Fortune found her
Nike’s top black woman executive talks about her emigration from Jamaica, growing up gifted and living a fortunate life
 
by Jennifer Dirks
Portland UpClose Managing Editor
 
Jackie Thomas left Jamaica when she was nine years old, shuttled to America by her high-school dropout parents trying to escape Jamaica’s poverty and scarce opportunities. It’s been an uphill climb on the sidelines of American sports history ever since.
            “What’s important to me is to be a woman of color that has transcended sports on the field,” she said, in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt from her office at Nike’s Beaverton world headquarters, the world’s leading sports and fitness company. “Too often kids who grow up in the inner cities believe that sports is a way out (and it is), but it is important that they know that it doesn’t have to be on the field/court or pitch. It can happen in a
 corporate environment and you can not only maintain your passion for sports but actually shape the way people feel about it.”
 
Coming over
“Sports has been really good to me, and it has afforded me tremendous opportunities in my life. I managed to get out of college without owing any money. I'm the first generation in my family to go to college.”
                        -- Jackie Thomas, 37
Let’s skip back to that first day, 29 years ago, when she came to America. She wasn’t sure if she would even recognize her parents when she climbed off the Pan Am flight (“The pilot let us come up to the cockpit; those days are gone now, aren’t they,” she mutters) out of an airplane and onto American soil for the first time -- it had been two years since her parents left to create a home in America, and it was only now -- after years living with grandparents -- that she and her brother also could get immigration visas.
“Neither of my parents graduated from high school yet they knew the value if education,” Thomas said. “[They] made it clear from an early age that they wanted their kids to get an education and have access to greater opportunities than they did.”
Thomas went after those opportunities with gusto. She won numerous high school records in sports – participating in basketball, softball, volleyball, soccer. She won “defensive player of the year” at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Then she went on to win a gold medal in basketball at the World Masters Games 10 years later.
But her experiences don’t stop on the court. She’s made a name for herself as one of the most senior black woman at Nike, where she stacks up in the highest echelon black women in Fortune 500 firms.
            “I also think, just the evolution of women in sports, that even though I'm not on the playing field anymore, I really can make a difference.”
Outside of the court, she changed the way Stanford University trained its women’s basketball team, a decision that led to Olympic starts for at least two Stanford-trained athletes. Over the years, she has worked with some of the world’s best athletes such as the WNBA’s Lisa Leslie, Olympic gold medallist softball pitcher Michelle Smith, U.S. sprinter Marion Jones and AJ Mleczo and Cammi Granato: “probably the two biggest stories in Salt Lake City in women's ice hockey,” Thomas says.
“Just being in the company of athletes like that and all the great basketball players we have, like, is just amazing.”
Meanwhile, Thomas helped the largest sportswear name in the world, Nike, change the way it felt about and marketing to women.
            “I'm at the top of the food chain,” Thomas said of Nike, from her office in Nike’s Beaverton-based world headquarters. “So, I'm part of the corporate leadership team, and there are 105 people around the world. So far enough up the food chain to be empowered and need to set a proper tone for the company, and help to move the company forward,” she said.
            And all while being the first person in her family to go to -- and finish -- college.
 
Racing with history

“The ability to dream beyond your surroundings is very important for kids; ask me, I'm living proof.” -- Jackie Thomas, 37

