Greg Lott, Otterbein University’s new athletic director, earned his job after seeing his field from just about every angle. In the past 20 years, he has been a coach, a scholar, a director and a professional athlete.
Throughout his experiences, a persistent idea pushed its way to the front of his mind:
“I really was getting very passionate about this notion of human development through sport,” Lott says. “I was noticing that it wasn’t really happening uniformly for all student-athletes; there were a lot of people that would go through this experience seemingly unchanged and I really wanted to get to the bottom of why that was happening and figure out how to be more intentional and systematic with helping others develop through sport.”
By Hailey Owens
Greg Lott
Growing up, Lott was told the same mantra that every athlete has heard at some point – sports, if nothing else, teach you lessons about yourself. Sports teach you how to be a leader, how to be a team player and how to accept failure.
“I felt like that was in my head, then my lived experience really matched that rhetoric, so as I was coming up through college, I just kind of assumed that that’s what happened,” he says. “But when I became a team captain and I was starting to look at things more broadly, I noticed that there were some individuals who didn’t match what I was told and what I always believed.”
He competed in Division III track and field at Dickinson College, a private liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. While he experienced a few injuries during his tenure there, it didn’t stop him from becoming an All-American and making it into the Dickinson Athletics Hall of Fame.
After graduating with an international business and management degree in 2004, he started coaching sprinters and hurdlers at Buffalo State University.
He then took a coaching position in 2005 at Valparaiso University in Indiana, but after a few years, he decided to go in a different direction. He moved to Orlando to be a professional runner and trained at the National Training Center under United States Olympic coach Brooks Johnson in 2006. Lott competed on an international level, spending the track season competitively sprinting in events around Europe.
By Hailey Owens
Otterbein University Women's Volleyball Team
Soon, however, he began to miss his family and home. So, he left the competitive circuit and took a coaching job at West Point, then took a director position at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 2010.
After all this time, his interest in human development through sport was still in the back of his mind so he decided to return to academia in 2013 to pursue a Ph.D. in kinesiology, specializing in sport management, from The Ohio State University.
His research focused on why some athletes seem to grow and mature naturally with sports, while others get lost in some way during their sports experience and can’t live up to their potential.
“I got to the point where I’m like, this is something that I’ve noticed now at five different institutions – everything from Division III to Division I to professional athletes,” Lott says.
After spending years researching and earning his Ph.D., Lott was hired at Denison University in 2017, where he was the associate director of athletics in a faculty/administrator position. He got to see his research come to life as the inaugural director of the Knetzer Family Institute, which offers an innovative, research-based approach to developing student-athletes.
By Hailey Owens
Otterbein University Women's Soccer Team
Lott is somewhere in the intersection of mindfulness, intentionality, efficiency, emotional awareness and physical fitness. He is a certified coach of both emotional intelligence and mindfulness, and he utilizes a holistic approach when considering how to best help students.
“I just got to have a laboratory like this at Denison where we built an institute specifically for this,” Lott says. “If you’re doing this right, you are able to document concrete changes in student athletes’ emotional and social competencies. … What’s really cool is as those competencies are enhanced, there really is a strong relationship between those kinds of things and academic achievement, on-field performance, positive impacts on different kinds of mental health indices.”
His expertise is now being utilized here at Otterbein, and he is looking for ways to give his students, staff and the community the best possible experience at and through Otterbein athletics. His goal is to create programs that directly address students’ well-being and implement practices that ensure a positive learning experience.
“A lot of my focus is going to be based on how we can enhance this experience so that when students graduate from here they can look in the mirror and say that, in large part, their experience – whether it’s soccer, golf, football, whatever it is – helped them become the human that they ultimately want to be,” Lott says.
Lott is embracing Westerville as his new home, and he’s excited about finding new ways to engage Otterbein alumni and get the community more involved.
“There’s just this vibrancy in the community. You can feel it when you drive through and you walk around Uptown,” Lott says. “I’ve talked to so many people that have talked about the kinds of ways in which the community used to be really engaged with Otterbein athletics. … I think there’s a lot of untapped potential with trying to connect the community with the university’s athletic department. The fact that it has been strong before leaves me to think that it can be done again, and that notion is really exciting.”
Tyler Kirkendall is an editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at tkirkendall@cityscenemediagroup.com.
