ARTICLE TEXT
JL Skinner relished the chance to be a role model.
The Broncos rookie safety grew up going to the Boys & Girls Club in Southern California. He credits a lot of his development as a kid to the hours, days and weeks he spent there after school and in the summers.
So in June, he jumped at the opportunity to join other rookies for a day trip to the Denver Broncos Boys & Girls Club.
“It felt like going back home for a little bit,” Skinner said.
Given his history, Skinner had a sense that he and the other Broncos youngsters would be the highlight of the day, probably the week, for the kids there. What he didn’t know when he got on the bus that morning, however, was that he would find a new role model, too.
At the start of the day, Broncos owner Carrie Walton Penner made her way from seat to seat, introducing herself to the newest members of the football team.
Intimidating, right? The wealthiest ownership group in American sports? The boss’s boss’s boss?
Actually, according to the sixth-round draft pick, not at all.
“She’s very down-to-earth, easy to talk to,” Skinner told The Post. “I really appreciate her for even coming with us on that trip because that shows how involved she is with us, the rookies and the team. It was really fun, very comfortable, not nerve-wracking at all.
“I look at her as a role model. … “Now I say ‘hi’ all the time. You can always go talk to her about anything. I had lunch with her, as well, and it was great to talk with her and build that connection.”
They know a little bit about each other now.
Broncos fans know a little bit, too, about the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group. As the family hits its one-year anniversary of purchasing the franchise this month, fans and outsiders have become accustomed to occasionally hearing about ownership’s decisions and vision through CEO Greg Penner.
Inside the organization, however, Carrie Walton Penner has set about developing and executing that vision in ways ranging from player development to mental health and wellness, staff culture to philanthropy and community involvement, from newly minted draft picks to 40-year alumni and everything in between. Her office in the Centura Health Training Center might just be the franchise’s center point, not because of its position in a high-traffic area at the top of the second-floor steps or because edicts emanate outward, but because it is the place where Walton Penner keeps the notepad on which she is constantly writing questions to answer, ideas to explore, brains to pick, groups to gather and people to circle back with.
The evolution of this venerated NFL club is happening right here, right now. And it has Walton Penner’s fingerprints all over it.
“It feels like 10 years”
When Walton Penner and the rest of the new ownership group closed on the Broncos last August and arrived in town, they and many others thought they were about to watch Russell Wilson and Nathaniel Hackett engineer a turnaround after a long playoff drought.
Instead, of course, Denver struggled offensively out of the gates and the wheels eventually fell off in a 5-12 season. Hackett was fired after 15 games.
The to-do list got long in a hurry.
“It feels like it’s been maybe 10 years,” said Walton Penner on a late July morning as new coach Sean Payton got his team on the field for its first ramp-up workout. “We’ve had about a decade of learning consolidated into a really short time. … Coming in Aug. 10, everything was fully baked and underway. Training camp was underway. We were a couple days out from our first preseason game. We knew we had a lot to learn, but I had no idea how much we would learn and really how quickly we would learn such a range of things.”
Instead of taking time to get accustomed to how the club operated, football decisions started coming into view quickly. Instead of building on on-field momentum, questions swirled by the time the Broncos went to London in late October.
“The unfortunate season we had, it was a bit of a blessing in disguise because it allowed us to learn a lot more, faster,” Walton Penner said. “I feel like we did have multiple seasons and experienced what for some owners might take five seasons or 10 seasons to go through a lot of the range of things we went through last year.”
A bad year on the field and a subsequent coaching search take up time and resources, but the world also keeps turning. It didn’t take long after “landing day,” as Walton Penner referred to the new ownership group’s arrival in Denver, for her to start to identify the areas of the organization she wanted to get to know first.
