By Julia Weingartner | Healthcare Leadership Review™ | August 2026
The passing of Hayden Panettiere made me think about a movie I hadn’t thought deeply about in a while.
Remember the Titans.
My favorite movie growing up. And, strangely enough, one of my earliest lessons in leadership. I didn’t know that at the time.
I was a kid watching football, conflict, friendship, and one hell of a soundtrack. And I absolutely loved Sheryl Yoast.
Hayden played her with this certainty that seemed completely unaware she was supposed to be intimidated.
She was a child in rooms full of grown men.
She knew football.
She had opinions.
She spoke her mind.
She didn’t ask permission to be there.
She just belonged.
I admired that then. I understand it differently now.
Because beneath the football, Remember the Titans was asking a much bigger question:
What happens when people who have been taught to see each other as different are suddenly asked to succeed together?
I didn’t have words like diversity, equity, and inclusion when I first watched it. I certainly didn’t understand organizational culture. I hadn’t studied human resources. I didn’t have a degree or professional certification behind my name. I hadn’t sat inside workplaces and watched how hiring decisions get made, how talent gets developed, how culture gets built, or how easily good people can become invisible inside organizations.
All of that came later. But the foundation was already being built.
Human Resources was where I began formally studying people and organizations. I studied it. Earned the degree. Earned the certification.
And perhaps because of that foundation, I sometimes struggle with what has happened to the conversation around DEI. We have turned something profoundly human into corporate vocabulary.
Initiatives.
Metrics.
Committees.
Training.
Statements.
Representation targets.
Some of those things matter. But none of them, by themselves, create belonging.
That’s one reason Remember the Titans still resonates with me. The film places Black and white players on the same newly integrated football team and then spends much of its story showing that proximity alone does not create trust.
Diversity put them in the same room. It didn’t make them a team. That required something harder.
They had to confront what they believed about one another.
They had to listen.
They had to fight.
They had to become uncomfortable.
They had to discover each other’s humanity.
Eventually, they had to trust someone they had been taught not to trust.
Tell me that isn’t a workplace lesson.
HR didn’t teach me to care about DEI. HR gave me the language for something my life had already taught me to recognize.
My relationship with these ideas is personal, too. My mother grew up in Belize. I grew up in the United States with privileges and opportunities she did not have.
One generation. Same family. Very different starting lines.
I’ve never believed acknowledging that diminishes what I’ve worked for. It gives me perspective on the conditions that made some of that work possible.
Privilege doesn’t erase effort. It asks us to be honest about the conditions under which effort takes place.
That distinction matters enormously when we talk about work. Because organizations love the language of merit.
Hire the best person.
Promote the strongest performer.
Reward the people who work hardest.
Those principles sound perfectly fair. Until you begin asking harder questions.
Who had access to the opportunity in the first place?
Who knew the unwritten rules?
Who had someone advocating for them when they weren’t in the room?
Whose potential was recognized before there was proof?
Who received grace after a mistake?
Who could afford to take the opportunity that paid less today but opened doors tomorrow?
Who could take a professional risk without failure becoming a financial crisis?
Who entered corporate America already understanding its language?
And who had to learn all of that while simultaneously proving they deserved to be there?
That’s where equity becomes more complicated than equality.
Equality says everyone gets the same starting gun. Equity asks whether they were standing at the same starting line when it fired.
My family taught me that difference long before HR gave me terminology for it.
There is a moment in almost every organization’s DEI journey when diversity becomes arithmetic.
How many women?
How many people of color?
How many people from underrepresented backgrounds?
Representation matters. It matters enormously. But representation is the beginning of the conversation, not evidence that the work is finished.
You can recruit a remarkably diverse workforce and still build a culture where everyone who succeeds learns to behave, speak, and lead exactly like the people who were already there.
That isn’t inclusion. That’s assimilation. And there is a difference.
Real inclusion asks something much more difficult of leaders: Can someone enter this organization, remain recognizably themselves, and still be trusted with influence?
Can they disagree?
Can they challenge prevailing thinking?
Can they make a mistake without that mistake becoming evidence about everyone who looks like them?
Can they be ambitious without being labeled difficult?
Can they be quiet without being overlooked?
Can they speak with an accent?
Can they come from somewhere unfamiliar?
Can they have a different cultural reference point?
