TEAM PLAYER
For Under Armour CEO and Kensington native Kevin Plank, it’s
always been about the huddle
By Carin Dessauer
In 1983, with his team trailing and time running out in Maplewood
Football playoff game, 11-year-old Kevin Plank of Kensington
entered the huddle determined to fire up his teammates. Running
back Mark Mason of Potomac went on to score the winning
touchdown, but Plank’s leadership skills and blocking on the final
play earned him most valuable player honors. Mason recalls Plank
telling him: “Come on Markey, let’s go, let’s score a touchdown.
He was the reason that we won.”
Plank, now 36, is the founder and chief executive of Baltimorebased Under Armour, the highly successful sports apparel
company he took public in 2005. Frustrated by the “soaking wet”
cotton T-shirts he wore under his University of Maryland football
uniform, the special teams captain created a fabric that wicked
away sweat while providing muscle support.
The clothing has become known as “performance apparel,” and
Under Armour, which employs 2,000 people worldwide, with 1,200
in Maryland alone, generated $725 million in revenue last year.
The company also makes footwear and other athletic accessories.
Plank, who took a $1.5million salary in 2007, made $12million
when he took his company public a little more than three years
ago. He owns an estimated 12.5 million shares of company stock.
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Plank says he built his company using the same principles he
learned during his years on the football field. “When I look back at
what made Under Armour so successful, it is my ability to put a
team together,” Plank says in a conference room at Under
Armour’s Tide Point Baltimore headquarters shortly after
completing a whirlwind launch of the company’s new running
shoe. His ability to motivate a team, Plank says, started when, in
the fourth grade, he began playing in the Bethesda area’s
Maplewood Football program.
Plank’s path to success took root in his childhood home in
Kensington, where teamwork, independence, commitment and
entrepreneurship were valued. The youngest of five boys (his
oldest brother is 13 years his senior), Plank grew up in what was
once a farmhouse on Frederick Avenue in Kensington.
His father, William, who died in 1993, was a real estate developer
with projects in Virginia, Florida, South Carolina and Maryland,
including Bethesda’s Al Marah subdivision off River Road. Plank’s
mother, Jayne, was a real estate broker until a few years ago. She
also served on the Kensington Town Council, was Kensington’s
mayor for eight years and was a State Department official under
President Ronald Reagan. She still manages real estate properties.
“I loved growing up in Kensington,” Plank says. He has fond
memories of playing for hours in Kensington Cabin Park and at the
nearby creek—both across the street from his house— and recalls
riding bikes “in little cycle gangs” down Kensington Parkway and
toward Howard Avenue and Antique Row to get Slurpees at 7Eleven. “Summers were big games of capture the flag or kick the
can,” says Plank, who describes the kids playing in the park as a
“real cross section from Kensington, Wheaton and Silver Spring.”
It was “not far from West Side Story,” he says with a laugh.
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During the school year, “we would pretty much leave in the
morning, and come home to get our things for [sports] practice,
and then come home again for dinner,” says brother Stuart Plank,
the second oldest son. Stuart says the Plank boys “made” their
own summer camp in the park across the street. Kevin’s favorite
place to eat was Continental Pizza off of Connecticut Avenue,
where Stuart, a Kensington resident, says his brother still likes to
get a cheese steak when he’s in town.
Jayne says her youngest son was “very happy, self sufficient,
easygoing, reliable, but a bit of a daredevil. I got a call one day at
work that Kevin tried to fly from the apple tree in our backyard,”
Jayne says, recalling that Kevin had broken his wrist. “He was
dressed in his Superman outfit.”
Plank recalls how his father had the boys work on housing
development projects or shovel the family’s driveway. They
usually got an Oh Henry! candy bar as pay. “Our parents taught
us that there was no silver platter,” says Scott Plank, the middle
son and the senior vice president of retail at Under Armour. “We
had to work for the things we had.”
Plank says dinnertime was a bit of a “firing line,” as the five boys
would “fight over food. I ate really slowly, and that was to my
disadvantage.” Stuart, a Bethesda home builder who is nine years
older than Kevin, laughs at thoughts of the first time his wife-tobe visited their house. She wasn’t sure whether the brothers were
going to “play catch” or “get into a fistfight,” Stuart says.