“I was definitely open to figuring out what it looked like and then getting my feet on the ground and learning and understanding and then figuring out where it would be that I could have the greatest impact,” she said. “With Greg as the CEO, we knew coming into it that somebody needed to be in charge and it needed to be really clear who you go to if you need an answer. With him really being focused on the day-to-day and everything that comes up over the course of a week, it gave me a chance to really experience and think about and get to know the organization broadly and figure out some of those things.”
“A rare skill”
Walton Penner heard a familiar refrain from friends and colleagues as the sale process played out.
“You’re going into football?”
It’s not exactly the family business or a natural part of her own career arc.
Walton Penner, the daughter of Rob Walton and granddaughter of Walmart founders Sam and Helen Walton, has spent much of her professional career working in education policy in Colorado and around the country as the education program committee chair for the Walton Family Foundation. In recent years, she’s expanded that work to focus extensively on mental health, particularly among K-12 children and young adults.
She spent much of her time growing up in Colorado and as a football fan – more college than the NFL – but football was not the thing. Walton Penner, 52, graduated from Georgetown, earned a pair of master’s degrees at Stanford and went to work in a complicated, thorny, different state-by-state policy landscape.
“She’s committed to voice and committed to making decisions democratically,” said Marc Sternberg, who worked with Walton Penner for several years at the Walton Family Foundation and then founded A Street, an education venture capital company. “It’s not about rushing to an answer but about putting in the work to make sure the right voices are at the table.
“She rolls out of bed knowing how to make people feel heard, and that’s a rare skill.”
Over the years, her work and investment portfolio expanded into mental health initiatives, including BeMe, an app that helps provide young people mobile access to mental health resources.
“It really was this transition and expansion from education and wanting to make sure that every young person has access to an excellent education and then realizing there are so many things that a lot of young people come to school with, whether it’s hunger or unmet mental health needs,” she said. “I shifted into that area and really started investing in start-up companies that were, from my perspective, a lot more innovative and really trying to solve problems.”
She joined the Stanford University Board of Trustees and is a board member at The Aspen Institute and KIPP Foundation.
All of which is to say she had plenty on her plate without scoreboards and division standings and ACL injuries.
But as Walton Penner dug into the Broncos, a surprising realization surfaced about all those years of policy work and the way it shaped her approach and skillset.
“It translates incredibly well (to football),” she said. “Part of it is I bring in a unique way of thinking of education – everyone thinks differently. How are we applying that and thinking about that for our players in terms of our playbook? Are we making sure we’re thinking fully about how people learn and how they experience being a part of the Broncos?”
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
ARTICLE CONTINUED
Into action
Three buckets.
That’s how Walton Penner thinks about people in the organization’s orbit: Those who play for the Broncos, those who work for the Broncos and those who cheer for the Broncos.
“Anything can fit into those three buckets,” she said.
Those buckets are starting to fill with the steady drip of change.
“She’s really got to know people across the organization,” Greg Penner told The Post. “Huge impact on how we think about player health and wellness, interaction with our former players, community impact and a bunch of other areas she’s having a meaningful impact on. Her and I working together on some of our longer-term initiatives, whether it’s touring stadiums and practice facilities, it’s been great.”
The Broncos this spring revamped their strategy and approach to their community foundation and are pushing toward – and eventually beyond – $5 million per year in commitments, sources have told The Post.
One example of a new initiative: The Broncos support girls flag football leagues across the state are partnering with the University of Colorado Children’s Hospital to study the mental health benefits of participation.
“Most research has been in boys sports, so really focusing on understanding the benefits to girls who are participating in those programs,” Walton Penner said. “We always think, how do we continue to do more? How do we really lean into some of these areas?”
During training camp, the Broncos are rolling out a new alumni program focused on all former players rather than emphasizing Ring of Fame members. They’re adding a director of alumni and expanding communication and outreach, including a roundtable with Walton Penner.
She said she wants to build out a personal finance program for players and former players that adds to what the NFL Players Association provides across the league.
She’s set about trying to impact workplace culture and is in a unique position to do so as one of the most prominent women in the NFL and a member of the league’s committee for diversity, equity and inclusion.
