LaKisha Papoutsakis

I attribute my success to the people that raised me, my village. I had awesome people that poured a lot into me and taught me how to survive and how to believe in myself. I had a multitude of mentors across race, creed, color, religion - Jewish men, Jewish women, black men, black women, you name it. I think that because I had so many diverse people that were my mentors, that is what has made me successful. They taught me how to live in a diverse world and how to function in a diverse world. One of the most influential things was Dizzy Gillespie telling me when I was 7 or 8 that the world's best education was travel - he had learned the most in life from his travel, about people and places. Growing up in a community where a lot of my friends' parents worked for the UN, having friends from Djibouti, Africa, Scotland, Japan - my diverse upbringing has made me successful because I'm culturally sensitive to people.

Don't be afraid of the word no. Don't let rejection shut you down. I was told, let rejection redirect you, don't let rejection destroy you.

Have a hard shell. I think being an athlete helps because I'm a competitor by nature, but I also have a tougher skin when it comes to leadership, teamwork, and not feeling inferior to men. I tell my girls that if they get nothing from our season, I want them to learn to use their voice. I remind them they're pretty badass - boys wear helmets, gloves, shoulder pads in lacrosse, but girls just wear goggles, same sticks, same ball, so automatically they're courageous. I don't want them to continuously let society make them feel like they're inferior. When I first got into music, you were either a bitch or a hoe - either you slept your way to the top or you were just difficult, and I was like, I'm neither. My advice is to use your voice and don't let anyone make you feel inferior. I've struggled with privilege versus being qualified throughout my lifetime, but I never felt like I was better than anybody else because I understood I was blessed and it was connections that got me there, even though my knowledge proved I deserved to be there.

In the sports world, I think the biggest challenges are just NIL and that sports has become so marketed - it's no longer really about sports, it's a lot more about money and who you know. I think it's a huge challenge to get in the sports world as a woman and to be respected, to get paid equally, in any capacity, whether you're an athlete, an agent, or a coach. In terms of entertainment, I think the biggest challenge right now is AI on the music publishing side of things - being able to challenge AI and protect your intellectual property from being copied by robots or computers. I think that AI is the biggest challenge and obstacle in music. Now we're not just protecting content, we're having to also protect sound - not just sound where you're talking about the notes like a song, but sound of someone's voice, because it can be taken and used to create another type of song with AI. I pay a lot of attention to the newer lawsuits that are going on, and I try to make sure that everything that we own is registered and copyrighted.

Honesty and dedication are most important to me. One of my biggest themes as a mom, as a coach, as a leader is making sure that people around me feel seen. That comes from my own trauma - both my parents and my brothers were deceased by the time I was young, so knowing how it feels not to feel seen, not to know that you're no longer anyone's priority, I really make an effort to make sure that all of these kids feel seen and special. I think people understand that kids are the future, but I don't think that as adults we always understand how to reach them in their world and really try to figure out how do we connect with them in their context. That really is probably what means the most to me.