THE FACEOFF 🤼: Kate Wellner & Tourney Direct

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 2026 · THE FACEOFF · VOL IV

This week's FACEOFF is a conversation with the founder who pays the forty people behind your kid's tournament and who spent her Januarys reconciling a season of paper checks so you didn't have to hear about it.

The Worst Month in Youth Sports Is January 🥶💸

Every tournament you have ever dropped a kid off at ran on a crew you never saw. Not just the officials, but the scorekeepers, the gate, the parking attendants, the trainer. On a multi-field weekend that is forty people, and every one of them has to be recruited, confirmed, checked in, paid, and in January handed a 1099. Almost nobody writes about that part. This week we found the person who lives it.

Kate Wellner spent nearly two decades in enterprise product at the American Red Cross, Oracle and AT&T before taking over her husband's tournament-staffing side business — he's a collegiate lacrosse coach — and rebuilding it into Tourney Direct: the whole crew in one system, from recruiting and assignments through GPS check-in, direct deposit, W-9s at signup and 1099s filed in January, with an AI operations manager named Teddy working the phones by text. The company says it paid more than $2 million to event staff across 275-plus events in 2025, with Prime Time Lacrosse and the IMLCA among its customers.

You spent a career building enterprise systems at the Red Cross, Oracle and AT&T. How does that person end up building software for lacrosse tournament directors out of South Bend?

"After nearly two decades building enterprise technology for organizations like the American Red Cross, Oracle and AT&T, I never imagined youth sports would become my next chapter. When our family relocated to South Bend, my role in Washington, D.C. wasn't something I could realistically continue — young children, limited childcare, a new area. A few weeks in, my husband looked at me and said, 'Why don't you take over the side business for a little while? It's only a few hours a week.'

It turned out to be anything but a few hours. Within my first staffing season I was surrounded by spreadsheets, handwritten notes, phone calls and endless email chains — spending hundreds of hours just trying to stay organized, not actually improving anything. Then COVID hit. Instead of a side business, I saw a broken operating model. Coming from organizations built on rigor and process, my takeaway was simple: there has to be a better way. That single thought eventually became Tourney Direct."

Was there a specific moment — an 11pm text, a stack of checks on the kitchen table — where this stopped being an annoyance and became a company?

"The biggest was when we integrated payments into the platform. Before that, every event ended the same way: hours of printing, signing and stuffing checks, redoing them for staffing changes, racing to get them overnighted to be on site, then answering 'Where's my payment?' emails. One click replaced nearly twelve hours of work per event. That was the moment I realized we weren't just making life easier — we were fundamentally changing how these events could operate. We stopped thinking of ourselves as a staffing company and started building a technology company that solves workforce operations for youth sports."

Walk our readers through what January actually looks like for a tournament director who just ran a full season. Most of them have never heard anyone describe it out loud.

"Most people assume the hard part ends when the tournament does. In reality, January is when the real work begins.

The first year we handled payments and tax reporting, everything was manual. We had written hundreds of paper checks — roughly 25% replaced or voided. Some people wanted Venmo. Others preferred Zelle. Stipends changed after events ended. Every payment method lived somewhere different.

The week between Christmas and New Year's, when most people are taking time off, I sat in front of a spreadsheet with at least a dozen tabs open, reconciling every dollar we'd paid that year. Who received what, and how? Did they cross the IRS reporting threshold? Did we have a current W-9 on file — and if not, could we even find them, given the turnover in collegiate coaching? Only after weeks of reconciliation could our accountants prepare 1099s. Even then, you don't breathe a sigh of relief: people move, someone loses their copy, someone gave you their individual name instead of their LLC. That clean-up runs well into March.

The irony is that growth makes it worse. That's when we realized the problem wasn't tax reporting. The problem was that youth sports didn't have access to modern workforce infrastructure."

Everyone else in youth sports tech went after registration, scheduling and brackets. You went after staffing, compliance and payments. Why is that the harder problem?

"Registration is exciting because it's tied to revenue. Staffing, payments and compliance sit on the cost side, and historically that's where people have been willing to tolerate pain. It's also harder because you're not managing software — you're managing people. Most of these workers aren't employees. They're coaches, officials, trainers and event staff who work a handful of weekends a year. You can't require them to learn five new systems or download another app. You have to earn adoption by being easier than what they were doing before.

For me, it was also personal. My husband is a collegiate coach, and weekend events are often the supplemental income that makes the difference between talented coaches staying in the profession they love and leaving it. I didn't choose the harder problem because it was easier to build a business. I chose it because it mattered."

Your own line is that Tourney Direct doesn't operate events, it powers the tools. Why does that matter enough to say out loud?

"Because neutrality matters more than people realize. Event operators compete with one another. Clubs compete. Facilities compete. If we operated events ourselves, we'd immediately become a competitor to our own customers. We're Switzerland — the technology layer that sits underneath the industry. That neutrality lets customers trust that their data and their workforce belong to them. We're here to help them succeed, not compete with them."

Once you could actually see the data, what surprised you most?

"How little institutional knowledge actually existed. Every event felt like starting over — the same recruiting, the same questions, the same uncertainty about who was reliable and worth inviting back. Everything lived in someone's memory. Data let us replace emotion with evidence: which staff check in on time, which events pay competitively, where no-shows originate.