“How do we make sure that in our building we’re reflecting our community and not just our community of Denver and Colorado, but of the country? And how are we making sure we have different perspectives and different experiences?” she said.
“… If you walk through those doors, regardless of what department you’re going to, if you bring excellence into the building it helps with producing excellence on the field.”
“Wait, this is the owner”
Of course, excellence on the field ultimately falls to coaches and, most importantly, players.
They are Ray Jackson’s entire job as Denver’s vice president of player development.
He was intrigued when Walton Penner first approached him late last summer, but unsure of what to expect.
“It’s interesting when you first meet her, you’re like, ‘Wait, this is the owner,’” he told The Post. “It’s just like you and I talking or you and one of your buddies. You see, wow, she’s really about the players.
“Think about it, most people, we assume people, when they have money, are wealthy, that they assume they have all the answers. She comes at it wide open. She’s taking notes and wants to learn. She cares about people, mental health, total health, total wellness of the whole body and what that encompasses. When she first got here that’s what she asked me: I want to know about our players. I want to know about them.”
Jackson said he and Walton Penner are in some form of contact virtually every day. Walton Penner meets with football operations staff each week to discuss player wellness. They talk through issues big and small about the stress social media puts on players or what it’s like to be drafted as a 21-year-old or the unforgiving nature of the league, which Walton Penner said, “has been eye-opening.”
“To want to know what’s it like when a guy gets released? What do we do? Do we reach back out to him and his family? That’s just rare,” Jackson said. “A lot of people, fans included, we all look at it like he’s just a player and doesn’t have any feelings. ‘Next.’ She cares.
“She wants to know how we can support them – are there jobs, are there mental health resources, are there internships? What can we do? The Rolodex they have, there’s nothing they can’t get for our players and that’s exciting.”
This is perhaps the most direct link to Walton Penner’s experience in the mental health world. Broncos players, especially young ones like Skinner, aren’t that different in age from the people she’s spent years advocating for. They aren’t that different – spotlight aside – from Walton Penner’s four kids, three of whom played college sports.
“It makes it easier to have that conversation with players as you get to know them a little bit and you’re able to ask,” Walton Penner said, nodding to the lunch she had with Broncos rookies and limited shareholder Condoleezza Rice last month. “They’re a lot more open to talking about some of the challenges and how hard it is to be in college and have the experience of having to deal with the social media negativity that can be directed at you as a player.
“We’re trying to do a better job of continuing to meet our players with what they need and what they’d like to have more of.”
That sounds like music to the ears to Jackson, a former NFL player himself.
“The average career is 3.4 years,” Jackson said. “I always tell my players, ‘If I give you 10 years, that puts you at 31 or 32 years old. You’ve got 50 more years you’ve got to live without football.
“To have this resource of ownership that’s willing to help and commit those resources to them, that’s going to be beautiful to see where we can go and be on the frontier.”
“I pinch myself”
If the Broncos are on the practice field, there’s a decent chance one or both of the Penners are there, too, watching.
If they’re playing on the road, you’ll find them, Rob Walton and sometimes the limited shareholders on the pregame sideline.
If it’s just another day, you’ll probably find Walton Penner in her office or working her way around the building with her notepad, following up or starting something new.
There’s a lot to do and winning’s important, but this, she assures, is an absolute blast, too.
“I feel really fortunate to be here and it really is an honor to have a chance to work across this ownership group,” she said. “From a family experience, it’s really fun to do this with my dad. It’s special to have a chance to do that.”
She looked up from a small seating area flanking her desk at the Broncos logo adorning her office wall.
“I pinch myself. I still do,” she said. “In 10 or 20 years, I hope I’m still doing that, because it should always feel like a thrill to be arriving here and be part of something that really is exciting. People in the building are passionate. People outside the building are passionate.
“And, you know, the responsibility to be the best that we can be, I definitely feel that on a daily basis.”