“I literally spent all week, sun-up to sundown, studying for these exams, and ended up with a 3.0 just because I literally locked myself in the library studying,” Hayes recalled. “I just didn’t want to be that guy – the guy who didn’t have good grades. I was willing to whatever I had to do.”
Buoyed by one of the wrestling program’s pillars, “Compete in such a Way,” Hayes has been an honor roll member ever since.
Garland said Hayes, one of the team’s captains, sets a perfect example. “It’s so encouraging to the other guys,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Look, you don’t have to be Einstein to do well here. You don’t have to have the greatest GPA, the greatest test scores, to be from the perfect school and the perfect background. You just need to make a commitment and work with all your heart, with everything you’ve got.’”
Hayes said two of his favorite classes have been “Managing Innovation” and “New Product Development,” which, due to the pandemic, he had to take online last spring, part of his entrepreneurship minor.
“They were such game-changers for me,” Hayes said. “The material was just awesome. It was kind of breaking down how new companies evolve and innovate. The word ‘innovation’ is thrown around loosely. I feel like so many companies throw the term around like it’s nothing. What I learned in those classes was that it’s not a one-time process of innovating; it’s a constant effort. It’s going back to the drawing board and looking at incremental, disruptive innovations and different types of product innovations, service innovations, process innovations. It’s a whole process, not just a one-time thing or only in one sector of a company. It’s all across it.