Can they be the only person like themselves in the room and still feel the same certainty Sheryl Yoast seemed to have on that football field: I belong here.
That’s the standard. Not attendance. Belonging.
But inclusion does not mean nobody has to adapt. Teams require norms. Professions require standards. Working with other human beings requires compromise.
The harder question is whether those expectations are genuinely connected to excellent performance—or whether they are inherited preferences for how the people who historically held influence happened to speak, dress, lead, and behave.
Because sometimes we call something a standard when it is simply familiarity.
My career eventually took me from studying HR to recruiting healthcare talent nationally. And that changed my relationship with these ideas. They became less theoretical.
When you are responsible for identifying, screening, and presenting healthcare talent across different markets and communities, questions about access and opportunity are no longer confined to a textbook, policy, or annual initiative. They appear in the work. Every day.
Who gets found?
Who gets screened in?
Which requirements are genuinely necessary?
Whose experience is considered transferable?
Whose career path is considered unconventional?
Who gets described as having potential?
Who gets dismissed because their résumé does not look like the person who held the job before them?
Which candidate gets labeled a “culture fit”—and what do we actually mean when we say it?
Those decisions matter because they happen before many candidates ever meet the hiring team. Recruiters are part of the system through which opportunity moves. That means we have responsibility, too.
Recruiters cannot create an inclusive organization by themselves. Neither can HR. Neither can a DEI initiative. Hiring is a shared system, and responsibility travels through it.
Recruiters influence where organizations look for talent, how broadly they search, how requirements are interpreted, who advances through screening, and what information reaches the hiring team. Hiring managers determine how that talent is received, evaluated, and ultimately selected. Leadership shapes the conditions surrounding both.
That means diversity in hiring requires more than expanding the top of the funnel. It requires discipline throughout the process.
Are job requirements genuinely connected to performance—or are we carrying forward credentials and preferences because that’s what we’ve always hired?
Are candidates being evaluated against consistent criteria?
Are we sourcing beyond the networks that repeatedly produce the same kinds of candidates?
Are accommodations accessible?
Are we examining where candidates fall out of the process?
Are compensation practices equitable?
Are hiring teams equipped to recognize bias without becoming afraid to exercise legitimate professional judgment?
Are we distinguishing culture contribution from the much more comfortable idea of culture fit?
And when a recruiter notices a pattern, are they empowered to say something?
Because recruiters occupy a consequential position in the hiring process. We are often the first human gate between interest and opportunity. That should make us thoughtful about the gate.
It does not mean lowering standards. It means being rigorous about which standards actually predict someone’s ability to succeed.
In healthcare, that responsibility carries additional weight. We recruit into organizations serving communities that are themselves extraordinarily diverse—across race, ethnicity, language, geography, socioeconomic background, age, disability, gender, education, and lived experience.
The goal is not demographic arithmetic for its own sake. The goal is to make sure qualified talent is not unnecessarily filtered out before an organization ever has the opportunity to recognize it.
As a national healthcare recruiter, that remains a priority in how I approach the work. Not because every candidate slate should satisfy some predetermined demographic formula. Not because standards should disappear. And not because the best-qualified candidate should ever be displaced to satisfy an initiative.
But because “we hired the best person” only means something if we were serious about where we looked, who received consideration, and how we decided what “best” meant.
That is a recruiting responsibility. It is a hiring-team responsibility. And ultimately, it is a leadership responsibility.
My earlier studies in HR gave me another way to understand why this matters. Human Resources sits at an extraordinary intersection of people and power. HR doesn’t merely administer employment. It helps construct the systems through which opportunity moves.
Who gets recruited.
Which qualifications become requirements.
How compensation is structured.
Whose performance gets recognized.
Who receives development.
Who enters succession planning.
Who gets promoted.
What leadership potential looks like.
Which behaviors get labeled “executive presence.”
Who gets another opportunity after getting something wrong.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, every one of those systems can widen opportunity—or quietly reproduce the advantages already present.
And bias does not require a deliberately biased person at every decision point. It can become embedded in criteria, processes, traditions, and definitions of “fit” that everyone involved experiences as normal.
That is why DEI cannot simply belong to HR. But HR cannot pretend it has no responsibility for it either. Neither can recruiting. Neither can the hiring team. And neither can leadership.
Culture isn’t what an organization writes on its website. Culture is the accumulation of thousands of decisions about whose voice matters.
