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Editor’s note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering leadership, personal development and performance through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.
PROVO, Utah — If you ever need to pique the interest of Kalani Sitake, just show him pictures of your toddler.
“Dude! No way. That is the cutest kid ever,” BYU’s head coach says of my nearly-3-year-old son, Leo.
I try to put my phone away and get back to our interview in a corner office inside BYU’s football facility, but Sitake wants to see more.
“Let’s see that one,” he says of our recent drive above Park City to grab the same Instagram-worthy shot that the rest of fall lovers go hunting for. Leo’s cheesing hard with his wild curly mane amid the banner yellow and orange aspen leaves.
“That hair!” he marvels. “You can’t cut that hair.”
I shake my head — I won’t anytime soon. I forgot that Sitake, who turned 50 last Friday, is currently rowing in the same dad boat.
He grabs his iPhone off his black leather notebook, flips it over, unlocks it and shows me rows of photos of the youngest Sitake: “This is my 3-year-old, dude.”
Sylvia Sitake, just three months older than Leo, smiles in some photos, snuggles her mom and dad in others. Sitake is still laughing over my son’s goofy smiles and disheveled mop. “Maybe they’ll go to prom together!” he says.
For a few minutes, the head coach of an undefeated AP Top 25 team with College Football Playoff aspirations is not thinking about the looming rivalry game against Utah. He’s doing what he knows best: leaning that aging former fullback frame fully into learning about others.
I came to Provo to learn more about Sitake’s leadership style and how he structures his team meetings. The first Tongan college football head coach is a soft-spoken leader who was a throwback hands-in-the-turf blocker. He hugs everyone he meets for the first time. His favorite hobby is learning other people’s life stories. He keeps daily notes in a notebook he carries with him everywhere he goes. And when he wants to make sure he doesn’t forget a vital piece of information — football-related or otherwise — he’ll video himself talking to … himself.
The stereotype of constructing the culture of a program in the mirror image of the head coach is belabored throughout every college football season. But with Sitake, who is now a decade into his head coaching tenure at his alma mater, it’s primarily about one thing: joy. He doesn’t strive for psychological edges over other coaches; he says, “I want to be friends with them.” He doesn’t stir up hatred on rivalry week when he faces his old boss, Utah’s Kyle Whittingham; he says stuff like “wishing bad things on good people is not good for the soul.”
I did learn fascinating things about Sitake’s meetings. Former BYU offensive lineman Harris LaChance told me that every Thursday, the Cougars perform karaoke. A player or coach picks a song — any song — and the rest of the team has to belt out the lyrics. If a player is caught lip-syncing, they have to roll the length of the field in football gear, because the whole point is for everyone to join in together.
“Ultimately,” former BYU center James Empey told me, “I think the approach was for everyone to not take themselves so seriously all the time and to be open with each other.”
But when I left that corner office after an hour, I didn’t text my editor about the Meeting 101 crash course I’d just had. I thought about the time Sitake spent asking about my son and the story he told about his dad that made his already quiet voice drift more placid. When Sitake told me the story about a long-ago Christmas, it felt like a pivot in the conversation — a beautiful story, filled with Sitake staples like harsh reality, heart and emotion, but a pivot nonetheless.
Only later did I realize the story he told me was the genesis of it all.
Sitake sits off to the side near the front during every team meeting. Meetings begin with an opening prayer, as do most activities affiliated with the university operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mondays are usually when Sitake will address the team, but his delivery is short and rarely about football. He jokes that if he’s up there any more than 15 minutes, then he just “starts making stuff up,” because nobody — not even a highly paid and respected head coach — has that much to say without delving into hyperbole.
When he was hired in 2015, he incorporated his primary program principle of “love and learn.” But what’s helped him become a better educator in social settings with his team are lessons gleaned from a book written by Daniel Pink titled “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.”
Sitake holds up his massive right hand and uses three fingers to count off the acronym “AMP” as he explains each letter:
“A stands for Autonomy. People want to have a say in things and want ownership naturally.”
“M stands for Mastery. You want to feel like you can work at something and perfect your craft.”
“P stands for Purpose. You want to feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself.”
The approach is working. The Cougars have had just two losing seasons in the last nine years. Last season they went 11-2. In 2025, the Cougars are ranked No. 15 and off to a 6-0 record with a true freshman quarterback. Sitake’s steadiness helped BYU escape the choppy waters of FBS independence and transition into a Power 4 conference in 2023.
One of Kalani Sitake’s favorite parts of the job is interacting with fans and taking pictures with people. (Photo by Chris Gardner/Getty Images)
It all starts during that hour or so each day when players, coaches and staffers are in one room together. Sitake says that individual ideas or approaches are usually offshoots from someone else’s. His are derived from legendary BYU coach LaVell Edwards, who led the Cougars for 29 seasons. Sitake’s senior year in 2000 was Edwards’ last season. As team captain, Sitake gravitated toward his mentor’s leadership style. Even then, Sitake and his former teammates were encouraged to speak freely in meetings, to suggest alternative schemes and to acknowledge ways to be different.
