Member Spotlight: Dr. Nancy Post
Davida Dinerman
Dr. Nancy Post – Breaking Barriers in Sport and Life
Breaking barriers is in Dr. Nancy Post’s DNA. So is hard work. Her father, Joe Post, walked onto the Brooklyn College basketball team, was an All-Star player, and then turned pro. When Nancy was growing up in Massapequa, football and baseball were the premier sports; there were no girls teams but, with Joe’s advocacy, girls could play only on boy’s non-contact sports teams. This is how Nancy came to play tennis in high school. In junior high, her father had established a girl’s basketball team which practiced one night a week at the school, and Nancy was a point guard on the team.
Nancy played tennis in high school on cracked concrete courts. In fact, she captained the boys’ tennis team, thanks to the support of the coach, Pete Rosenstein. The sport was highly underfunded in the school and the town. To pay for her own lessons, Nancy washed cars and cleaned houses. In high school, she worked as a receptionist at a tennis club which offered her free court time… at midnight! That is dedication. Nancy biked to USTA tournaments where she played against girls her own age for the first time. All of this, plus she was a straight A student.
When she was getting ready to consider colleges, Nancy’s teachers suggested she look at the Ivies. Yale wanted her for basketball, but Nancy did not click with New Haven. She wanted UPenn for its City and Regional Planning studies, but UPenn didn’t offer a big enough financial package. Being the resourceful gal that she is, Nancy met the legendary UPenn coach, Ann Wetzel, who realized Nancy would be first string varsity on the tennis team. They went to the AD Connie van Heusen’s office to rally for a bigger financial package. This was around the BJK/Title IX boost.
Sure enough, Nancy ended up at UPenn where she earned six varsity letters in tennis and squash, and was a doubles specialist, thanks to her (unusual at the time) serve-and-volley game. In her spare time, Nancy earned a degree in Psychology and Economics. While at UPenn, Nancy taught an all-city tennis team in Philly. She was more than just a teacher and organizer of matches; Nancy made a big impact on these kids’ lives, many of whom earned tennis scholarships to college, including University of Maryland. She keeps in touch with some of these students.
But before we get into where all that education brought her, let’s find out a bit more about Nancy’s tennis journey.
After UPenn, Nancy stopped playing tennis until she was in her 30s at which time she joined the Germantown Cricket Club as she was living in Philly. Someone put a bug in her ear to play the L1 grass tourney there, stating “You’d be in the middle of the pack, and if you work hard, you’ll rise.” She played doubles with a friend who had competed at Swarthmore, and lo and behold, they won the back draw. From that alone, she received a letter from the USTA saying she now had a national ranking in grass. The next year, she was knocked out of the first round, but in 2019, she and Inese Williamson earned a silver ball in the 45s. A few years later, she and Inese won bronze. Last year, with Hyacinth Yorke, she lost in the finals in the back draw of the 55s.
Nancy’s observation of an L1 tournament, “It’s a gathering of excellent people who are good at what they do. Whether you win or lose and give a good player a run for their money, you become part of the group. It is a community that supports one another to play your best.”
Nancy used to view older women as inspiring, and now she realizes she IS one of those older women. As she put it, “I love the game [of tennis] and love what it has given me.”
But Nancy is not yet ready to retire and play the L1 circuit. Nancy is a pioneer in how to build and use human energy, and still has a lot of work to do in the area of individual and organizational health. Creating methods of individual and organizational performance with roots in East Asian medicine and modern organizational behavior, she advises leaders on how to optimize their own performance and health as well as the health of their teams and organizations.
At UPenn, in the Masters Program in Organizational Dynamics and then at Wharton’s Aresty Institute for Executive Education, Nancy taught a course in change management that focuses on the impact of change on an organization’s health both operationally and humanly. Her PhD research centered on what happens to the health of leaders during major organizational changes. She found many of those leaders were ill with anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders. Some even became manic and alienated themselves from their loved ones.
This humane and pragmatic approach to organizational and leadership consulting was decades ahead of her time. Nancy has an uncanny knack to predict trends. Last year, she won the Pennsylvania Healthcare Trailblazer Award in recognition of her decades of work designing new methods for improving the health of an organization through the energy of its employees.
In addition to keeping the corporate world and its inhabitants functioning smoothly, Nancy is on another mission to ensure players at the grass tournament at the Germantown Cricket Club have housing if needed. But even more importantly, she, Paula Perry, Lisa Hoffstein, and a team of “excellent women” are rallying the club’s General Manager and members to keep the highly anticipated tourney on the summer schedule. The women are working hard to get sponsorships and have developed a clever marketing and branding campaign called “Germantown Cricket Club, promoting excellence in women.” You can contact Nancy at info@nancypost.com if you need housing. If you need sponsor information, send an email to Head Pro Ann Marie Devlin at Adevlin@germantowncricket.org.
Dr. Nancy Post knows that you must break something – a habit, a mindset, a process - to fix it, and she is dedicated to making sure others know how to embrace change for the better.