You’re Not Alone. You’re Here with Hailee. 

This series started as conversations between me and my dad.

For most of my life, I knew him as “Coach” — the man who spent over 40 years leading at the highest levels of the game in both college football and the NFL.

But before all of that, he grew up in a small town in Arkansas, in a one bedroom home that housed 15. It was a home built on faith, family, community, and hard work — where people showed up for one another, loved each other deeply, and understood that success meant very little if you weren’t bringing others along with you. Those values shaped not only his his childhood, but the way he raised our family and the principles that guided him throughout his life and career.

He was also a dual collegiate athlete himself back in the day, and someone who built his life in environments where performance, toughness, and resilience weren’t just encouraged, but expected. Over time, his path took him far beyond where it all began in Batesville.

In many ways, his entire life has been shaped by responsibility, identity, leadership, color, sport, pressure, and service to others. He’s spent decades guiding young men through some of the most defining years and moments of their lives, and the same values that grounded him growing up — integrity, accountability, discipline, faith, and family — became the foundation of how he led both on and off the field.

Our careers have intersected in the most interesting aways, leading us conversations that we didn’t always have before.

Conversations about mental health.

About identity.

About color and systems.

About family and relationships.

About what means to lead both in and out of the home.

And about what he saw in those he worked with and the athletes he coached, but maybe didn’t always have the language for at the time.

Now, in a different season of life, there is more space to reflect. More space to look back on the experiences, relationships, lessons, and people who shaped him — and the countless lives he helped shape along the way. This season is an opportunity to sit back and appreciate what has been built, what has been learned, and what continues to be passed forward.

This series is a space for those conversations.

Where his lived experiences meets my clinical lens — not to overanalyze, but to better understand. To put language to things that can so often go unspoken. And to create a different kind of dialogue about what strength, support, resilience and connection can look like.

My hope is that these conversations resonate — with athletes, with parents, with families, and especially with young men who may have grown up in environments where strength was emphasized, but emotional support wasn’t always a part of the conversation.

So go ahead and pull a seat up to our table.

Welcome to Conversations with Charlie.