The Palm Coast-Flagler Regional Chamber of Commerce appointed John Phillips, the former athletic director at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (and the broadcast voice of some of its teams) its new president after a five-month search and the untidy ouster of former President Greg Blose. Chamber Board Chair Michael Chiumento III announced the appointment in an email this afternoon.
“After an extensive and thorough interview process, we have found the right leader to guide our Chamber into its next phase of growth and success,” Chiumento wrote. “John brings over 25 years of executive leadership experience in strategic planning, economic development, fundraising, and community engagement. His impressive track record includes leading major initiatives at Pictona at Holly Hill and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where he successfully increased membership, secured high-value partnerships, and enhanced community impact.”
Howard Holley, a member of the chamber’s executive board, had been the interim president, reorganizing the chamber’s operations, among other initiatives.
Phillips worked for 27 years in the Athletics Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautic University, from where he graduated and where he’d played baseball as a student, 10 of those years as athletic director.
He spent two years at the United States Air Force Academy and two years on active duty in the Air Force, starting work at Embry-Riddle in 1997. In his years there he saw–and oversaw–the expansion of the athletics department from six sports to 20, with 500 student-athletes evenly split between men and women. He took over as Pictona’s director in the summer of 2024. Pictona is the 49-court pickleball facility on Ridgewood Avenue in Holly Hill. It had opened in 2020, and by the time Phillips arrived, had nearly doubled its number of courts and grown its membership base to 1,400.
“I’ve always been interested in sports marketing. The business side of pickleball was really intriguing to me — to take something and grow it,” Phillips told the News-Journal when he took over Pictona. “It’s a wonderful brand and great facility. Just a really cool opportunity. Also, the opportunity to work with Rainer and Julie was really intriguing as well because of their history. The timing was right for me, for them, and for the opportunity as well. You had to check off all three of those boxes, and here we are.”
After its years with Blose, who had a particularly abrasive style, the chamber appeared to have been looking for a more affable leader to build bridges in the community and build the chamber’s membership. Phillips’s philosophy appears to contrast sharply from his predecessor’s.
When he was asked on a podcast soon before he left Embry-Riddle what tools he would pack in his toolbox, Phillips all but summed up his management outlook: “Pack your patience,” he said. “Pack your patience for people and your patience for dealing with things, because rarely do things go off the way you expect them to. Every athletic event I’ve ever been to, it happens live. And sometimes things happen. Sometimes it rains, sometimes the power goes out. I could go on for days and weeks about some of the things that we’ve experienced over the years. So you just got to pack a good attitude and a lot of patience.
“And I think that goes with even when you’re not an athletic director. Just pack your patience. If you’re if you’re driving down the interstate and the traffic gets in your way, pack your patience. There’s nothing you can do about it. Don’t drive yourself crazy. One of the things we like to say around here is control the controlables. Don’t worry about things that are outside of your control. Be prepared. Have a plan, but don’t stress about the things that are out of your control.”
Phillips added, as another tool for his toolbox: “Pack your diversity of thoughts. Everybody’s got a different approach to certain things, and sometimes, I think, as a young athletic director and even as a young employee, I felt like, ‘here’s the way we’re going to do it, and that’s the way we’re going to do it because I said that’s the way we’re going to do it.’ Don’t be afraid to listen to others’ opinions about all sorts of things, not just how to do something, but just diversity of thought, period. I think that served us really, really well.”
Phillips lives in Ormond Beach.
