The team behind the team.

Rachel Jennings has spent her career building academic pathways for student-athletes — from the Pacific Islands to every corner of the world. As Assistant Athletics Director for Academic Excellence at the University of West Georgia, she brings deep institutional experience and a long history of helping young athletes succeed in the classroom.

Before UWG, Jennings spent two and a half years at UT-Permian Basin as Assistant Athletic Director of Student-Athlete Success. Earlier roles included Senior Football Academic Support Specialist at Missouri Southern State and three years as an Athletics Academic Advisor at Delaware State University.

For nearly a decade, Jennings served as Director of Academics for Field House 100 Recruiting and the Pasefika International Sports Alliance — two nonprofits placing student-athletes from American Samoa, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia into U.S. scholarship programs. Together, the organizations have placed more than 200 athletes, including seven NFL players and three Academic All-Americans. During the same period, she taught English at Samoana High School in American Samoa, leading the territory’s oldest school through the WASC full self-study accreditation process and earning the maximum six-year term.

Michael L. Iosua brings the rare combination of football pedigree and high-level legal expertise. A former Defensive Captain for the University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors under Coach June Jones, he is now a partner in Government Relations and Commercial and Real Estate Litigation, with extensive experience in strategic advocacy on legislative issues at the local, state, and federal levels.

Before joining the firm, Iosua served as Assistant Attorney General for the Government of Samoa, representing the territorial government in legal transactions and civil actions. His public-service work continues today: he chairs the Audit Committee of the Stadium Authority, sits on the Board of Directors of Na Koa — the official booster club for Rainbow Warrior Football — and serves on the Legislative Committee of the American Resort Development Association. In 2016, he was selected to the Pacific Century Fellows class.

Iosua holds a J.D. from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, an M.B.A. from BYU’s Marriott School of Management, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Jeff Sims has spent more than two decades doing one thing better than almost anyone in his field: looking at a young athlete and seeing what they can become. He brings a championship evaluator’s eye and an operator’s discipline to identifying, projecting, and developing football talent.

In 2016, Sims led Garden City Community College to a perfect 11–0 season and the NJCAA National Championship — the first in the program’s seven-decade history — earning National Coach of the Year honors from both the ACCFCA and the Spalding NJCAA Coaches Association. Across his career as a junior college head coach he compiled a 77–32 record and three conference championships, placing more than 250 student-athletes into four-year scholarship programs.

More than 70 of his former players have signed professional football contracts, including All-Pros Jason Pierre-Paul, Lavonte David, and Trey Hendrickson. At Indiana University he built the player personnel department from inception into a 30-member operation that delivered the top two recruiting classes in school history; at Florida Atlantic his recruiting and evaluation helped turn a program ranked 120th nationally into a bowl-eligible team within two seasons.