“All I did is do what he did and try to define it a little bit more and refine it a little bit more,” Sitake says. “I had to confirm that system and to see if that works with this generation.”
Every 20 minutes, Sitake has assistant coaches or players change the current topic or lesson because otherwise he’s noticed the group loses focus. That’s part of learning to teach nearly 100 Gen Z football players: not only making them feel seen and heard, but personally involved.
“He’s good at transmitting his vision and where you fit into that vision and why you’re important to it,” says former BYU defensive end Tyler Batty.
Team leaders weigh in on the weekly calendar and offer insight into whether some pieces of the schedule might be better moved to a different time or cut entirely. Batty said whether it was a 5-7 season like BYU’s first in the Big 12 in 2023 or last year’s 11-2 record, the message from Sitake is the same: The team’s success hinges on how much the players want to take individual and collective ownership.
In team meetings, he wants others to take control or speak up. It’s one of the only times Sitake actually wants to be the fly on the wall.
Sitake says the most rewarding team meetings are discussions around the smallest of gestures, brightening the days of others. One smile, he tells his players, can last a lifetime.
“I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes the best way to lead a football team is to get them to not focus on football for a moment,” Sitake says. “To get focused on who they are as a person and that they can make a difference — that it has nothing to do with Xs and Os. It has everything to do with their platform. You’re giving this window where you can really make a difference in a person’s life and then you put the autonomy on them.”
LaChance says Sitake’s daily search for joy permeates the locker room. And for players, the message sticks: “It made me want to try and be the same man,” LaChance says.
That is the Sitake way, the head coach who never misses an opportunity to dance on the field after wins or sing along with his players in the meeting room.
“The thing I love about being head coach is not that I get praise or credit, it’s that I get more access to people,” Sitake says. “I love when fans want to take a picture with me. It’s not like I’m an extremely handsome person. You know when you take a selfie, when you’re all squeezing together in tight and smiling? You can’t help but come away from that moment with at least a little bit of joy.”
Joy is what he seeks. It’s a helix in his DNA sequence. That desire took root long ago, when he learned that perspective is everything.
Sitake proudly calls himself “the son of a boxer” from Tonga who impressed upon his kids that whatever kind of ring you might find yourself in, you’ll always need those in your corner to get to where you want to go. Such a spirit, Sitake said, will enrich you further when things are going well in your life. And when they’re not, you can still be grateful for what’s directly in front of you.
The elder Sitake knows about embracing faint slivers of light in dark times. After Sitake’s parents divorced when he was 6, his dad, Tom, relocated the family from Tonga to Laie, Hawaii, raising his children as a single father. They moved around the country as Tom found jobs where he could. They lived with family members wherever they could. Income was tight. Tom always let his children know the reality of their situation. He was honest and tough and demanded that his kids control what was in their power. The Sitakes landed in the Bay Area briefly before relocating to Provo to be closer to extended family.
Before he begins to tell me the story that causes his voice to break and his eyes to water, Sitake takes a deep breath. One Christmas night after moving to Provo, it was brutally cold, and the Sitakes had no money.
“We had nothing. I think we had a box of oranges delivered to our front porch. My dad never shied from being honest with us about what we had and what we didn’t. We were super happy. It was cold. We went for a drive. We didn’t have anything but a full tank of gas.”
They looked at Christmas lights across the city. Tom played The Temptations’ Christmas Card album. He and the kids each had parts to sing, and so for the rest of the night, the Sitakes drove around Provo and belted out songs together. He says it’s one of the most memorable Christmases he’s ever had, a mental postcard of pure shared joy, delivered perfectly because everyone did their part.
“We had hungry bellies,” Sitake says, “but full souls.”
It’s a core memory, one clearly connected to the way Sitake leads his football program — and how he’s affected many of his players.
Tom Sitake strolls the royal blue hallways of the BYU football facility daily. If Texas has a Minister of Culture in Matthew McConaughey, Tom Sitake is the Minister of Joy at BYU.
He’s often wearing reflective aviator shades or a white BYU fedora, always at the ready to flash the “shaka” — the Hawaiian hand gesture signifying love, relaxation and enjoyment. A staple of the Sitake era at BYU, the shaka, historians say, was likely borne out of the brutal working conditions of Hawaii’s sugar cane plantations in the early 20th century. It’s an indicator that, even when life’s harsh realities seem unrelenting, there’s always room to spread good vibes.
For as long as Sitake can remember, his dad taught him the same tenets he now relays to his players. That, no matter what, you could control how well you did in school and how you decided to greet each day, every morning. That nothing worth fighting for can be obtained operating solo. That humility will always prevail over ego, kindness isn’t a form of weakness, and true happiness isn’t measured by what’s in your bank account or even by the empty rows of your refrigerator.
“It’s everything,” Sitake says, “that’s inside your own heart.”