic background, people that were comfortable with coaching, practicing, all of the common sense ideas that fall under an athletic mentality. And their ability to work on race cars or the degree of their mechanical competency was really secondary. Now, when you're pitting a race car, there are certain mechanical abilities you need to have. You're working with equipment, there's adjustments, there's minor damage, repair. All of these sorts of things occur during the course of a race that need to be addressed by the pit crew. But beyond that, if the car is heavily damaged or needs to go back in the garage area behind the wall to be worked on, that's something that the road crew, the mechanic crew, that same crew that builds and maintains the car back at the shop, that's their responsibility. So for pit specific duties, even when it comes to adjustments and repair, it's a very, very limited menu of what that pit crew can do. And certainly they needed to be skilled and competent in those areas. But all of that was being addressed under this athletic idea of practice and repetition and coaching and all of the sort of common sense ideas that, that exist in the athletic world. So that was the big innovation in NASCAR at the time. And because it occurred with a very good team and a very good driver, and the number of wins and championships and dominance that the DuPont team had back then was, was, was legendary, it was really what helped form the dynasty that is Hendrick Motorsports today. And racing being the sport where all of the competitors are at the same place at the same time, pretty soon people pick up on what's different, what's successful and winning, and they start to do their versions of it, they start to copy. So it's very much an innovative by design because everyone's together, same event, same time, everyone gets to see the same sorts of things, what's working and what's not. The stuff that's working is quickly identified and quickly copied by your competitors. So you've got to keep that innovation rolling on in order to maintain any advantage that you have. Anything you have, if it's just an aha moment, if you don't build in a way to innovate and build in a way to improve, to constantly trickle it in, you'll quickly get caught and surpassed by your competition. And from that simple idea about bringing in crew members that had athletic experience and creating an athletically designed pit crew where practice and repetition and coaching, overcoming adversity, eliminating distractions, all of those very common athletic ideas were going to be applied to pit stops. So the fact that you didn't know how to jack up a race car, how to take lug nuts on and off, how to use the impact guns, the fuel cans, it was irrelevant because starting from day one and applying those athletic principles to that process, we were going to have incremental improvement. We were going to be able to diagnose our shortcomings, build on our successes. And ultimately, that pit crew was part of the reason why a driver like Jeff Gordon and a team like the dupont team was dominant through all those years. Certainly the driver and the car and Ray Everham as our head coach and crew chief was a major part of the organization's success and right along with it, that pit crew, well, we held our own. We would keep the car out front when it was running out front. We would pit Jeff to the front when we were running somewhere further back. And all of those components together came together for just an amazing experience and a time of my Life that I'll never forget. And if we use that as the foundation for how pit crews in NASCAR changed and became more like other athletic professional sports teams that we're familiar with, we fast forward from that time and we see now how all of the major organizations do their version of finding and training athletes. There's coaches that are there to train the pit crews and also strength and conditioning coaches and injury and rehab. We've got orthopedic surgeons that make the rounds, chiropractors, nutritionists, sports psychologists, and cognitive support for the crews. All of these different factors are ways in which these support systems help build and maintain successful championship level pit crews. And the latest piece of the puzzle that was put together most recently was this idea of scouting and recruiting. One of the hardships of NASCAR is the fact that it's a 10 month season and you race all over the place, all over the country, you're constantly on and off planes. But one of the benefits that it brings to trying to find picker athletes is the fact that it's very easy to recruit nationwide. So similar to what collegiate athletic departments do, similar to what professional sports organizations do, NASCAR teams recruit graduating seniors from football, from baseball, from hockey, wrestling. Either these athletes are not going to make the next step to the pros or in, in a case like, like wrestling, there is no true pro alternative. There's certainly, there's MMA and, and there is the wwe, but, but to, to go from collegiate wrestling to the next step in the same form of wrestling, other than Olympics, there is no pro alternative for, for these athletes. So they're at the peak of their athletic ability and similar to where I was all those years ago, they have this goal of being a professional athlete and they come to the realization that it's not going to happen in, in their chosen sport. But now here comes NASCAR riding in on the white horse saying, hey, check us out. You might be able to fulfill your dream. It just won't happen the way you thought, but it can happen with us. And it's a big opportunity, but it's also a big risk for these athletes because they have to decide whether they are willing to risk everything they were and who they were and, and the successes they had up to that point in their life to start all over again, go to the bottom of the ladder and work and learn this brand new sport. Some of the stuff they know from their previous sports will apply. Some of it's brand new, some of it is specific to nascar, how to be successful and the ones that are willing to Risk it. The ones that are willing to take that chance. Similar to what I did all those years ago where I thought, man, I don't want to put on the dreaded suit and tie and join a management training program. What else you got? Well, these athletes today have just as much on the line, just as much to risk, and their goals and dreams are just as big and just as important. And the ones that risk it and succeed have a tremendous career. They become pro athletes and they get to showcase their talents and their abilities in the NASCAR world for all of America to see. Recently, I put a bow on my 30 years in NASCAR. You know, it's funny, when you first get into your career, you tend to imprint on the things that you experience when you're young, when you first get into your job. And for me, that was coming out of college, stumbling into NASCAR and being the new kid, the new kid with the different ideas. But an interesting thing that happens, you blink your eyes and magically 30 years goes by. Now. There were great years, successful years, championship level years, but nevertheless, 30 years. And my next 30 year plan puts me at 84. So that's a polite way of saying there is no next 30 year plan. It's a great time for me to transition into something I've been doing now for about 15 years, which is corporate consulting, business consulting. I want to take my 30 years of experience with the pit crew and the pit department, which when I started, the pit department was just me. When I was finished at Hendrick Motorsports, the department had grown to 50 people, including coaches, trainers and all the other support systems that I had mentioned. My career began as an outsider, the person that sees a familiar problem with fresh eyes and a new perspective. Now I use those same capabilities, that same passion for coaching, teaching and mentoring in working with individuals and businesses on how they can succeed when they think like athletes. Doesn't matter if you ever played a sport or even like sports, the cognitive building blocks of how successful athletes solve problems can help all of us lead more successful and engaged lives in business, with our friends, with our family, and with our own personal goals and dreams. And with that, my story is done. I want to thank you all very much for listening to me today. If you'd like to find me, you can reach me through my website at otw, which stands for over the Wall, OTW thinking dot com. This is Andy Papathonaseu. Thank you so much for listening. Take care and have a great day.

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