THE FACEOFF 🤼: Rob Thompson & GamePlanU 🎙️

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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2026 · THE FACEOFF · VOL VIII

Watch or listen to Episode 2: YouTube · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

The Third Wave 🌊🎙️

This week's FACEOFF 🤼 puts our second guest in the chair. Rob Thompson has been inside American football at just about every altitude the sport has: an All-American offensive lineman at the University of New Haven, a season of pro ball in England, then the NFL, where he managed NFL Youth Initiatives and helped launch NFL FLAG. After that came an Arena Football League front office, Radio Disney and a run of companies of his own. Today he's the founder of GamePlanU, which builds commercial pathways for college athletes, sports innovators and content creators. Episode 2 of The Coach's Board podcast is thirty-three minutes with him; the links above get you there. Below is the written version, for the people who would rather read on the train than listen in the car: our founder Paul Variano's questions, and Rob's answers trimmed from the tape.

A player, a coach, the NFL, an Arena League front office, Radio Disney, and a founder since you were twenty-three. Walk us through it. What moved you from one to the next?

“I never planned any of it. I was one of those athletes that, when it was over, didn't know what to do. I needed to reinvent myself, to figure out what my new identity was. I was lucky enough to extend that journey by playing over in Europe, and that was such a great education and discovery for me. I played in England, and I got to meet a lot of people over there who were involved with NFL International and do a lot of cross-promotional stuff. It opened my eyes. There is another world out here. Not just coaching as a transition, which a lot of people do, and which I also did, but the business side and how it all connects together.

I went from Europe into college coaching with my old line coach, Tony Sparano, who went on to be the head coach of the Miami Dolphins and the Raiders. I went right into camp at Boston University as a line coach, and I realized I didn't like the day-to-day part of it. But I was in charge of JUCO recruiting, and I fell in love with helping athletes and their families make one of the biggest decisions of their life at seventeen, eighteen years old: where are you going to college? That was 1990, '91. There were no recruiting services. There were the relationships you had with high school coaches, and there was a list in Street & Smith's that gave you the top hundred kids at every position across the country. And I always knew college football coaches don't fly to the Northeast. They fly south and west. So how do I get them to come east?

So I left coaching and started a recruiting agency at twenty-three. It got absorbed by a bigger global agency, and I did summer camps to identify kids, O-line and D-line camps. I ended up at the NFL, and I was part of the team that launched NFL FLAG, the crazy idea of five-on-five flag football for boys and girls six to fourteen years old. I was twenty-four, twenty-five, married with a kid on the way, and I had to accelerate everything quickly. Entrepreneurship was the one thing that allowed me to discover who I was and make that transition from athlete to business leader.”

What are you building now with GamePlanU, and how is it supposed to make youth sports better?

“GamePlanU is really the tail end of what I call the cradle-to-grave life span of an athlete. You start them off at NFL FLAG at six years old. You provide the structure, the fun, all of that. Now they have a pathway into the Olympics and into college, which, when we started NFL FLAG, was never the idea. The idea was psychological. If a ten-year-old girl has kids twenty or thirty years from now, chances are she's going to become a consumer, and chances are she's going to allow her children to play football if she understands it and she's already experienced it. And that has held true. How do you get more kids to play? You put a ball in their hand and you let them compete.

That was the first phase. Now I'm at the tail end of my career, and at the tail end of these athletes, following them along. When I returned to my alma mater ten years ago, I had a different lens from being at the NFL and Disney and Arena Football and private equity, and I brought it to higher ed. I don't want to say I saw it coming, but I understood how far behind college athletics and higher ed are, and unfortunately that was exposed during COVID. A lot of people realized there are a lot of warts in this industry.”

Tell us about those warts. What's the diagnosis, and what's the medicine?

“I think higher education in general has shifted, and a lot of that has to do with social media and what kids think of as the perfect situation. The Power Four schools, especially the schools with palm trees and pools, have become all-inclusive resorts that have education. The ones that have gone all in on academic integrity are now realizing entrepreneurship has to be part of that journey, or at least an option, which it never was before. Kids are smarter now. They know they can take what we're doing right now on a cell phone and monetize it. The entry point to a side hustle or a business is such a low barrier now. So the avenues to making a living are not about workforce development anymore. It's probably thirty percent workforce development, and the other seventy percent is entrepreneurship in some form or fashion, even if it's just a side hustle.

