Megan Oglesby joined High Point University President Nido Qubein in the Power List interview, a partnership for discussions with influential leaders. The interview was edited
for clarity.
Megan Oglesby is the executive director of High Point’s Earl and Kathryn Congdon Foundation, which was formed by the family that built Old Dominion Freight Line into one of the largest U.S. trucking companies. Her great-grandfather, Earl Congdon Sr., started the business in Richmond, Virginia, in 1934. Old Dominion moved its headquarters to High Point in 1962. Oglesby previously worked for Business High Point Chamber of Commerce. Last year, she became the second female to be the principal investor in a MLS NEXT Pro professional soccer club, the Carolina Core FC. She has a bachelor’s degree from Elon University and an MBA from High Point University.
Megan, you’re the principal investor and founder of the Carolina Core FC soccer team. That’s just one of the ways you are helping transform your hometown. How do you go from being a communication major to sports ownership?
I’ve always led with my values and what I feel like I can bring to the table. One of the first questions I often get when I tell people I’m the Carolina Core FC founder or principal investor is, “You must really love soccer?”
Soccer was part of my life growing up, along with Girl Scouts. But one of the things that made me decide to become an investor in the team was the work we were doing in our community. You were a big part of that, revitalizing our downtown with a multi-sport, multi-use stadium.
We have a great baseball team there, and I was brought to the table to help bring something to our downtown that’s exciting and vibrant and very inclusive.
We’re in MLS Next Pro. MLS is Major League Soccer and they came up with a secondary league, kind of like the Triple-A of baseball. It’s a development league that started in 2021. In 2022, we decided to go after an expansion. Because it’s a developing league, it has access to opportunity. And soccer is very, very popular.
So what does it take to start a soccer club? Somebody must have done a pro forma to determine if this region can support a professional soccer team.
You have to start with vision. You have to know where you’re going, and then you have to have a plan. And obviously the financials play into it. And you have to have the people who have the expertise to get it off the ground, especially for a startup.
We’re an independent club, a part of MLS Next Pro. That means we’re not affiliated with a first club. Crown Legacy FC is a part of Charlotte FC. They’re the Next Pro team that moves players up to Charlotte FC. We’re independent, which means that we can move our players anywhere.
Why would you move your players? Do teams bid on these guys?
We want to move our players. We want them to come to us and develop, and then move on to where you want them to go to a higher level.
How did you start the team? By hiring a coach and players and getting the city on board? Did you find the location first?
The answer to all of that is yes. It all sort of had to happen at the same time. Everything kind of had to fall in line. The first thing we did, besides the vision and the plan, was to make sure we had the right people on board.
We have some other minority owners because everybody brings some expertise and perspective to the table. That’s super valuable for our club. So when I’m making big decisions, I lean on our other owners and our staff because they have expertise that I
don’t have.
What is that long-term picture for Carolina Core FC?
A long-term picture is that this club outlives all of us. For me, the definition of success is when I see not just players but staff move on to something better. You know, we’re a small enterprise, and we’re a great place to learn. And if people want to stay with us forever, I hope they do.
Why did you call it Carolina Core?
We were going to call it Triad United, but that sounds like an airline. We got the inspiration for the name from the work that the Piedmont Triad Partnership is doing in our region, yourself included, to bring additional jobs to our region. That’s really what Carolina Core FC is all about, and the vehicle is soccer.
When we think about attracting businesses to our region, whether it’s a small mom and pop or a huge company like Toyota, the first thing they’re looking at is, is there a skilled labor force there that I can hire?
Number two is quality of life. What is there to do? What are the school systems? Carolina Core FC is a small part of that. I am a North Carolina native, I love the state. I love this region, I love our town. And we have something to offer for everybody.
What does the foundation look at when it allocates funding?
The Earl and Kathryn Congdon Family Foundation is a private family foundation. The board members are Earl and Kitty, who are in their 90s, and their three grown children, who are in their 60s and 70s.
Our mission statement is to invest in nonprofit organizations that improve quality of life by reducing barriers to opportunity. We have three areas of focus. One is improving the quality of and access to education, including helping with our school systems. Our second one is critical community needs, including homelessness and food insecurity. We are big supporters of our hospital because you have to have a strong hospital to have a strong community.
The third one, which is where I became personally passionate, is economic development for revitalization and stabilization. If you can’t have a stable job, it’s really hard to do anything else. That’s where my passion for creating jobs turned over into my work with Carolina Core FC. (The foundation isn’t directly involved with the soccer club.)
You’re doing great work. I am quite familiar with many of the projects that the foundation has invested in. Does the foundation work principally in High Point?
We focus mainly within the greater High Point area. The family members decided in 2015 when they founded the foundation with their own private dollars, that they wanted to give back to the community that supported them through the hard years.
Megan, you speak with such clarity and with conviction and, yet in your life, you’ve had a challenge with your hearing. One would never know that. But, and I know you have managed that challenge with elegance and responsibility. To the extent that you’re comfortable, tell us about that.
So I was born with a hearing loss. I have about a 75% loss in both ears. At the time, the hospital didn’t test babies when they were born for hearing loss, so my parents didn’t find out about my hearing loss until a little bit later. So I was delayed in my speech.
As soon as my parents found out, I had speech therapy every day. I got hearing aids back in the 1980s.
One of the things that I’ve thought about a lot as I reflect on my life is that my parents did not give it power. They didn’t say, “Megan, you wear hearing aids, so you can’t be on the swim team. You can’t play on that soccer team because you’ve already lost your hearing aid for the third time.”
They wanted me to go and do what I wanted to do and just figure out how to work with it. So I thank my parents for that. It has shaped who I am.
I also thank God that I was born in at a time with the technology. Had I not had hearing aids growing up, I wouldn’t have learned language. I probably would have been considered disabled. And the technology gets better.
Now the soccer team had its first season in 2024. Was the main challenge getting crowds out there? Is it attracting players? What is the major challenge?
I wouldn’t say there are any major challenges. We’ve had a really great first year. We’ve got a great foundation. Probably the biggest challenge is just keeping everything aligned and moving forward, making sure that everybody who works for you has the same values. Personally, I don’t want to work for a company that my values don’t align with.
You’re really great about saying these are our values here at High Point University. This is what we stand for, and being unapologetic for it because you’re convicted and that you believe so strongly. And so I need to be better about saying these are our values, come on board with us.
If I came to a Carolina Core game, I assume I would see all ages. But the predominant profile would be a young family with young children who are crazy about soccer?
So one of the things that I love the most about our stadium in downtown High Point is that it is a mixed-use multi-sport stadium. When you’re there for soccer, it feels like soccer. What we thought would be one of our biggest challenges ended up being one of our greatest assets. That is the outfield of the baseball diamond, which we don’t use during the soccer game because soccer is rectangular.
Somebody brilliant on our team said, “How about we allow everybody with a ticket to be able to go down on the pitch in the outfield, and we just make it a party? We have a game down there for the kids and a concession stand.
That outfield has been the best thing. The families love it because the little kids get to run around and parents can watch the game or finish a conversation without being interrupted every two seconds by their kid. So when you look around the stadium, you see families with little kids. We even have people carrying their newborn babies.
We have die-hard soccer fans. We have older clients that come and watch the game. And it’s really been one of those things that has felt like such a unifier for our community. A mother came up to me the day after one of our home games the next day, and she said she had four kids, one in elementary school, two in middle school and a high schooler. This is one thing we can do as a family where everybody has a great time. ■
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