What Playing a Team Sport Taught Me About Building a Business That Runs Without You
I played volleyball for most of my life. Club, college, and well into my adult years — the kind of sport where you are acutely aware, at all times, of where everyone else on the court is and what they need from you.
What I didn't realize until much later was how much that experience was shaping the way I approach business. Not just mine — my clients' too.
Because here's the thing about athlete entrepreneurs: we are, almost universally, both the best and the worst clients to work with when it comes to building a business that runs without us. The very instincts that made us good at our sport — the competitiveness, the work ethic, the "I'll just do it myself if I want it done right" reflex — become the ceiling we keep bumping into as founders.
The "I'll cover it" instinct
In volleyball, there's a version of a play where the ball is heading somewhere that's technically someone else's responsibility, but you read it faster, you're closer, you know you can get there — so you call it and take the ball.
It's the right call in that moment. You make the play. You get the point.
In business, that same instinct looks like this: a client email comes in at 7pm and you answer it before your account manager even sees it. A proposal needs to go out and it's faster to just write it yourself than to explain what you want. A new hire is struggling and instead of coaching them through it, you step in and handle their work.
Every single one of those is you calling "I got it" on a ball that wasn't yours.
And every time you do it, you're training your team that you'll cover for them — and training yourself that the business can't run without you in the game.
“The best coaches I ever played for didn’t win by doing everything themselves. They won by building a team that could execute the system without them calling every play.”
What great coaches actually do
The best coaches I ever played for didn't win by doing everything themselves. They won by building a team that could execute the system without them calling every play.
They spent practice creating muscle memory — running the same rotations until they were automatic, building trust between players so that in a pressure moment, nobody had to think about who was supposed to be where. The system ran. And when it ran, the coach could see the whole court.
That's the job of a founder who wants to build something transferable.
Not to be the best player on the floor. To build the system, develop the players, and eventually trust the team enough to run without you on the bench.
That transition — from player to coach to owner of the whole program — is the hardest identity shift in business. Especially for athletes, because we are wired to compete, to perform, to be in it. Stepping back feels like losing. It isn't. It's the whole point.
The identity underneath the business
Here's where it gets personal, and I'll say it plainly because I've seen it in too many clients to pretend it's rare:
A lot of athlete entrepreneurs have wrapped their identity around being the best person in the room. The most capable. The one who gets things done. It's what drove you on the court, and it's probably a big part of why your business exists in the first place.
But that identity — "I am the one who makes this work" — is exactly what keeps a business from becoming transferable. Because a business that needs you to be the best person in the room is a business that stops when you do.
The founders we've worked with who make the leap — who build something that genuinely runs without them — almost always describe a moment of recognition that sounds something like: I don't need to be the MVP here. I need to be the general manager.
Different job. Harder job, in some ways. But the one that actually builds something lasting.
Three athlete instincts to retrain
If you played competitive sports, you probably recognize these in yourself:
The "I'll just do it" reflex. You're faster, you're better at it, and delegating takes more time than doing. True in the short term. Devastating over time. Every time you take the ball that wasn't yours, you slow down the development of the player who should have had it.
Performing under pressure personally rather than building systems for it. Athletes are trained to rise in a crisis. Founders who rely on that instinct build businesses that lurch from fire to fire — and call it culture. Real resilience is a business that handles pressure without requiring heroics from the owner.
Measuring success by personal output. How many emails did you send, calls did you take, proposals did you write? That's an athlete's scorecard. A founder's scorecard looks different: how much did the team accomplish, how many decisions got made without you, how much of the business ran on its own?
What the shift actually looks like
It's not a personality transplant. It's a set of deliberate choices, made consistently over time.
It looks like building a sales process that someone else can run, and resisting the urge to jump in when they're still learning it. It looks like documenting how you do things — not because it's exciting, but because it's the only way to transfer what lives in your head. It looks like hiring people who are genuinely excellent at things you're not, and getting out of their way.
And eventually, it looks like a business that surprises you with what it can do without you. That's the moment. That's what we're building toward.
We work with a lot of athlete entrepreneurs at Ripples Edge — founders who are wired to compete and need a partner who gets that, while also being honest with them about the instincts worth retraining. If that sounds like you, let's talk.
Kimberly Wasney is the co-founder of Ripples Edge Advisors, an exit readiness and growth advisory firm based in Chicago. She is a former competitive volleyball player and an anthropologist by training — which means she spent a career studying how people work before helping founders build businesses that do.