Athletes have two character traits that most people do not have, and that's ambition and grit. You cannot teach it. On your résumé and on your LinkedIn, list that as your experience, which most student-athletes fail to do. Forget the server job, forget an internship, unless you're going down the pathway of accounting or legal or medical. Your experience is: I was a student-athlete for four years. These kids are special in a lot of different ways, but everybody gets stuck on perception, because all they see in the media is that these kids are greedy, NIL, the portal, college sports is ruined. Name, image and likeness is what I did at Disney. They used the same language; you can tell attorneys put it together. It should have been something completely different, like player marketing. It killed everybody's perception of it.

So GamePlanU is there to give these kids permission, but also a commercial pathway and a bridge, to take those ideas and create a new identity and a new value while they're still playing, without taking away from what they're there for: to go to school and to be an athlete. Can I sell my own T-shirts on TikTok? Can I get a licensing deal to do that? Can I do one-on-one coaching with youth sports? Can I create a nonprofit? Five years ago they'd get their wrists slapped for doing that. We're educators. Our job is to get these kids through a career discovery process, because you're going to figure out what you don't want to do long before you figure out a career path that you love. It doesn't have to be about chasing brand deals, or alumni who'll pay me to show up to kids' birthday parties. It's about real career opportunities, discovery through entrepreneurship. As simple as that.”

Who have you watched come through it? Tell us about a founder you've worked with.

“There are a bunch of cool stories, especially with student-athletes. Nick Lord, the founder of NOCAP Sports, is a good example. I met him early on and saw his transition from being a basketball player at Gettysburg to creating marketplaces and revenue channels for athletic departments using alums. The first or second version of his business was just a marketplace connecting student-athletes to brands, and he quickly realized that the kids you think are doing NIL rarely even answer your texts or your emails, let alone promote a product for fifty bucks. But every athletic department, I don't care what level you're at, needs revenue. So Nick created a mousetrap to do that, connecting alums back to other alums and doing referral fees back on products.

Protein Pints was a good one that came out of Michigan State. I saw those guys in the beginning, when they wanted to sell ice cream at gyms. I'm like, no one eats ice cream after you do squats. But it's a healthy ice cream alternative, and these guys happened to be at Michigan State, which has its own creamery. That saved them in manufacturing and testing and recipe development, and now they're absolutely killing it.”

You're in conversations with athletic directors and university presidents now. What's next for GamePlanU?

“Right now I'm working with colleges to implement a track within their innovation centers. One of our pilot programs is with Illinois Wesleyan. We're building out a whole-year program for their student-athletes, with demo days and pitch competitions across campus and across verticals, and I'll be leading the sports innovation track and the athlete entrepreneurship programming. For decades, a student who isn't an athlete has been able to do capstone projects and work on startups with resources and grant money. There's never been that for a student-athlete. Now there is. We'll do some other pilot programs with schools here in Connecticut, where I'm based. Ultimately we'll do a national pitch competition, almost in a March Madness format, in three categories: technology, which is basically AI; performance, which is science and medical wellness; and bold ideas, which is community impact. That's where you put the next five-on-five flag football, the next sport. Our thesis has always been impact in the way we watch, connect and consume sports.

We created a portal called GamePlanU360. There are learning modules and a lot of group sessions, but more importantly, you get to meet people who are in the same space, people you maybe wouldn't have met before. It's a community of educators and athletes and content creators and investors. And the last thing: we're working on an angel network called 1880 Ventures. 1880 is the year American football was created by Walter Camp, here in New Haven, where we're based. Walter Camp was a student-athlete when he created the rules; he was the captain of Yale football. To save the sport he had to create rules like the line of scrimmage, because American football was basically rugby and soccer back then. He was the original athlete, entrepreneur and innovator. 1880 Ventures is going to be an angel network where angels can invest in a lot of these startups, a membership program where they get access to all that deal flow.”

