Lauren Crandall
Located In: Nevada
Position: Director
Lauren is a 3-time Olympian who has taken her lessons from the athletic field into the business world to earn success in a new industry. She was a member of the U.S. Women’s National Field Hockey Team from 2005-2016 where she competed in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 Olympic Games. She captained the team from 2011 - 2016 until she retired after the Rio Olympic Games.
In her playing career she competed in 2 Pan American Games, winning gold in both the 2011 and 2015 Games, the 2014 World Cup where her team achieved a historic 4th place finish, was a gold medalist at the 2014 Champions Challenge, and won bronze at the 2016 Champions Trophy. In 2014 Lauren was named an FIH Player of the Year nominee and twice selected to the All-Pan American Team. While training for the Olympics, Lauren earned her Masters in Public Administration with an emphasis in Non-Profit Management from the Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry University.
Before joining the National Team, Crandall attended Wake Forest University where she was a two-time National Champion, two-time ACC Champion, and 3-time All American. In 2006 she was a Finalist for the Honda Award, the collegiate sport specific top honor.
However, beyond the championships, honors and awards that show up in a biography, Lauren has navigated her learnings through the losses and failures that have defined her athletic career. As a young captain asked to lead a team into an Olympic Games there were many failed moments that created opportunities for immense growth, many conflicts that developed emotional intelligence to better serve her team, and innumerable losses that forced her to transcend beyond the score board to learn about long-term winning from a leadership perspective.
Since retiring from her athletic career, Lauren has found value in sharing her stories of failure by teaching people how to evaluate losing as a normal process and apply the lessons learned into the next “game”. Growth and development can be a painfully slow process but necessary to master in order to achieve high performance. Everybody wants to win - but the hard part is putting in the time to understand the processes and mindset behind winning and that is the foundation of Lauren’s learnings.
Lauren now works in the insurance industry where she applies the parallels between succeeding as a team athlete and succeeding as part of a sales team.