Thomas turns 38 on June 30. Retracing her history to that first step on American soil seems “like a lifetime ago.”
Jamaican by birth, Thomas grew up is what she describes as “beautiful country, but opportunities are scarce. People are poor financially (rich in spirit though).” Even then, sports were in the blood. She came from an active family; her dad used to cycle in Jamaica.
She emigrated to Chicago, where it became too cold for her dad, who worked as a welder on construction sites. “So we moved to L.A.,” she said. Was it a culture shock for this then 10-year-old Jamaican national? “L.A. is a culture shock no matter where you're from,” she laughs.
There, she went to the normal public schools before getting a scholarship to a small 180-student boarding school in Danville, Calif. It was called the Athenian School, and it was “probably the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“I'm sure there are people that have some really wacky visions about what boarding school is, but it was just -- it was an amazing experience.”
Thomas got the opportunity through a program called A Better Chance, an organization that provides students, predominantly from inner city school districts, the chance to attend many of the nation's finest schools. (Oprah Winfrey is now national spokesperson for ABC). It is designed to place promising inner city kids into great secondary schools to better prepare them and increase their chances of getting into universities.
“I think at the time there were like 5,000 applicants and 500 scholarships, and I got one,” she said. “So I got to go away to boarding school for three years … It gets kids out of their traditional environment, and opens up them up to a lot of greater things. So, it was really great.”
She had never been away from home before: “My parents were like, oh my God, are you sure you really want to do this.” Any home sickness? “Going away to boarding school was difficult because I had to leave my parents again, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”          
It was 1980; she turned 16 the year she got there. She went there on an academic scholarship and graduated -- the first in her family to graduate from high school in at least two generations -- three years later.
The school is really set up on a very interesting principle based on a non-traditional European school model. “It is a very non-traditional boarding school founded on the principle of the universal man. Everyone can play sports. No one is denied access because of talent; same for the arts and sciences.”
“You could go to school in your pajamas if you wanted to, or barefoot if you wanted to,” she said. “You called all your professors by their first name. Classes were like eight or 10 people … Imagine calling your professors by their first names and wearing whatever you wanted to class-you went to class because you really wanted to learn and learning was fun and imaginative. “It was very intimate. It was very personal. And you realized how fun it was to learn.”
How did boarding school encourage her basketball, an area where she later competed in the Winter Olympic Games?
“Basketball was only one part of the plan,” she said. “In fact, since sports was not all about winning it probably hindered my athletic talents, but enriched me in so many other ways.”
            Did the experience change who you are now? “Absolutely,” Thomas said. She’s now being considered for the school’s board of trustees.
            Her former geometry teacher Eleanor Dase, now head of school at the Athenian School, expounds (Dase is late getting back to me because British royal Prince Andrew is there touring the campus; that’s the kind of school this is): "Jackie in high school was a very motivated and very dynamic young women, so those qualities have always been there, and they're part of what are making her so successful today.”
How is Jackie different now? “What's different, I think, is that at that point I would have termed her kind of rambunctious -- rambunctious with inner-confidence and just fun -- and now she is so focused as she has grown up,” Dase said. “And also she has always been someone to take initiative, and someone who's always been very determined. Yet when she was here she was kind of in that adolescent rambunctious phase, whereas at Nike she's kind of taken the bull by the horns.”
Anything else? “She's always rebounded, not only in basketball but in life,” Dase said. “We have a 25-day wilderness course before graduation, and she was a real leader in that -- she was able to facilitate the group dynamic so well. Our graduates say that course teaches them more about life than anything they'll ever do. The confidence has always been there, the initiative has always been there, but what's new is the poise in which she does that now. She's also a real visionary. She's always thinking five steps out.”
            How about sports? “I played a little soccer when I was in boarding school,” Thomas said. “Got my toes broken a couple of times -- the only bones I've ever broken in my body.”
            She played a little volleyball, and “battled at softball. I didn't enjoy it because, you know, you have to get dirty. Actually, you get dirty when you play basketball, but you don't really get dirty. You get sweaty. Softball is a dirty game. You've got to get in the dirt, it gets under your nails. You've got to slide; you get raspberries. Not a softball player.”
            She went to Berkeley on an academic scholarship, but ended up playing basketball all four years. “I had always loved basketball.”
            There, she double-majored in French and biology. “I really thought I wanted to go to medical school. You know, a little black kid growing up in L.A., what do you want to be? I want to be a doctor. Yeah. I thought I wanted to be a doctor.”
            But after four years of school, her plans changed: “I got out of college and I told my dad, oh my God, I've got to take a little time out. I don't know what I'm going to do. So, he gave me six months”
Why did she check in with her dad? “Since my parent made so many sacrifices for us growing up and as I mentioned earlier education was and is very important in my family-deciding not to go to medical school right away required consultation with my parents.”
