Tepper Sports CEO ‘can do everything.’ She had to hear it before she believed it

She was still on maternity leave — fresh off a trip from the West Coast to watch her Clemson Tigers win a national championship, in fact — when Kristi Coleman heard five words that would change her life.

Dave’s going to call you.

That’s Dave. As in David Tepper. It was January 2019. Tepper had just bought the Panthers six months prior. And now Coleman, who was the Panthers’ director of finance at the time, was going to get a call from him. That’s at least what Coleman’s boss and mentor, Mike Dudan, told her over the phone on that January 2019 afternoon.

Reason for the call? Dudan was leaving. Tepper needed a new chief financial officer.

Coleman was stunned. Visibly so. So much, in fact, that when she hung up the phone in her house, her husband, Wade, could tell something was on her mind. She told him everything: that Mike was leaving, and that Dave would be calling, and that she may have a chance at a job she never imagined would be open, and …

“And my husband was just like, ‘Kristi, what are you doing?’” Coleman told The Charlotte Observer. “Call Dave right now!”

Coleman’s gotten good at telling this part of her story — of how she became chief financial officer of the Carolina Panthers. She knows how to do so now, hitting all the right notes, smiling warmly, chuckling some at her naivete. It makes sense why she’s gotten good at recounting it. She’s been asked to share it at various speaking engagements over the years, and requests have only grown since she was promoted to Panthers president in 2022 and then Tepper Sports and Entertainment CEO in 2024.

That attention has boomed recently. The 39-year-old executive was named the Queens University of Charlotte Business Woman of the Year in 2024, and she was added to the Sports Business Journal’s 40-under-40 list in June. Right now, she’s one of two presidents/CEOs who are women in all the NFL.

And yet, seven years ago, there she was: much more anxious, fresh off the phone with her boss, wondering what she should do next. She tells you the rest of the story with utter competency: how she called Tepper right away; how he told her to meet him and then-team president Tom Glick at Angeline’s in uptown, where they would later offer her the CFO position. It culminates with her collecting herself and her nerves — “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I was scared, I was nervous, I was all the things” — and then calling her mother.

And she remembers what her mother said clearly.

“So I was telling this to my mom,” Coleman said. “And she says, ‘Kristi, you know this business better than anyone.’”

Then came the advice encased in a question: “Do you want to train the boss? Or do you want to be the boss?”

Coleman needed to hear that, she says now. It helped her believe it. She had an answer, too.

She’d had one for a long time.

What makes Kristi Coleman ... ‘just different’

For what it’s worth: James Plyler could have answered that question for Coleman, too.

Plyler and Coleman have known each other for 18 years. They met as colleagues at Deloitte, both fresh out of college, in 2008. And they’ve grown to be friends. Plyler is now the VP of finance for the Panthers. He joined the Panthers in 2019, and in those early days, he’d be at dinners and parties and networking events and frequently hear the same line of questioning.

“People would ask me way before she got promoted: ‘Oh, tell me about your boss, Kristi,’” Plyler said. “She’s young, right? Basically your age.”

And Plyler would respond: “Kristi’s just different. She’ll be the president of the company one day. Like, no doubt in my mind.”

Why? Plyler shrugged at such a question. It’s something he just knew, he said — a product of Coleman’s “charisma” and “ambition” and “knowledge of the organization.”

And where did those traits come from? It’s worth peering into Coleman’s story to find out.

Coleman was born in Gwinnett County, Georgia, but spent most of her childhood in Fair Play, South Carolina. More specifically, she grew up on Lake Hartwell, in a cove with a paddle boat to get around. It was an area that was 15 minutes from the closest Walmart in Seneca, 20 minutes from the closest shopping mall in Anderson and an even longer drive to where “the rich people lived” in Greenville, South Carolina.

She grew up as the second of four children. She has an older brother Paul, a younger brother, Kevin, and a younger sister, Kerry. Her mother, Kim, worked as an accountant. Her father, Chuck, worked at General Motors.

Maybe she got her warmth from her Southern small-town background, something she learned as early as when she was checking people in and out of her neighborhood pool, her first job. Maybe her work ethic came from playing volleyball and basketball in high school. There’s no doubt where her ambition came from, however; it was written into her name: Her parents preferred Kristi to Kristen, she said — but they went with the longer version because “Kristen would look better on a resume.”

Coleman went to Clemson and majored in accounting. Her first job out of school was at Deloitte in Charlotte. She joined in January 2008, and in a bit of serendipity, that’s right when the Carolina Panthers needed to be audited to ensure they were in alignment with the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement. The Panthers, thus, were her first client.

She worked out of the offices in Bank of America Stadium regularly for the winter months thereafter. She would do the same for the organization’s annual financial statement audit, too. That “kind of guaranteed that I would be out at the Panthers’ stadium from January to July every year,” she said — it guaranteed her having funny run-ins with Cam Newton, too, and hearing the gregarious head coach John Fox ask her and her team occasionally: “So, are y’all going to do my taxes for me?”

