After our last post on the 9th Ward Field of Dreams, we had an opportunity to speak with the founder, manager and soul of the project, Brian Bordainick. His story impresses us, not just for his eleventh-hour extra effort to save an almost-ruined project, but because of his success at taking on leadership roles he never expected.

“As an educator, it’s been an interesting experience since Katrina, working with eight FEMA trailers and students who missed months of one the biggest socializing aspects of their lives,” says Bordainick of life immediately after the hurricane. They were also short staffed. “The athletic director asked me if would coach basketball and thought it would be a good way to get to know my students out of the classroom, so I said ‘sure.’ Then the athletic director left and I was asked if I could be athletic director and in a ‘famous last words’ kind of way, I thought ‘how hard can that be?’”

Bordainick found himself shifting from teacher, to coach to athletic director and ultimately to businessman. “I moved into the entrepreneurial world and, honestly, I’m not sure how to accept that.”

Evidently, he’s thriving at it, cajoling physicians to give free team physicals, creating a corporation to manage the 9th Ward Field of Dreams project, opening a foundation and convening a board of directors. We all know what CEOs earn, but Bordainick does it on a teacher’s salary. “I have become the liaison between my school and the business community,” says Bordainick.

And this is how Bordainick’s career progressed since Katrina, one new leadership challenge after another. So it should come as no surprise how he artlessly handled the pitch that got the attention of the NFL, CNN and CBS’ “Sixty Minutes.”

After learning that the project’s original architect had backed out on the Friday before a Monday deadline and after hosting a big media tour on campus, Bordainick worked the phones into the night, to everyone he thought might be able to help find a new design to qualify for the NFL grant.

“A friend was at a party Saturday night and texted me that he had spotted architect Steve Dumez,” says Bordainick. “My friend wrote that he would corner Dumez and put me on the phone with him. So I got a call from my friend who told me to give it my best and then he put the phone in Dumez’s hand.”

The next day, Bordainick’s organizers met with Dumez at a coffee shop. “Steve said, ‘You know what “we need more crazy ideas like this in the city,’” says Bordainick. Dumez agreed to get the necessary plans drawn up overtime on the weekend.

Bordainick quips, “I believe irrational people rule the world and this is definitely an irrational plan!”

Could you find a better example of leadership through rapidly changing circumstances? Bordainick is obviously committed to his life’s work of improving the lives of students and his community and he never stops digging for the ring in the rubble.

May you find many rings, Brian.

Sometimes we find ourselves buried in the rubble of catastrophe before we can start digging. A crushing defeat will leave anyone reeling and all the more so when it takes you down with it.

Brian Bordainick felt like he’d been shot when he learned the crushing news about his ‘9th Ward Field of Dreams’ project.
–CNN.com

Full story here.

Bordainick is the high school athletic director in New Orleans who last year had pursued a crucial $200,000 grant from the National Football League to build a $2 million sports complex for young athletes in the Katrina-ravaged 9th Ward of New Orleans. Bordainick’s school, GW Carver High, is now mostly FEMA trailers, so the proposed facility was an amazing boost of opportunity for a community that hasn’t had much good news since the 2005 storm.

Then came the “shot.” The architect firm designing the facility had to pull out. And they had to pull out on the weekend before a Monday deadline to submit plans in order to qualify for the NFL grant.

Certainly we all have weekend deadlines and all-nighters, but few are $2 million make-or-break showdowns the likes of which Bordainick faced.

But this public school educator must have some serious resolve and entrepreneurial spirit, because he managed to dust himself off, bandage his battered spirit and do one of the hardest jobs in any business endeavor: cold call…on the weekend. Mind you, he was calling some of the most busy and sought-after architects in the area. But he got through to one who immediately demanded the best 30-second pitch he ever gave.

Bordainick’s goal line stand found the receiver—Steve Dumez, design director for Eskew+Dumez+Ripple—who agreed to take on the audacious task of delivering a design plan in a matter of hours.

It’s an incredible story in its simplicity and heroism and pluck. I’ll probably refer to Brian Bordainick in my keynote speeches because he demonstrated the ardor it takes to “keep digging” as described in The Ring in the Rubble.

Why not start digging on more manageable day-to-day rubble?

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