The scholarship was the beginning of the relationship, not the end of it.
For more than a decade this Foundation has named scholar-athletes, congratulated them, and let them go. LEAD Fellows is how that stops. It brings a small group of current and former LEAD Scholars — and other scholar-athlete leaders — back in, and gives them a say in the work rather than a certificate about it.
What it is
An advisory body, not an alumni club.
The distinction matters and we would rather be precise about it up front. Fellows are not invited to receive programming. They are invited to shape it — to tell this Foundation where it is wrong, what scholar-athletes their age actually need, and which of our assumptions have aged badly since Angela Taylor walked on at Stanford in 1989.
They advise
Fellows bring the perspective the board structurally cannot: what it is like to be nineteen and navigating this right now. Program design, application language, what actually reaches people their age.
LEAD Fellows is established under the Foundation’s bylaws, reports to the Program Committee, and reports to the governing body. That is not a formality. It means Fellows advise the people who make the decisions, and that their advice arrives on the record rather than in a conversation somebody may or may not pass along.
They connect
A cohort of eight to twelve is small enough that people actually know each other. Fellows meet each other, the board, and the professional network around this Foundation — which is most of what a fellowship is worth at this stage of a career.
They come back
Fellows are the bridge to the girls behind them. The intent is that Fellows show up in Foundation programming — camps, clinics, the Networking Collective — as the people a fourteen-year-old can actually picture becoming.
What a network is actually for
One introduction, thirty-five years ago.
Mentorship is easy to describe and hard to point at. This is the thing itself: somebody in an athletic department made a phone call for a student who had not asked for one.
He was a junior. Somebody in the football office made a call.
Gary went to Stanford on a football scholarship. After his third year, a member of the football administrative staff — not a coach, not a recruiter, somebody who worked in the office — put him forward for an internship at Rudolph and Sletten, a commercial construction firm in the Bay Area.
He did that summer. Then the next one. When he finished football as a fifth-year senior and graduated, they hired him as a project engineer.
He is still there. Five promotions and more than thirty-five years later he is a Senior Project Executive at the same company, running projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nothing about that was a program. It was one person in an athletic department who knew somebody, and decided a nineteen-year-old was worth a phone call.
LEAD Fellows exists to stop that being luck. Every scholar we fund should have somebody in a position to make that call, and know that they can ask. That is what the network is — not advice in the abstract, but people who will pick up the phone.
Who it is for
The years nobody builds programs for.
There is a great deal of support for a promising fifteen-year-old athlete and a great deal for an established executive. Between those two things sits roughly a decade in which most people quietly lose the identity that carried them, and almost nobody is holding the door. That decade is what LEAD Fellows is for.
College freshman
Newly arrived, often no longer competing, and working out who they are when they are no longer the athlete on a high school roster.
Choosing a direction
Majors, internships, first real professional rooms. The point at which ambition either gets specific or gets quiet.
The first year out
A first job or graduate program, and for many the first time in fifteen years without a team, a season, or a coach.
Individual contributor
Doing the work well without yet having authority. Where competence is built, and where people most need someone a few steps ahead of them.
Emerging leader
First time leading other people, or first time in graduate school choosing a field. The point where a sporting background quietly starts paying off.
Why this window and not another
The years just after competitive sport ends are the least supported stretch of the whole pipeline, for everyone who goes through them. The clearest evidence we have is from research on women: those who went on to hold formal leadership roles had played sport for an average of eight years, and those who did not averaged six. What happens immediately after the playing stops is doing real work — and almost nobody is building for it. See where Fellows sits in the iWIN Journey →
The founding year
Deliberately small, deliberately a pilot.
The first cohort is a pilot and we will say so to the people in it. Eight to twelve Fellows, a virtual launch, and a rhythm designed to be survivable alongside a full course load or a first job. If something in the format does not work, the founding Fellows are the ones who will tell us.
Virtual launch
The founding cohort convenes online. Virtual by design — it lets us seat the right people regardless of which state they are studying in.
One virtual session
A working meeting rather than a webinar. Fellows bring what they are seeing; the Foundation brings decisions it has not made yet.
First in-person anchor
Timed to the winter break, when college students are actually home.