Thirty years in, you see a lot of deal flow. What's being overbuilt right now, what isn't being built enough, and what makes you want to pass?

“This is the third wave I've seen in my career of interest in youth sports. It's definitely not the first wave of private equity in youth sports. It goes back to the eighties and nineties, when Streetball Partners and Host Communications owned and operated Hoop It Up basketball, NFL Air It Out, NHL Breakout. Back then it was more of a traveling carnival tournament business. When we got involved with NFL FLAG, there weren't third-party operators like there are today. You partnered with the parks and recs, the YMCAs, the Boys & Girls Clubs, the school systems. The challenge was that they didn't want to operate anymore; they had staff that turned over a lot. So the league was built with margins in it for a third-party mom or dad or local entrepreneur to grab it and run the program with all of our playbooks.

Then I saw it again in the mid-2000s, right before the market crashed: registration platforms, live-streaming platforms, and the aggregation of multi-market club and travel teams in sports like lacrosse and soccer that were worth a ton of money. Now, almost twenty years later, it's indoor complexes, multisport complexes, academies copying IMG. A lot of those complexes were independently owned, because you get dads at a lacrosse tournament sitting around counting heads and counting parking and counting concessions, and they're like, I can do that. They build an indoor facility and it goes under within three years, because they couldn't figure out how to keep it occupied Monday through Friday, nine a.m. to five.

The tournament business is an unbelievable monopoly. Say I own a club in Albany, New York. I'm going to play in yours in Syracuse and Connecticut and Long Island, but now you've got to play in mine, and we each walk away making three, four hundred thousand dollars. Then I sell it to a private equity group for a million and a half: here are the keys to our storage unit. That's the direction I went later on. I went into private equity, we did a roll-up, and we ended up buying the legendary properties of Hoop It Up, so my life came full circle. The tournament business wore out. Now it's the elite business.

So I see this phase of acquisition and consolidation, and if you don't have any real estate tied to it, I don't see it working. If you don't have housing as part of these multisport complexes, where you can actually house kids, I don't see it, because the money's in the heads and beds.

And flag football is not where it is unless college athletics hugged it, because they needed a Title IX sport, and it's a great sport for girls to play and to watch. Without the pathway to college, there is no Olympics. There are eight million high school athletes and only five hundred thousand roster spots. You've got to close that gap. You've got to go from half a million roster spots to a million, and keep creating sports and opportunities for these kids to play. Why? Because it's proven they have ambition and grit, and those kids turn out to be successful.”

The takeaway. Rob has watched money come for youth sports three times now: the traveling tournament tours of the eighties and nineties, the platforms and club roll-ups of the 2000s, and today's complexes and academies. His test for this wave is blunt. Without real estate tied to the business, and housing to go with it, he doesn't see consolidation working, because the money's in the heads and beds. That's worth sitting with whether you're selling a club, financing a complex or signing a lease. The other half of the conversation is for everyone standing next to a kid right now. The gap he wants closed, eight million high school athletes and half a million college roster spots, runs through your programs first, and his advice for every one of those athletes costs nothing: put student-athlete on the résumé and the LinkedIn profile, as the experience it is. Full disclosure: our founder, Paul Variano, is a member of GamePlanU360, Rob's free online community. Nobody paid for this conversation.

Find Rob and GamePlanU: gameplanu.org · GamePlanU360 · Rob Thompson on LinkedIn

Follow The Coach's Board: YouTube · Instagram · X · TikTok · thecoachsboard.com

LOOKING AHEAD ⏭️

Next Thursday’s FACEOFF 🤼: Skye Eddy, the goalkeeper who was Defensive MVP of the 1993 NCAA Final Four, then stopped working on the kids and started working on the adults, now the founder of Soccer Parenting and The Sideline Project, on what it takes to change the adults on the sideline. Know an operator, founder or coach we should feature? Just hit reply.

Today we're in New York as credentialed media at Sports Business Journal's 2026 Game Changers Conference. What we bring back runs in the editions that follow, credited to Sports Business Journal.

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

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