We also discovered that many of the biggest frustrations weren't about money. They were about ambiguity. 'I thought I was getting paid $400 for the day.' 'I never saw that email.' 'Am I confirmed to work?' Without a shared system of record, everyone remembered the conversation differently. Transparency solved a surprising number of problems."

The referee shortage gets covered constantly, almost always as a recruiting problem. You're watching these people actually get paid. Is it a recruiting problem or a pay-and-friction problem?

"The shortage is real, and a lot of what drives it goes beyond technology. What we've learned is that once someone agrees to work an event, the experience surrounding that event matters just as much as recruiting them. Can they see their assignments? Check in easily? Get paid the day of the event? Finish the tax paperwork without frustration? Every point of friction increases the likelihood that someone decides the next event just isn't worth it.

One of the biggest lessons came earlier this year. I spent nearly an hour helping an official complete what should have been a two-minute payment setup. I kept saying, 'Just open it in your browser.' Finally they stopped me and said, 'What's a browser? I use my phone to take pictures and send texts.' I realized I wasn't meeting people where they already were. Today, nearly everything we build starts with one question: can this happen through a text message? If the answer is yes, adoption skyrockets."

Our readers are the operators. What's the most expensive staffing mistake they're making that they don't know is a mistake?

"It's not compliance, and it's not no-shows — those are symptoms. The most expensive mistake is treating every event like it's the first one you've ever run. Every season, operators rebuild their workforce from scratch: recruit the same people, answer the same questions, scroll through old texts trying to remember what they paid someone last time. They're throwing away the most valuable asset they have — the knowledge they already earned. Imagine if Amazon forgot every customer after each purchase, or an airline rebuilt its frequent flyer program every weekend. That's effectively how much of youth sports still operates. The organizations that win the next decade won't be the ones with the biggest tournaments. They'll be the ones that build institutional memory around their workforce."

Teddy. Plain-English version: what does he actually do on a Friday night when three refs cancel — and what was the hardest part of building him?

"He's your AI operations manager. He handles the thousands of small conversations that consume an operator's day but don't require an operator's judgment — checking availability, sending assignment offers, answering 'Where do I park?', routing 'I'm running late' to the right event manager. The operator still makes the decisions. Teddy does the busywork.

The hardest part wasn't the technology. I originally designed him around commands: 'Reply 1 for yes, reply 2 for no.' Then people started texting him like a coworker. 'Hey Teddy, thanks for a great weekend.' 'I'm stuck in traffic.' We had built for commands. Our users wanted a conversation. So instead of teaching people how to use Teddy, we've focused on teaching Teddy how to talk to people."

You can meet Teddy yourself — Tourney Direct runs interactive demos for event operators, event staff and clubs running payroll.

There's a real backlash right now against AI showing up in youth sports. Where's the line, and how do you keep Teddy on the right side of it?

"Teddy is there to remove work, not replace people. He's a tool, not a decision-maker. Tournament directors still decide who gets hired. Assignors still make assignments. Coaches still coach. We think about AI as reallocation, not replacement — if Teddy saves an operator ten hours a week, those hours don't disappear. They get spent talking with families, supporting staff, and being present at the event instead of buried in a phone. That's where AI belongs."

It's Monday morning and a tournament director just read this. What's the one thing they should do this week?

"Take one hour and write down every tool your staff has to touch to do their job. The email. The spreadsheet. The texts from their personal device. The scheduling system. The W-9. The payment platform. The paper check.

Then ask yourself two questions: if I were running my first event this weekend, would I actually enjoy this experience? And if I were working my first event this weekend, would I? If the answer is no, that's where to start. Your workforce experience is just as important as your player experience. Growth is a blessing — but not without a foundation to support it."

The takeaway. The referee shortage gets written about as people walking away. Kate is watching the other half: what happens to the people who stayed, between the yes and the payday. An official who needs an hour of phone support to collect a stipend, a January lost to a dozen spreadsheet tabs — none of it shows up in a participation survey, and all of it decides whether the same forty people come back next season. The line worth keeping is the Amazon one: most of youth sports forgets its entire workforce every winter and rebuilds it every spring. The operators who stop doing that — with Tourney Direct or with anything — are buying back the only asset in this business that compounds.

And Kate opened the books to put a number on it — one nobody in youth sports has published before: Tourney Direct's 1099 volume grew 78% year over year, from 561 in 2024 to 1,000 in 2025, with an average annual payout of about $2,200 per recipient, across a range of $300 to $18,000 and every staff type on the platform. A thousand people got a tax form because they worked your kid's games. That is a workforce, whether anyone runs it like one or not.

If January still means a dozen spreadsheet tabs and a drawer of voided checks, run Kate's one-hour audit this week — list every tool your staff touches, then ask whether you'd enjoy working your own event. Then go see what she built at tourneydirect.com.

LOOKING AHEAD ⏭️

Next up in THE FACEOFF 🤼: the University of Maryland hockey player whose dorm-room gear problem became Vapor Fresh — you met the spray in Monday's Coach's Favorites; Stephen Steinberg's story is next. Know an operator, founder or coach we should feature? Just hit reply.

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The Coach's Board by Paul Variano
The weekly executive roundup for youth sports leaders.