Second in-person anchor
Timed to summer, and to the season when Foundation programming is running and Fellows can be part of it.
An August in-person launch, and a statewide cohort
From the second cohort the launch moves in person and shifts to August. The 2027 budget carries a travel-support line specifically so the cohort can be drawn from across Idaho rather than defaulting to whoever lives near Boise.
Time commitment and expectations are set out in full in the Founding Fellow appointment packet, which goes to each nominee before they are asked to accept.
Terms and tiers
Three years, then a different kind of membership — not an exit.
A Fellowship with no end date becomes a committee. A Fellowship that simply ends recreates the problem this program was built to fix. So the term is capped, and the tier that follows it is a real one.
The three-year cap is exactly the length of the arc
A Fellow in the first year. Fellow Lead–Elect in the second, learning the job from the person doing it. Fellow Lead in the third. Then Alumni. The cap is not an arbitrary limit imposed on the tiers — it is the same length as the progression through them, which means a Fellow who stays the full three years leaves having run the thing.
Why the cap exists
Three years is long enough to do something and short enough that seats keep opening. Without a cap, a founding cohort quietly becomes permanent and the twenty-year-old who should be in the room next year has nowhere to sit. The Alumni tier is what makes the cap humane — nobody is thanked and released, which is precisely what happened to a decade of our scholars before this program existed.
Why we built it
Nobody asked them to say this.
Three 2026 scholars joined a board meeting in August. Within hours, every one of them had offered to contribute something — skills, time, ideas about how the scholarship itself might be run better. None of it was solicited, and none of them had anything to gain.
That is the entire case for LEAD Fellows. The appetite was already there. What was missing was a door.
“I want to help the foundation in any way in the future, so please message me if I can help.”
“I’d love to stay involved beyond today if there’s ever a way to contribute.”
Both are being invited to the founding cohort. The full story is on IX Stories →
How Fellows are chosen
By nomination. There is no application form, and that is on purpose.
A public application would fill this cohort with the people best at applying for things. We already know a great deal about the people we want, because we have been watching them since they were high school seniors.
Who is eligible
- LEAD Scholars, women and men alike. Every scholar-athlete named since 2015 is in the nomination pool. The scholarship honors both Alice and Charles Taylor and has always recognized male and female scholar-athletes — Fellows is drawn from all of them.
- Other scholar-athlete leaders put forward through the Foundation’s network, where somebody can speak to them personally.
How a Fellow is seated
- Nominated by the current cohort, a Foundation committee, or staff.
- Appointed by the board. A seat on this body is a board action, not an invitation from a staff member.
How the Fellow Lead is chosen
- Nominated by Program Committee leadership — a deliberately narrower route than a general seat, because it is a leadership appointment.
- Appointed by the board, on the same footing as any other seat.
The founding cohort is all adults. No minors are seated in the founding class.
If you are a LEAD Scholar
You do not need to apply and you do not need to wait to be noticed. Write to us. Tell us where you went, what you are doing, and what you would want from something like this — that is useful to us whether or not you are seated in the founding cohort, and it is how we keep the pool current.
Not sure whether you are on our list? Every scholar since 2015 is here.
Said plainly
Twenty of the scholars named before 2026 are still, on our own website, just a name on a page — we do not have their photograph and in some cases we do not know where they are. That is a failure of stewardship on our part, not on theirs, and LEAD Fellows is one half of the correction. The other half is simply asking.
For supporters
The cheapest leadership development in the pipeline.
What funding this actually buys
The people are already identified, already vetted by eleven years of selection, and already predisposed to come back. There is no recruitment cost and no discovery cost. Funding LEAD Fellows pays for convening — travel, meeting costs, materials — on a group that has been assembling itself since 2015.
What it makes possible next
Fellows are the group that makes longitudinal follow-up feasible. Tracking scholarship alumni into their careers is the most valuable research this Foundation could produce, and it is impossible without knowing where people are and having a reason for them to answer.
Fall 2026
The founding class is being assembled now.
If you are a LEAD Scholar, we would like to hear from you regardless. If you know a scholar-athlete leader in college or early career who should be in a room like this, tell us about them.
LEAD Fellows is a program of The Taylor LEAD Foundation. The founding cohort convenes in Fall 2026 by nomination.