She worked for Club Med for six months, at Playa Blanca resort in Mexico, “and just had a blast,” she said. “And when I came back, I thought, OK, I’m definitely not going to medical school.” Instead, she started working with people that were apparently healthy: she got into the fitness business.
She started doing some strength training at the San Francisco Bay Club. After a few years there, she thought: “You know what, I'm paying this club like 40 percent. You know, I could be the house.
“I decided to bolster my science background with the premier certifications in the industry,” Thomas said. She earned a certificate as a Health Fitness Instructor from the American College of Sports Medicine and a certificate as a strength and conditioning coach from the National Strength and Conditioning Association. She completed both of these certificates while building what would be the next avenue in her life: owning her own fitness business.
The San Francisco Bay Club had just done a lot of major remodeling. They had all this equipment, so Thomas used the money from her Club Med job -- put in savings since she was on a resort with all expenses paid -- and bought it all.
“I bought this stuff. I stuck it in storage. And six months later, I opened my own facility. So, again, just fortune,” she said, inferring this type of fortune happened before. Again? “I believe to some extent we create our own fortune and good luck; my whole life has been fortunate. [Here’s the] little girl from Kingston, Jamaica, living in America now doing something she absolutely loves and getting paid for it -- and making my parents proud. If that isn’t fortune, then what is?”
She was 23 at the time: “What do you know at 23?” she said. “If I had known how much work it was really going to be when I set out to start my own business, I never would have done it.”
She did that for the next five years, training famous names such as actor Nicholas Cage and guitarist Kirk Hammett from Metallica. Her gym was called Focus on Individual Training. Today, it remains San Francisco's premier personal training studio.
By happenstance, her gym wound up working with the Stanford women's basketball team to help change the way it trains.   “Normally, when you train teams, you put everybody on the same program. And my [gym] business was about designing individual training programs for individual people, because we all have different lives, different needs.”
            She got to know Tara VanDerveer, who was the head coach of the Stanford women's basketball team, who wound up becoming the coach of the U.S. Olympic women's team. And at the time, Nike sponsored probably the premiere five or six players on that team.
            Through VanDerveer, Thomas started working with some of the athletes who were on the national team, and then subsequently got to know Nike’s women's marketing director, then Sue Levin.
Thomas recalls Levin saying something along the lines of ‘Hey, you've got some great ideas, you really know the fitness business. Why don't you come and work for me.’
“And I laughed,” Thomas said.
Thomas wore Nike-made products as a basketball player. “But I lived in San Francisco,” she said. “I was like, Portland, Oregon? Get out of here!”
            About a year later, she wound up coming here “and actually had a really unique opportunity, which was to kind of come in and take a look at the fitness category and how the brand spoke to women,” she said. This was 1996.
            She really wanted to come in and say, hey, the Nike brand is in such an incredible premiere position with women who love sports. You've got to really start talking to women through the lines of fitness.
            “It just felt, really, like it was behind the times.”
            That was her first charge, to come in and take the fitness positioning and tether it closer to the brand.
            What makes her happy? “Sports,” she said. What about sports? “Because I think all of the really great values I've learned in my life, I've learned through team sports in particular. Hard work. Teamwork. Overcoming obstacles. How to be a gracious loser. How to be a gracious winner.
            “I mean, really, I think it's an incredible metaphor for life … everybody has a role to play.”
            Sports have been really good to me, and it has afforded me tremendous opportunities in my life. I managed to get out of college without owing any money. I'm the first generation in my family to go to college. You know, my parents immigrated to the States to really create a better life for their kids. There were three of us.
            “When you're an immigrant, especially a person of color -- and I really believe this -- I think your value system is perhaps a little different.” What do you mean? “Well, it's really interesting. Not to say that African-Americans in the U.S. have a chip on their shoulder, but it's kind of … I never knew I was poor until somebody told me I was poor.”
            “I grew up in a country that was very rich in heritage and rich in spirit, and, you know, I was well-cared for. So, I didn't think I was poor, until somebody said, ‘You don't have a TV? You don’t have this, and you don't have this?’”
            It’s a lesson she’s reminded of in her overseas travel. “I will never forget going to South Africa. I went to South Africa, working for Nike, when I first got here in '96, and went to some of the most amazing places in the world, and really saw some of the most amazing people.”
            “And the poorer the section of South Africa, in Cape Town we went to, the kids just, they beamed. I mean, they were incredible. They were incredible. They were so focused on what was good in their lives and so able to shine.
            “They had soccer balls that had been restitched because they had been punctured so many times. They didn't have a decent field to play on. And they were just, they were happy, you know. They were happiest when they were involved in something that they really loved. Sports took them away from impoverished day-to-day existences, struggle and realities. The ability to dream beyond your surroundings is very important for kids; ask me, I'm living proof.”