All of the Plank boys walked across Connecticut Avenue to grade
school at Holy Redeemer on Summit Avenue. Kevin Plank says his
parents didn’t set up car pools; the boys either walked to friends’
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homes or activities or got their own rides. Plank was industrious at
an early age. Stuart says that during the summer after his
freshman year of college, Kevin made his lunch every day for a
dollar. Kevin recalls mowing the lawn “in the fourth or fifth grade
because his brothers said it was [his] turn.”
When Jayne worked for the Reagan administration, she took the
boys—sometimes just one; other times more—on business trips to
“give them special time” with her. “Kevin always had a comfort
with people,” Jayne recalls. “I told the boys, ‘there are no
strangers, just friends that you never met.’ ”
Dave Crocker, whose mother, Jan, is still a kindergarten teacher
and vice principal at Holy Redeemer, was a year younger than
Plank in school. Crocker, who now lives in Olney and is a swim
coach at the Montgomery Aquatic Center in Rockville, describes
Plank as “always sort of a jokester” and “easygoing” in school. But
when “he put his football helmet on,” says Crocker, who also
played Maplewood Football, “then he would be the hardest hitter
on the field.”
Mason, the former Maplewood Football player and now a resident
of Atlanta, played with Plank at Maryland. Mason recalls being
“intimidated” by Plank in fifth grade. “He always had a fiery
demeanor,” Mason says, describing the drills required during daily
football practices at Alta Vista Park in Bethesda. “We would run
around the field and then have to run through the trees chanting
‘Hail Maplewood,’ ”Mason says. “Kevin ran and yelled the entire
time. He was intense.”
‘Let’s go make some money’
Plank took that spirit to Georgetown Preparatory School in North
Bethesda, where he was one of three captains on the freshman
football team. Each of his brothers graduated from the school. “No
one wanted to win more than Kevin Plank,” recalls classmate and
co-captain Andy Kish, who met Plank on the first day of school
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freshman year. “It did not matter what we were doing...Kevin was
always the most competitive one in the group.”
Kish, who now runs Under Armour manufacturing in Asia out of
Hong Kong, describes how his friend would “call me up at 7 a.m.
and say, ‘Let’s go make some money,’ and we would shovel snow
all day. He would rope in a number of guys. He did this all through
high school.”
“Kevin’s father taught him the value of a dollar,” Kish says. “To
this day he walks around the office turning off the lights.”
When Plank was in high school, middle brother Scott returned
from Guatemala—where he had traveled to learn Spanish—with a
duffel bag full of colorful knitted bracelets he’d bought for $20. He
suggested that he and his two youngest brothers try to sell the
bracelets at a Grateful Dead concert. After earning more than
seven times what his brothers did, Plank says he recognized that
he was a terrific salesman. Chris Smith, who grew up in Chevy
Chase and now lives in Los Angeles, played football with Plank at
Georgetown Prep and says Plank“ could entertain a lot of people.
He was very gregarious.”
“During sophomore year” at Georgetown Prep, Plank got a call
telling him that he “was not being asked back,” Smith says.
According to those close to Plank, his grades weren’t up to par.
“He was not looking forward to explaining this to his family,”
Smith says.
“I was always a good kid, but I ended up finding trouble from time
to time, too,” Plank says. “I remember overhearing my mom and
dad talking one time…it was just after I had been let go from
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Georgetown Prep. I was upstairs and hearing my parents talking,
and my mom saying, ‘What are we going to do about Kevin?’ and
my dad just saying, ‘You know Kevin, he will always be OK.’ ”
So for his junior year, Plank transferred to St. John’s College High
School in Washington, D.C. “I always knew that it was a matter of
me growing up and maturing,” Plank says. “Leaving Prep and
going to St. John’s helped build who I am today…it made me a lot
stronger.” he says. “Sometimes it is important to reinvent
yourself… so you are not burdened by the person that you were
before.” Smith, from Prep, says he admired his friend because of
his attitude to “just move on.”
