A stranger stepped onto an elevator in Shawnee, Oklahoma, glanced at John Woods's Libertyville polo, and asked what he does there.
John could have said he schedules games, buses, and officials. Instead, he told the man, "I get the incredible opportunity to wake up every day and inspire, influence, educate, empower others to become the best that they're capable of becoming."
The stranger's reply? "Whoa, I want to come to Libertyville."
That's John in a nutshell. He's the Athletic Director at Libertyville High School, a CMAA, a 2026 NHSACA Athletic Director of the Year, an Illinois Sports Hall of Fame inductee, and non-stop in his mission to serve others.
Our "Inside the AD Playbook" conversation covered purpose, problem-solving, leading change, and innovation. Let's dig into some highlights.
It's about winning people, not games
I asked John what the AD role really means to him, and he went straight back to the elevator. Most people describe the job as scheduling games, buses, and officials.
"No way," John said. "That just happens to be a component. The most important piece is the people...it's all about winning people. It ain't about winning games."
"It's all about winning people. It ain't about winning games."
He didn't always see it that way. When John first became an AD in Champaign, IL, he said, "I actually thought it was just about scheduling games. I had no idea what it was all about. Literally no idea."
Filling in the blanks became a career-long project, and it came into focus when he arrived at Libertyville in 2018. After four months of 1:1 meetings and a full fall season of observations, John pulled every head coach into one room. The department had 31 sports and 92 teams. He wanted to know whether they were operating as a single program.
"We landed somewhere between 31 and 92," he said. "Not a good thing, it's not a bad thing. It's just a thing."
So they built a mission, vision, and set of core principles, a process the department calls MVP. A group of coaches met every Tuesday for an hour, and John sent Google forms to every coach and every student athlete for input. When one coach asked how many meetings it would take, John didn't have a number.
"It's just going to take what it takes," he said. "You can't put a deadline on determining who we are." It took six months of Tuesdays, and the result rolled out in May 2019.
The mission is to "focus on the individual development of each child and strive to be the best part of their day."
The vision is to become nationally recognized "for how we do things, not what we do."
As for the trophies, John was clear: "That is a byproduct of how we do things, how we interact with our kids."
Look in the mirror, not out the window
Every new AD gets a honeymoon period, John told me, when coaches line up to ask for turf, better facilities, and new equipment. His standard response is a question. "How is a better fill in the blank going to inform your instruction?"
Facilities, in his view, were never the point. "I don't care if you got a grass field," he said. On grass or on turf, "You're still going to be the same coach, you're still going to be the same kid."
He boils the idea down to four words he shares with his coaches all the time. When someone else has the better weight room or the better recruits, the answer is "Don't matter. Get better."
It's a standard he holds himself to as well. "I need to look in the mirror, not out the window," John said, "to make sure that I am also modeling that same behavior."
"I don't care if you got a grass field...you're still going to be the same coach, you're still going to be the same kid."
Looking out the window gets you a list of limitations you can't control. Looking in the mirror shows you what you can.
It's also how he deals with the constant stream of advice every AD receives. Anyone who's been handed a recommendation at the grocery store, the Walmart, or church knows exactly what he means.
"If I give attention to literally everything, I'm going to be exhausted," John said. His filter is the mission and the vision, and he put it as a pair of questions. "Who are we? Where are we going? [That] should drive what gets my attention."
Give people a voice, and they'll own the change
When I asked how he leads through change, John said it depends on the change. A platform switch is one thing (more on that below), but when a change touches how his coaches work together, he wants them in the room.
Last year, he caught himself getting comfortable. "I hate that feeling where you start to get comfortable and the 'this is how we've always done it' mentality. The seven words of a dying organization," he said.
"Number one, you give them voice. Number two, you enhance the ownership. Number three, if I have a voice in it, I'm more likely to get down with it."
So he asked his head coaches where the department needed to get better. With retirements and growing families bringing turnover, he worried Libertyville was drifting back toward silos, with each head coach onboarding new people their own way. He went to last year's NADC with a single goal of improving onboarding, came home, and shared an 8-10 page document broken into easy-to-read categories. Then the replies started coming in. "Hey, have you thought about this? Boom. Add this," he said. By the end, the document carried input from his coaches and his principal.
"By including your people in decisions that move the needle for your people, a couple things happen," John told me. "Number one, you give them voice. Number two, you enhance the ownership. Number three, if I have a voice in it, I'm more likely to get down with it." He was honest about the rollout, too. "For some, it was a bit overwhelming, and for others, it was like, thank you. This is what we need right now in this moment."
A platform decision that started with a "why"
When I asked John how Bound has helped him, he started with a person. "Here's the beautiful thing about being the athletic administrator at Libertyville High School," he said. "I get Chris Davis."
Chris, his assistant athletic director, handles the scheduling, and John's rule for him is simple. "As long as you're the assistant athletic director at Libertyville High School and you do all the scheduling, we are not going to make a change ever," John told him. "Unless you drive the change."
"...one thing I know about Bound is when I make a phone call, somebody picks up the phone that actually has experience in this profession."
Chris ended up evaluating four platforms and came back with a recommendation. "He said, we got to go with Bound," John recalled. "I said, I need to know why." Chris had his reasons, and the results show up across the building. John's administrative assistant and summer camp coordinator like it, and so do the staff at sister school Vernon Hills, "for all of the reasons. The simplicity, the platform, the app."
John also passed along what an AD from another school, who's in the middle of switching to Bound, told him last Saturday. "Every platform is going to have their issues," that AD said, "but one thing I know about Bound is when I make a phone call, somebody picks up the phone that actually has experience in this profession."
John's camp coordinator texted him after a recent call with our team to say it had been an absolutely great call, with "awesome summer camp changes coming." John's takeaway was simple. "That's all authentic reasons why we're with Bound and why we're sticking with you and promoting it to everybody we know."
That's by design. We hire former ADs at Bound because they've been through what you're going through. Hearing John describe it was a good reminder of why that matters.
Start with your why
I closed by asking John what he'd say to an AD who wants to innovate but feels trapped in the daily grind.
His answer was a question. "The question will become why," he said. "When you have a clear and compelling 'why,' the how and the what are going to take care of themselves."
And if you can't explain it: "Then why do you want to do it? Is it just because our sister school did it?"
For John, the why was professional development for coaches. "If we expect our kids to get bigger, faster, stronger, then we should expect our coaches to do the same," he said.
Last year he started a monthly online professional development session for coaches, on the first Thursday of every month from 7 to 7:30 a.m., open to every coach and AD in Illinois and eligible for professional development credit through the state board of education.
When Kelvin Sampson, head men's basketball coach at the University of Houston, joined in May, almost 300 coaches were on the call. This fall, John took eight of his coaches to Alabama to spend a couple of days inside the programs there. "They didn't just see what they do. They got to see how they do it," he said. The feedback from every coach was "this is the best professional development ever."
And John isn't just focused on the performance of today's Wildcats. Libertyville started a hall of fame that just inducted its sixth class. John told me that when he listens to inductees tell their stories, whether they graduated in 1954 or 2014, "They don't talk about the games, the contest, the notoriety, the recognition. They talk about the experience."
Strive to be the best part of a kid's day, he said, and the rest follows. "The rings have come, the ribbons have come, the banners, the trophies have come."
Pull up a chair with John
This is just a slice of a much longer conversation. John also got into the "dangerous drift" of losing sight of your mission, why comparison steals so much joy, and why informal coaches' gatherings are worth doing more of.
Want the full conversation? Watch the on-demand webinar: Inside the AD Playbook — 5 Things High-Performing Illinois Athletic Directors Do Differently.
