The elder Schiller served as commissioner of the SEC and CEO of Yankee Global Enterprises among other top jobs.getty images
Derek Schiller has made a name for himself as the Braves’ president and CEO by leading the club’s business operation to new heights. That’s easier said than done — especially when his name is attached to a sports business legend like Harvey Schiller, who had stints as SEC commissioner, Turner Sports president, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee and Yankee Global Enterprises CEO, not to mention his time as a chemistry professor at the Air Force Academy.
“Derek was never going to be the guy that played the ‘I’m Harvey’s son’ card,” said Revelxp President Tracy White, a close friend of Derek’s and a former work associate. “He’s never had any level of entitlement.”
While the younger Schiller has made a conscious effort to forge his own path, he’s still very much his father’s son. Both perfectionists. Both ultracompetitive. Both have pushed their kids — Derek and his wife, Kristin, have two children — to be their best.
“My dad instilled in me this desire to always be better than what I was,” Derek said. “If I got a 95 on the test, why didn’t I get 100?”
During his upbringing, Derek was often along for the ride with his father, gaining valuable business-related experience in the process. In his early teenage years, for example, he sold chipwiches at an Air Force Academy athletic complex.
“I think I ate more chipwiches than I sold,” he quipped, “but I was very competitive.”
Derek’s father also exposed him to business operations around the Olympics while he was a teenager, a background that helped the younger Schiller land his first job in sports at Atlanta’s International Sports Plaza, which was affiliated with the 1996 Olympic Games and headquartered in a building that neighbored the engineering firm Lockwood, Greene & Co., where his professional career began.
“I saw how my dad did things, whether it be manage people, manage relationships, approach decision-making,” Derek said. “I look back on it now and it wasn’t like he was teaching me the lessons directly as I was going through it, but I was learning just by being there.”
