Team Insight

J eff Covington has built a legacy in the team sports business for nearly four decades. Starting as a part-timer at Sports Spectrum in Chattanooga, TN, in 1986, Covington learned the ropes under the mentorship of the company founder before becoming part-owner himself. From those early days of balancing college with work at the small retail store, Covington's career evolved as he became an integral part of the company's growth, transitioning into outside sales, taking ownership and expanding the business into new areas. Today, Sports Spectrum is a thriving operation with 22 employees and with recent expansion plans underway at a new 14,000-square-foot facility, Covington's focus on the future is as strong as ever, looking to create new opportunities for growth while staying true to the company's roots in team sports. To tell the story of the success of Sports Spectrum, Team Insight goes One-on-One with Jeff Covington. 10 • Team Insight ~ January/February 2025 teaminsightmag.com Team Insight: Tell us your story about how you got started in the team sports business. Jeff Covington: e company was orig- inally owned and operated by a couple – Mike and Joyce Tindell – and Mike was sort of my mentor. He brought me in when he opened in 1982 and then in 1986 I grad- uated high school and was entering college here at the University of Tennessee. I heard about a part-time job opening so I went by and saw Mike, he gave me the job, and we were basically just a two-man operation. How did you grow into the team sports side? Mike's background was team sports and in those days you sort of had to have a retail store to even be in team sports. He had a small retail store, so I went to college in the mornings and I worked in that store in the aernoons. About a year later, he asked me if I wanted to give it a try on outside sales, so he gave me some schools to go see. I went to college in the mornings and I would go visit coaches aer class and sell and in the aernoons I went back to the store and did my store responsibilities. I did that for three-and-a-half years until I graduated college in 1990. What happened next? Upon graduating I stayed with the com- pany and became a full-time sales rep in outside sales and from there, I guess you could say our company started growing as we started adding more people over the years. For me, I'm going into my 39th year. Mike retired in 2014, but over the years he and I had done some partnerships in building our second location together so upon him retiring, we owned the real estate jointly. Anything else you thought up? In 1999, I had this wild idea that we needed to own our own printing company, so we partnered up and started a separate division of team sports and that was our printing company, where we started doing Jeff Covington and his team at Sports Spectrum cut the ribbon for the dealer's new expansion. By Carly Russo ONE-ON-ONE PROJECT JEFF COVINGTON, OWNER, SPORTS SPECTRUM, CHATTANOOGA, TN We realize there's some things that we don't do today that we did many years ago. We adapted to those changes and I think it's made us more successful. ONE-ON-ONE WITH ...

• Cover