Former NFL coach and Presidential Leadership Scholar Daron Roberts traded crafting plays to win football games for teaching plays to win at life. As a lecturer and founding director of the Center for Sports Leadership & Innovations (CSLi) at the University of Texas, Daron’s focus is to cultivate the character development, leadership skills, and long-term welfare of athletes and coaches.

Daron developed a course, “A Gameplan for Winning at Life,” that is taught to incoming freshmen at UT. During each academic year, Daron teaches nearly 300 students.

While attending PLS, Daron was inspired to expand the reach of CSLi through the Captains Academy program.

“Captains Academy brings boy and girl captains of the high schools in Austin to UT to three half-day leadership training sessions,” Daron said. “The genesis for this idea was born from PLS. I saw how my own leadership style was enhanced after the first and second PLS sessions and understood that there was a need for this type of leadership training at the high school level.”

The program, jointly crafted by Daron and the Austin Independent School District, provides training to high school team captains in areas of effective communication, human intelligence, and decision-making. After 100 participants completed the pilot program in 2016, Captains Academy was made available to any high school team sport captain in Austin.