Melissa Dawn Simkins: 'Broken to Breakthrough' - How HBCU Coaches and Athletes Overcome

HOUSTON -- Author Melissa Dawn Simkins does not define leadership by rank. She defines it by how people prepare for and respond to pressure, whether in competition or in life.

"I look at the definition of leadership very simply," Simkins said during an interview with HBCU Legends. "It's not a title or a role, it's just a response. How do we respond when life pushes back?"

That question sits at the center of Simkins' work.

She is the CEO of Velvet Suite, the leadership strategy firm she launched in 2006, and the founder of Athleadership, a platform focused on the mindset elite athletes use to perform under pressure. Her book, "Athleadership: The Elite Athletic Mindset: How to Lead Under Pressure and Perform When It Counts," was published on June 23, 2026, by Ideapress Publishing.

Simkins came to the work through professional football. She said her firm created the first NFL Player Brand University in 2008, more than a decade before name, image and likeness opportunities transformed college athletics.

"My firm did the first-ever NFL Player Brand University. This is before NIL," she said. "We took 400 athletes through an experience to help them build their leadership off of the field."

Simkins sees an opportunity to bring those principles to college athletes, particularly those at HBCUs. That opportunity feels especially relevant given her personal connection to Black colleges.

Her connection to Black colleges is personal.

"My father is an HBCU professor. My sister went to an HBCU. I did not, but I grew up in the South," she said.

Melissa Dawn Simkins Quote on Leadership with HBCU Legends | Credit: Melissa Dawn Simkins and HBCU Legends

The Process Before the Result

That idea shows up clearly in winning HBCU football programs, where coaches often point to the daily work as the real source of success.

South Carolina State coach Chennis Berry has built his program around that philosophy, teaching his players to embrace what winning requires rather than focusing solely on the trophy waiting at the end -- loving the process.

Simkins teaches a similar lesson. Even her 10-year-old son can recite it.

"Fall in love with the process," she said. "It is about a repetition. It's a conditioning that you prepare, and so it becomes automatic default, automatic instinct."

After 34 years in the recruiting industry, I have seen the same principle at work. For many recruiters, the hardest part of the job is making the phone call. But making the call is the foundation of recruiting.

That same principle explains why Simkins says progress is so hard in a culture built on instant gratification.

"I believe it's hard because we live in a society that wants instant gratification," she said. "One way that I coach individuals and myself is to focus on progress over perfection. If I can get 1% better every day, if I can see that yesterday I was huffing and puffing, but today I got my wind behind me."

Failure as Data

Simkins does not use the word failure the way most people do.

"It's feedback. I think it's not failure, it is feedback," she said. "It's giving us the opportunity to take in data, whether that's what someone says, reviewing game tape, whether that's stepping back and processing for ourselves. All that's data, and that data will help us make a different decision."

That reframing matters even more now, Simkins argues, because traditional markers of authority and expertise are changing. In her view, that shift leads directly to how leadership should be defined.

"It used to be about how much you knew, what degrees you had, how much experience you had. With AI, it's changed everything," Simkins said. "It's no longer what you know. It's how do you respond when life brings uncertainty, change, and pressure."

That brings her definition of leadership full circle. Knowledge matters. Experience matters. But neither guarantees how someone will respond when the plan falls apart.

The Private Practice

One line from Simkins' book stayed with me: Teams prepare athletes for the playbook, but they do not always prepare them for the pressure.

Simkins believes what eventually appears in public is often developed through work nobody sees. That idea leads into the private struggles that shaped her own perspective.

"Many of the greatest leaders, whether they're athletes, coaches, executives, world figures, we applaud them in public, but we don't see their private practice," she said. "We don't see what they've had to go through. And some of us become more vulnerable to share, but everyone has had to overcome something that could have broke them."

Simkins has her own history of overcoming adversity. She said she has dealt with endometriosis and adenomyosis and experienced the sudden death of her boyfriend while he was playing basketball when she was in her 20s.

"I have lived through a lot of life that happens, right?" she said. "We all have what we expect, and then the reality of what comes."

Our conversation became more personal as we discussed how people respond when life abruptly changes. That opened the door to my own experience with prostate cancer, and Simkins noted that her father is a prostate cancer survivor.

We also discussed the advice I had given my 21-year-old son while he navigated a difficult period: Stay in the room. Do not shut down, run away, or withdraw. Show more of yourself, including your vulnerability.

Simkins took the idea a step further, turning the conversation from coping to identity.

"You've got to reframe that as not the definition of who you are, but it's the building of a different identity," she said.

Her summary of the larger message is four words.

"Leaders aren't born, they're built," Simkins said. "And the building is what it takes when we go through these challenges in life."

MVP Stands for Something Else

For athletes, identity can become particularly complicated because achievement brings recognition, attention and expectations. Simkins says that pressure makes the question of who you are even more important.

"Anyone who has high platform has a hard time with identity, because you become known and branded for what you do, not who you are," Simkins said.

Her answer uses an acronym athletes already understand.

"Everybody wants to be an MVP. But MVP stands for mission, vision, and purpose," she said. "We were helping rookies build their MVP first, not just around their performance on the field, but who they are outside of that."

That led to one of the defining lines of our conversation.

"The who defines the what," Simkins said.

For college athletes, particularly in the NIL era, that distinction has implications beyond leadership development. An athlete's playing career may provide the platform, but Simkins argues that the person must eventually become larger than it.

Practice Outside the Arena

In Simkins' framework, confidence is a product of repetition. That same repetition can also shape how athletes show up away from competition.

Athletes understand their capabilities on the field because they repeatedly test them. Simkins wants them to develop those same repetitions away from competition.

"How do we begin to give them practice outside that arena so they can begin to feel a little uncomfortable," she said, "whether those are relationships, going to networking events, or leveraging the platform and access they have to donors and alumni in their community."

Her instructions are practical.

"Get in that networking room, put your phone down, start to talk to people," Simkins said. "Don't just be in the corner on social."

The goal is to make unfamiliar environments familiar before an athlete's playing career ends.

"It's just about orienting yourself to the proximity of that new opportunity," she said.

That could be particularly valuable at HBCUs, where alums, corporate partners, donors, and former athletes can become part of a student's professional network long before graduation.

An Open Invitation to HBCU Programs

Athleadership operates under Velvet Suite, and Simkins said the platform extends beyond her book. It includes an online learning arena with courses, experiences and coaching designed to translate athletic performance principles into leadership development.

She also has experience with HBCUs. That background helps explain why she sees an opportunity here.

Simkins said she served as a commencement speaker at North Carolina A&T and is returning to her undergraduate alma mater, Otterbein University, for a campus-wide program focused on preparing students for life after graduation. She also earned a master's degree from Northwestern University.

For HBCU athletic departments trying to prepare athletes for life beyond competition, Simkins sees an opportunity.

"I think there's a huge opportunity for athleadership in intercollegiate athletics, undergrads and grad programs, HBCUs and beyond," Simkins said. "If anyone's interested, you definitely should reach out."

Her closing message returned to the principle that started our conversation. That same principle frames her final point about how people respond when life changes.

"At the end of the day, life will come, and it will hit you hard, and it will be unexpected, but it's how we respond," Simkins said. "And if I can get that message to as many people as possible, I believe we will see a shift from people being broken to breakthrough in every aspect of their life."

For today's HBCU athletes, Simkins' message may resonate because it keeps returning to the same truth: response matters.

"Broken to breakthrough," Simkins said. That's a bar.

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