With the Panthers: ‘Something I thought I would love’

After six years at Deloitte, with a short stint at another accounting firm in the middle of that, Coleman received a Facebook message to join the Panthers. And she eventually did.

It wasn’t a simple decision on paper. She loved Deloitte, after all, and was on track to eventually become a partner there. Plus, as is understood, business jobs in sports don’t come open often; in other words, people don’t leave. Was she content being the director of finance/controller for the Panthers for the rest of her career — even when so much was in front of her elsewhere?

“It was a choice I made because I’d been going to the stadium, I loved going to the stadium, and it was my happy place,” Coleman said. “I loved all the people. I knew what I was saying yes to with the Panthers. It was just, I don’t know …“ She paused. “I wouldn’t call it a dream because I never had dreamed of working in sports, or working for the Panthers. It was just something I thought I would love.”

And for four years, that’s what she did. She worked a lot, she said. The bulk of that work came in 2018, as she was instrumental in doing due diligence for the team’s sale once Jerry Richardson decided to put the team on the market. It was then when she got to know the people from Appaloosa Wealth Management — including its leader, Tepper — pretty well. “They’re financial people,” Coleman said. “They all asked a lot of questions.”

Coleman admitted that there was some anxiety during that process. After all, there were no guarantees that new ownership would keep her onboard. Plus, she was pregnant with her second son, Charlie. (Her eldest son, Thomas, was born two years prior.) But she made a good impression on the Teppers — and her relationship with Nicole and Dave has only grown since.

Panthers, Charlotte FC see record revenue years in 2025

Coleman as “the boss” — as CFO, then president, then CEO — has done a lot. Since 2022, specifically, she supervised efforts in cultivating a fan base in Germany; she’s aligned the goals of the business operations and the athletic operations; and she’s spearheaded the stadium renovations — the Panthers’ fieldhouse/practice facility will be ready to go by training camp 2027, she said, and other fan-facing elements will begin construction starting in 2027, too.

It’s worth mentioning that the Panthers and Charlotte FC had record revenue years, according to a Tepper Sports and Entertainment spokesperson.

The teams added 30 new corporate partners and announced a 10-year renewal with Coca-Cola Consolidated. Stadium events drew people from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam and 77 countries (up from 60 last year) — and that number will only climb in the upcoming years. Think of the U.S. men’s national team’s penultimate friendly against Senegal in May, or the MLS All-Star Game in July, or the full slate of concerts scheduled from April to October, from Bruno Mars to Ed Sheeran to AC/DC.

It doesn’t hurt that Charlotte FC had its best year in its four-year history in 2025. Nor does it hurt that the Carolina Panthers made the playoffs for the first time since 2017.

‘People need to see they can be you’

But her full impact goes beyond her job, her colleagues say.

Take Caitlin Roberts, director of premium services at TSE.

Roberts is a Charlotte native. She remembers going to Panthers games when she was young and seeing several women running around with headsets on and watching them bring a game to life. And when she joined the Panthers in 2014, she loved that her company was represented by someone like Coleman.

“That was so amazing to see,” Roberts said. “It told you, ‘OK, you can do everything.’ You can be this amazing person professionally, but you can also give to yourself and your family personally. And I think Kristi has just always exemplified that.”

She learns from Coleman as much as she can, even from just being in her orbit, Roberts said: “If she’s in the room, you know where you’re going to stand.”

That means being a great leader and person, a hard worker and committed parent, a mentee and a mentor. Coleman co-founded Thrive, an intra-TSE group meant to foster conversations for women in the workplace. Coleman initiated Thrive just as she has many other efforts; before she’d advocated for one, the Panthers didn’t have a clear maternity leave policy, for instance.

She still has reservations. Public speaking, for one. General attention, for another. When asked to take a photo when the Panthers visited the Las Vegas Raiders in 2024 — with Sandra Douglass Morgan and herself, the only two female presidents in the NFL — Coleman at first resisted.

“Sandra and I are friends, we’re great,” she said. “We don’t need to blast a photo or do any of that stuff, or whatever. ... And I think back when we had our first draft pick come through. I was like, ‘I’ll take the photo, I don’t need to be in it.’ And someone said to me, ‘Well, you need to be in the photo because people need to see that they can be you.’”

She added: “And it’s not about being male or female. I would hope that men who work at Tepper Sports, or men who saw Sandra and I, say: ‘If they can do it, I can do it.’ And I do think that’s important. I do recognize that as a responsibility that I hold to be able to show other people that they too can be whatever they want to be.”

That could mean training the boss. That could mean being the boss.

Or, in Coleman’s case, it could mean both.

This story was originally published February 4, 2026 at 5:00 AM.