Meet Tony Jackson - Dream Team Founder and CEO

Raised as an only child by two working class parents with my only dream in life to play in the NBA, I realized after graduating HS in 2002 (at 5’11” and not genetically blessed athletically) that playing Division III basketball was an unlikely path to my dream and I wanted to pursue a career in coaching.

After calling friend and mentor Nate McMillan, then Head Coach of the Seattle Sonics, I was offered an opportunity to work for the team, where my job was to workout NBA players pre-game, in practices, individual trainings and off-season workouts.

This allowed me to attend and graduate from the University of Washington with a business degree in 2008, when the Sonics became the Oklahoma City Thunder. Having met my wife in school, knowing that family was going to be the most important part of my life, and that a move to OKC would’ve been solo, I had to get a “real job” without ever having considered a career outside of basketball.

After a dozen interviews and only one offer, I accidentally fell into a role in software sales. Nobody explained “Market Development” meant cold calling strangers to get them to evaluate buying software and I had every negative stereotype you could imagine about sales.

I quickly realized:

  1. Sales done right is about genuinely caring for and helping others

  2. The opportunity to build wealth is life changing

  3. Every aspect of sales is directly synonymous with team sports and former athletes consistently thrive

A 15 year career in the industry allowed me to serve as a revenue leader through three successful IPOs (Snowflake, MongoDB, Tableau), an advisor and investor to dozens of companies, and an instructor for the University of Washington.

My life has completely changed through these experiences and now I’m making it my mission to help others do the same, while empowering the best leaders and companies to hire and coach the next generation of superstar sales professionals and leaders who will consistently outperform their peers.

Meet Matt Airy - Co-Founder & Chief Coaching Officer

After 23 years in college basketball (5 as a player, 18 as a coach), I remain convinced that competitive sports are the best educational spaces in the world. It’s always been the human and life lessons that attracted me to team athletics, and the most fulfilling moments of my career have always centered around seeing athletes apply these learnings to great effect.

In 18 years of coaching college basketball, I’ve had the good fortune to coach 14 winning teams, including a number of historic seasons at my alma mater, Whitman College. From 2016-2019, our program set all time national records for wins in a 4-year span (112-10 overall record) and made multiple deep runs in the NCAA Division III National Tournament, including an appearance in the 2017 Final Four. We produced multiple All-Americans, and our staff were honored with multiple National Coach of the Year awards.

Yet, what sticks with me looking back at the totality of my coaching experiences are the incredible achievements of our student athletes AFTER they graduated. An All-American award is a nice honor, but seeing that former All-American graduate from law school or land a first sales job and rapidly climb the ladder has been vastly more fulfilling than anything we ever achieved on the court.

I took my own turn in making the leap from coaching to SaaS sales in 2022 when Tony Jackson took a chance on me. The many parallels to my athletic and coaching experience allowed me to advance rapidly, moving into a lead and eventually Director role just 8 months in.

My passion for sharing this experience with others is what led me to reunite with Tony to assist in the founding of Dream Team. In so many ways, my full life and professional experience feels as if it’s led to this opportunity— a chance to make it my full time job to help former athletes transform their competitive skills into a life changing career engine.

Meet Graham Betchart, MA - Dream Team CMO (Chief Mindset Officer)

For the last 20 years I have had the pleasure of being a mental performance coach almost exclusively in the world of basketball. Recently, I’ve served as the mental performance coach for the NBA’s Utah Jazz and Sacramento Kings as well as for the back to back national champion UConn Huskies Men’s Basketball team. My history with performance mindset training goes back more than 20 years, as I first began training current NBA players Aaron Gordon (World Champion, Denver Nuggets) and Jaylen Brown (Boston Celtics) when they were teenagers and wrote the mental skills playbook called Play Present while earning my masters degree in Sport Psychology

Mental skills training changed my life as a 19 year old during my first year of college basketball in 1997. I was really struggling as a young collegiate athlete, and was introduced to the greatest teaching I have ever encountered - how to train your mind. These powerful skills and techniques inspired me on such a deep level that it became my mission in life to teach these lessons to others through sport and eventually sales.

One key learning over 20 years doing this work: performance is performance, pressure is pressure, winning habits are winning habits. Having partnered with a number of businesses in the tech space and beyond, it’s become quite clear that there is little-to-no difference between what top tier performers in the business world face, and the challenges that national and world champion athletes take on. The good news? The solutions are just as similar and powerful! The same techniques that I’ve seen land top tier athletes on the championship podium have equal power to deliver life-changing performance in software sales.

This journey through the world of high performance mindset training has provided the opportunity to make many great connections— one of those being Matt Airy, and through that relationship, Tony Jackson. I am so grateful to be the Chief Mindset Officer at Dream Team as my passion for serving others never wavers, and I’m excited to bring winning mindset training to the next wave of sales professionals.

Our mission

Dream Team’s mission is to create life changing opportunities by connecting differentiated people with characteristics and values from sports to revenue teams who aspire for greatness.

By changing the way revenue teams are built, coached, and supported, we create dream teams, coaches and careers.