Move on he did. Plank says he went to St. John’s telling himself, “I
am going to be a good student.” He achieved“ a B average” while
he wrestled, played lacrosse and excelled on the football team. In
his senior year, he was the MVP of the St. John’s football
championship win over rival DeMatha High School and received
honorable mention recognition on USA Today’s All-USA high
school football team.
After graduation, Plank decided to play a year of football at Fork
Union Military Academy in Fork Union, Va., because he wanted to
improve his chances of playing “big time college football.” The
team featured 13 future National Football League players,
including future Heisman Trophy winner Eddie George. These
connections would serve him well when he launched Under
Armour.
Bill McDermond, who played football with Plank then and is now
senior director of international operations at Under Armour, recalls
Plank’s focus and moxie, such as walking up to college recruiters
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and introducing himself. Although Plank was much smaller and not
as talented as other teammates, McDermond says “he was not
afraid to go after something.”
The following year, despite having received scholarship offers
from other schools, Plank decided to attend Maryland as a walk-on
player. After being “red shirted” his first year (not playing his first
year so he could be eligible for four more years), Plank played
fullback and linebacker, was special teams captain and didn’t miss
a practice in five years. He earned a scholarship for his final two
years.
Eric Ogbogu was a freshman at Maryland when Plank was a
senior. He says Plank wasn’t the “biggest guy” or the “fastest
guy,” but the one who “worked harder than anyone.” Ogbogu,
who played in the NFL for seven seasons, remembers a spring
practice during his freshman year when Plank, at almost 5 feet 11
inches and 228 pounds, gave the 6-foot-4- inch, 245-pound
Ogbogu his “first and only concussion…in college football.” Ogbogu
is now the Under Armour brand ambassador and “Big E” in
company advertisements.
Entrepreneurial spirit
Craig Fitzgerald, Plank’s freshman and sophomore roommate and
football teammate, marveled at his stamina and energy. He recalls
how Plank could get away with four hours of sleep. “He would get
the most out of Maryland, juggling football, homework, social life
and work,” says Fitzgerald, now the director of strength and
conditioning for athletic teams at Harvard University.
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Scott Plank, who is seven years older than Kevin, noticed how
good his brother was with people when he watched him bartend at
Nantucket Landing, now The Barking Dog, in Bethesda during his
college summers. “With everything going on at the bar,” Scott
says, “Kevin was always able to keep the drinks flowing” and the
people happy.
Plank first met Desiree Jacqueline “D.J.” Guerzon of Potomac while
at St. John’s, when he went out with one of her schoolmates from
the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. He ran into D.J. again on his
first day of college, and they started dating a few months later.
“He knew what he wanted and how to make it happen,”
D.J. recalls. The two were married six years ago and have two
children. In college, Plank avoided rules that restricted student
athletes from taking jobs by launching businesses of his own, such
as selling T-shirts. He even pulled D.J. into his business efforts.
She remembers how Plank wanted to sell T-shirts at a Grateful
Dead concert and “thought they could make more money on the
shirts if they tie-dyed them.” She says her mom helped her tiedye the shirts in the backyard of her family’s home.
Plank also developed Cupid’s Valentine, an annual business that
sold roses for Valentine’s Day. Again, Plank involved his college
friends, and D.J. was his “chief of staff,” according to Fitzgerald.
Plank says he put away $17,000 from the rose business, which
eventually became seed money for Under Armour.
‘I figured it out’
At St. John’s, Plank was always “cutting his football shirts in half ”
because he was uncomfortable, recalls high school friend Brendan
Quinn of Washington, D.C. Quinn, who is president of Ernest Maier
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Block, a masonry block manufacturer in Bladensburg, and a
member of St. John’s board of trustees along with Plank, says
Plank “was the sweatiest guy on the football field.” Plank says he
“used to hate [the] cotton T-shirt” he wore under his uniform.
“It would get so wet,” he says. “I changed it as often as I could.”
Plank says he was always interested in apparel and considered
how he could make a shirt that would wick sweat away from the
body.
