About this episode

Jake Schroeder discusses his journey from coaching youth sports to founding the D-Day Leadership Academy in Normandy, focusing on leadership lessons from WWII.

He sang the national anthem for the Colorado Avalanche a thousand times, coached 4,000 inner-city kids, lost it all, and rebuilt on the beaches of Normandy — where a WWII veteran watched children playing on Utah Beach and said through tears: "That's why we came." Jake Schroeder—former frontman of OP Gone Bad, national anthem singer for the Colorado Avalanche, and executive director of the Denver Police Activities League—now runs the D-Day Leadership Academy, bringing inner-city youth to Normandy, France to learn leadership through the stories of World War II. After concussions, insurance costs, and political shifts dismantled his youth sports programs serving 4,000 kids a year, Jake pivoted. Inspired by the WWII veterans he’d been bringing back to Omaha Beach and Utah Beach since 2011, he transformed his nonprofit into a Normandy-based leadership program built on five pillars drawn from D-Day: leading from the front, total commitment to mission, chaos, preparation, and empathy. In this conversation, he and host Christian Taylor—director of the award-winning documentary The Girl Who Wore Freedom—explore what success really means when the money isn’t there but the mission keeps…

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