Who gets invited.
Who gets interrupted.
Who gets sponsored.
Who gets challenged.
Who gets protected.
Who gets another chance.
Who gets promoted.
Who gets believed.
Every workplace eventually reveals who it believes belongs there. The employees already know.
Remember the Titans is a dramatized film inspired by the 1971 football season at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. It is not a documentary account of school integration, and I don’t treat it as one.
I view it as something else: a story that reached me before I had the language to explain what I was seeing.
Within that story, integration didn’t magically solve anything. Proximity created conflict before it created understanding. People said the wrong things. People resisted. People were angry. Some changed faster than others.
And leadership wasn’t about pretending those differences didn’t exist. It was about refusing to allow those differences to determine whose humanity mattered.
That distinction feels especially important now. Because somewhere along the way, DEI became a political argument when, inside a workplace, many of the fundamental questions are remarkably practical:
Are we finding talent everywhere it exists?
Are we removing barriers that have nothing to do with someone’s ability to do the work?
Are we evaluating people fairly?
Are we creating conditions where different people can do exceptional work together?
Are our leaders capable of leading people whose lives don’t look like theirs?
And are people given a genuine opportunity to belong?
Those shouldn’t be radical questions. They are leadership questions. They are business questions. And for someone whose career began with HR and now lives much closer to the front line of healthcare hiring, they are impossible for me to separate from the work.
And eventually, this brings me back to Hayden. I didn’t know her. I don’t want the familiarity of having watched someone on a screen to pretend otherwise. What I knew was a character.
A little girl standing on a football sideline, surrounded largely by grown men, completely certain that she had every right to understand the game, have an opinion, and occupy the space. I loved Sheryl for that.
Years later, Hayden would describe Remember the Titans as her favorite movie to film and speak warmly about what that period of her life meant to her. There is something especially poignant about knowing that now.
As a kid, I thought I admired Sheryl’s confidence. I’m not sure I understood what I was actually seeing. She belonged. Or perhaps more importantly: She behaved as though belonging was never hers to request.
There is something powerful about that. Especially when so much of organizational life is spent watching talented people calculate whether they are permitted to be fully themselves in a particular room.
Hayden’s passing made me return to a movie I loved before I understood why I loved it. And in returning to it, I realized something.
Remember the Titans gave me an early story about difference.
My family gave me perspective on different starting lines.
My early studies in HR gave me language for what I had already begun to understand.
My career in healthcare recruiting gave me responsibility for putting some of those ideas into practice.
That’s why DEI matters to me. Not because three letters appeared in an HR textbook. Not because a company created an initiative. And not because everyone should become the same or arrive at the same outcome.
It matters because talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Belonging isn’t. And organizations make choices every day that either narrow or widen the distance between them.
Diversity asks who made the team.
Equity asks whether everyone had a fair opportunity to show what they could do.
Inclusion asks whether people can contribute fully without first becoming more like everyone already there.
Belonging is what happens when they no longer have to wonder whether the team was built for someone like them.
And leadership? Leadership creates the conditions that determine whether any of those things are true.
Twenty-six years after I first watched that little girl walk confidently onto a football field, I understand the lesson differently. Sometimes the things we love as children stay with us for reasons we don’t understand until much later.
Thank you, Hayden, for bringing Sheryl to life.
I thought she was teaching me something about confidence. It took me a few decades to realize she was teaching me something about belonging.
Hayden Panettiere and Remember the Titans. Hayden Panettiere portrayed Sheryl Yoast in Disney’s Remember the Titans, released in 2000. The film became one of her notable early roles.
Historical context. Remember the Titans is a dramatized story inspired by the 1971 football season at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. The film takes creative liberties with the history surrounding school integration and is used in this essay as a personal and cultural reference rather than as documentary evidence.
Hayden on the film. In a 2023 retrospective interview with Entertainment Tonight, Panettiere described Remember the Titans as her favorite movie to film and spoke warmly about wishing she could return to that period of her life.
This essay uses Remember the Titans as a personal and cultural lens through which to explore opportunity, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, recruiting, and leadership. The film is a dramatization and should not be treated as a complete historical account of school integration in Alexandria.
The interpretations of workplace inclusion, recruiting responsibility, organizational systems, and leadership expressed here are the author’s editorial analysis.
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