THE FACEOFF 🤼: Sam Powell & LeadtheGame

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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 · THE FACEOFF · VOL V

Listen to the episode: Substack (video) · Apple Podcasts · Spotify

Look Harder at the Coach Than the Logo 🎙️🏒

Last month Sam Powell was in this newsletter's Coach's Favorites. The leadership coach who reads what an athlete's behavior is actually saying. Last week she flipped the table. She put our founder, Paul Variano, in the guest chair on Locker Talk, LeadtheGame's podcast for the parents in the stands, asking him the questions we usually ask everyone else: what's changing in youth sports, what a family should look for in a program, what a coach is actually for. The episode went out this morning. Below is the part of it built for the people who run programs: Sam's questions, Paul's answers trimmed from the tape, in the same shape as every FACEOFF 🤼 with the honest caveat that this week the founder on the record is ours.

Sam Powell is the founder of LeadtheGame, outside Pittsburgh. After nearly twenty years developing leaders in high-pressure environments, she works with parents, coaches and organizations on recognizing what athlete behavior is really communicating and on building the performance behaviors that improve play today and hold up as leadership later. Locker Talk is her show for sports parents. Episode 2.9 is the one with us in it.

Sam's questions are in bold. Paul's answers are trimmed for length from the recording.

You're talking to people across so many different corners of youth sports. What has come alive for you behind the scenes that parents or coaches don't know about — or should know more about?

"The corporatization of youth sports. It's covered enough in the news, but what I don't think parents realize is that even with Congress passing laws, even if private equity isn't allowed in as much, it's going to be a different type of funding mechanism — public-private partnerships, family offices. One of our first articles was on girls' flag football, and a lot of that investment is coming from professional football teams. The Irsay family, who own the Colts, put $10,000 into every public high school in Indiana to have a girls' flag football team. That's not private equity.

So for the parents saying, we're upset about the way youth sports is going — I don't think there's anything you can do to stop it. What I can say is there are ways to adapt to it. When you're signing up for a team, the thing you have to look at most now isn't the history of the organization. When I was playing, that was everything: what's the history, what's their credibility. There are so many new teams that have popped up across every youth sport in the last couple of years, and at that age you're really looking for development. Where you're going to get development is the coach.

The other thing that's different is kids hopping from organization to organization every year. I played at one organization for eight years. I was with the same group of kids, my parents were friends with their parents — you had this much more feeling of community. So with this corporatization feeling, you have to create more of that yourself: the preseason pizza party at the park with the parents and the kids, the social media account the kids started to throw their videos up. Focus on your kid's development, not necessarily winning, and not on the programs you think have the most credibility."

You've said the coach is the biggest part of player development, and you've now seen it from both sides of the fence. When you think about the non-mechanical skills — confidence, resilience, leadership — what do people need to do to help those grow?

"The role of a youth coach is the technical, obviously, but more importantly it's the life skills you're trying to give them. For me, the most important thing is that you want your kid to fail. You want them to fail. Because adversity, resilience, however you want to bucket it — when you get knocked down, on the ice or the pitch or the turf, how quick are you to get up? How do you look when you get up? And when you do get up, what are you doing after? That's the greatest metaphor in sports. Winning is great. But I don't think you ever see someone who's constantly winning. Everyone goes through some kind of struggle, and if you haven't, you will eventually.

There are so many moments coaching, or playing, where you think you can't win, that you can't come back, and you see different players have different reactions. Those who aren't willing to give in, who play to the whistle. And others who are just, all right, let's get this over with, I want to go home. That works for men's league. At the youth level, it could be a moment in life — losing a job, a breakup, losing a parent or a close friend. What you have to do as a coach is use those moments as a learning experience: who's the person you want to be? Because if you give up, no one's going to want to help you. The more you work, the more people are willing to support you.

Those are the things you can't teach technically. I can't draw it up on a board. It's an opportunity that presents itself by being part of this journey — did you give them the right tools to get through that situation and show what their character is? Sometimes that's helping a kid understand, hey, it's going to be okay. And sometimes, if they're giving up, it's more of the constructive criticism: are you going to give up on your next project? On getting a good grade in school? Everything — the advice, the critique — you try to bring back to some kind of life skill."