Plank recalls sitting in his dorm room during his senior year at
Maryland and drawing the first Under Armour shirt. “I thought, ‘I
figured it out, I am going to make a T-shirt,’ ” Plank says. He
bought fabric that he hoped could combine the snug fit of a
“Hanes cotton T-shirt” and the lightness and fast-drying texture of
synthetic, stretchy fabrics used in women’s lingerie. He found a
tailor outside College Park and paid him“$480” to sew seven
prototypes. Plank then had football teammates and athletes from
other Maryland teams test them.
After graduating in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in business
administration, Plank says he got into his car and drove to New
York City’s garment district. “I had 500 shirts made up, and I
phoned every equipment manager in the [Atlantic Coast
Conference] that would listen to me,” Plank says. He reached out
to his former football teammates and had them spread the word
about the shirts, pioneering what has become known as
performance apparel.
Early on, Plank ran the company out of his grandmother’s rundown town house in Georgetown. Plank says that the “selfdescribed ‘tough-old broad,’” who managed real estate until she
died in 1996 at age 93, was one of his mentors.
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As he had done with his high school businesses, Plank pulled
together a team to help him, including D.J., who was studying
nursing at Georgetown University. By the end of 1996, Plank says
Under Armour had generated $17,000 in revenue purely by word
of mouth. Plank says the key to his early success is that he
“always created an image” that the company was much “bigger
and larger” than it was.
The next year he had $100,000 in orders to fill and found a
factory in Ohio to make the shirts. He had gone through the
$17,000 from the rose business in college and run up $40,000 in
debt across five credit cards. Many people, according to early
partner Kip Fulks, advised Plank not to go forward. “The advice he
got was ‘don’t do it,’ you cannot compete against the big players,”
says Fulks, an Under Armour senior vice president. But Plank was
undeterred and “fueled” in part, Fulks says, by companies like
Nike ignoring his product at trade shows.
The company first made a profit in 1998, but a pivotal moment
came in 1999 with the release of Oliver Stone’s football movie Any
Given Sunday, in which actor Jamie Foxx wore an Under Armour
jockstrap in a locker room scene. After hearing about the movie
through a Fork Union teammate, Plank sent samples of his
products to the costume designer and convinced Stone’s assistant
to pay for the Under Armour goods.
With the Stone movie about to be released, Plank decided that
Under Armour had to tell its “story.” The company had only
$25,000 to spend, and Plank put it all on an ad in ESPN The
Magazine. He calls the move a turning point. “We generated close
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to $750,000 in sales from the advertisement,” he says. Three
years after starting the company, Plank put himself on the payroll.
The huddle
Posted on the wall in most meeting rooms and offices at the
headquarters are the “Under Armour Huddles,” a kind of
combination, in company terms, of Robert’s Rules of Order and
the Ten Commandments. The rules encourage workers to “be
prepared to huddle,” “manage the clock,” “know your position,”
“run the huddle,” “execute the play” and “respect your
teammates.” To some, the meeting rules might Seem trite. But
they are at the heart of what Has made Under Armour so
successful.
Kish, Under Armour’s manufacturing manager in Asia, explains:
“We do not have a front end and a back end, we have offense and
defense. We do not have colleagues, we have teammates. We do
not have meetings, we have huddles. Everything is related to
sports.”
Under Armour “teammates” maintain that Plank is the same
person today as the one they knew in childhood or at college.
They say he is regularly in touch with many childhood and college
friends and invites many, along with his family, to an annual
Preakness party. D.J. says she and Kevin try to get to
Montgomery County Each month to visit family and friends or to
go to one of their favorite places, Uncle Julio’s Rio Grande Cafe or
Houston’s Woodmont Grill, both in Bethesda.
Eric Ogbogu, the company’s brand spokesman, who has known
Plank since college, attended the Under Armour All America High
School Football Game in Orlando in early January with Plank. He
says that his boss “is a humble and regular person.” Ogbogu says
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that after a “hot day in the sun” talking to high school football
players, “KP came over and brought me a Power Ade drink.”
Deborah Yow, athletic director at the University of Maryland,
explains his success this way: “Anytime you find a person who has
character and competence and works in an area where they have
passion, then you are going to see something very special.”
Asked if he pinches himself in light of his success, Plank demurs,
“No. We do not know how it ends.”
After all, there is so much more to do, so many more teams to
organize and so many more huddles to call.
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