What's one thing you hope parents do differently because of what you've seen?

"Parents should engage coaches more. It's just that the way they engage them now isn't the way they should — it's usually a political type of thing, trying to get your kid more ice time. A parent came up to me the other day, and I was actually really happy. She has a daughter who's a goalie on the team. Her husband didn't play hockey, she doesn't know much about goalies, and her daughter had started tying her skates differently, wrapping the laces around the skate. She said, do you know anything about this? I don't think it's safe. And I thought, wow — this parent is not thinking about getting her goalie more ice time. She's thinking about the safety of her child, an equipment question, and she wanted my perspective as the coach who can give that advice. I think of it as a development question for the parent, too.

A lot of parents think they're experts. Everyone — and I hate to say it, my dad is a culprit — tries to get the highest coaching license you can get when your kid's playing that sport. He's a wonderful coach, so I don't want to call him out. But even if you were a great player, the parent might know the technical skills; the coach is so much more involved with what's going on across the sport. I take the licensing. I'm connected with other coaches in the area. We're talking about players. Parents don't have access to that knowledge bank or that network. And hockey is a team sport — even if you're a great technical player, how do you pass the puck with the rest of the team? Are you in the right place when you need to get it? The coach is looking at how that one kid plays amongst the whole team, and that's what gets you to the highest levels, which any parent would want their kid to eventually reach."

It's hard, when you're a parent, to separate your kid from the reality of where they're at.

"For me, I don't have kids, so I don't have any kids on the team I coach. And I think this is really important: getting a third-party perspective on what your kid looks like — what's their ability, where are they going. When I tell a parent something, it's non-biased. Here is the reality of your child. It's not going to make me any more money. I don't play politics. That's what my parents did when I was younger: you get the third party who isn't making money off this to give you that reality check. Is my kid good enough? Is it worth it for me to spend the money? And hopefully that third party can also give you a recommendation of where to go with it."

The game eventually ends for everybody. When kids hang up the jersey for the last time, what do you hope they take with them?

"That feeling of community. In today's society we see so many young people who don't feel like they have a sense of belonging, a sense of identity. The whole point of youth sports is that feeling of being part of a team — and if you play an individual sport, that's your club, or the public court where you're playing pickup. The pandemic changed a lot of that, too. So if you never play again, I hope you still have the desire to be part of a community, because there's value they'll give you and value you'll give them.

Every player on my team, I've learned something from that kid, and hopefully I've taught them something. When it goes both ways you almost have a bond, and you create multiple of those over time. That's community. I still talk to a lot of the people I played youth sports with. Some moved away and went on to other things; we still catch up. I see some of them still play rec league and I like their pictures. And I know people, friends, who aren't like that — who are spending time at home, who don't feel like they can find a community, who don't know where to start because they never had that experience. Some of them didn't play youth sports, where you have to join something. That's part of the experience."

That's a skill.

"Explain who you are, what you do, what you like. That's what you have to do in sports. Every time you step on a field, you have to meet the people you're playing."

The takeaway. Read this as the parent side of your own sales pitch. Every family that signs with your program this fall is being told by a leadership coach with no roster to fill and a founder with no kids on his bench to look past the logo, ask who is actually standing behind it, and find a third party who isn't making money off the answer. That is a higher bar than a tournament schedule and a walk-up song, and it is the right one. Sam's five takeaways from the tape read like an operator's checklist in reverse: keep up with what's changing, look harder at the coach than the logo, sometimes want your athlete to fail, find an objective voice outside the family, and remember that what kids keep isn't the wins but who they shared them with. If your club's pitch can't survive a parent who does that homework, the problem is the pitch.

Follow Sam and LeadtheGame: Instagram · TikTok · YouTube · Facebook · LinkedIn · Substack · leadthegame.org

LOOKING AHEAD ⏭️

Next in THE FACEOFF 🤼: the chair turns back around — the founder Q&A returns, with a builder who's been in youth sports a lot longer than the headlines have. 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.