THE FACEOFF 🤼: Pull Up a Chair at the Board 🎙️

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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 · THE FACEOFF · VOL VI

Watch or listen to Episode 0: YouTube · Spotify · thecoachsboard.com/faceoff

The Best Conversations Were Happening Off the Page 🗣️

This week's FACEOFF 🤼 has nobody in the chair but us. The Coach's Board is now a podcast. Episode 0 is seven minutes of our founder, Paul Variano, alone in front of a camera. It's up now; the link above gets you there. Below is the written version, in the shape of every FACEOFF, because the rules don't change when the subject is us.

Paul Variano played competitive ice hockey through college and still plays in an adult league where, he would like it noted, nobody is developing. He spent a decade in financial services connecting executives, boards, founders and investors, then pointed that at the thing he'd been doing in his free time: he coaches youth travel hockey now.

Cold buildings, before sunrise, all over the Northeast. He doesn't have kids of his own, which makes him the one adult at the rink at six a.m. who chose this, and the only person in the building with nothing to gain from telling you your kid is good.

The three beats below are the ones every FACEOFF runs. This week we're running them on ourselves.

Don't oversell it. Nobody was waiting for another podcast. We know. This one is a single conversation a month to start, recorded by one person with no producer. It gets more frequent. If it isn't, you'll hear that from us before you hear it from anyone else. What it will never be: recruiting hype, highlight reels, or takes from people who have never run a season.

What is real. The reason is the gap. In the stands, in the parking lot, in a hotel lobby at a tournament, the same conversation keeps happening. Private equity is buying up the facilities.A coach gets banned by one governing body and is coaching again next season under a different one. A dad who has never coached anything is running twenty eight-year-olds at a soccer practice with no idea what to do for the next fifty minutes. Real decisions are being made about all of it, the money, the buildings, what happens to a kid on a Tuesday night in November and nobody is talking to the people making them. "The people doing the most interesting work in youth sports running a club, building a facility, starting a company mostly can't get a platform," Paul says on the episode. "Especially if what they've built is a product or a service. Nobody's asking them anything."

So: one conversation an episode with somebody who actually runs this game. Club directors. Facility owners. Tournament operators. Coaches who've built something that works. Athletic directors. Officials. The researchers studying all of it. The founders building the software and the gear every one of those people runs on — because that is an industry now too, and somebody should be asking it hard questions. And the investors circling all of it. The people holding the budget and the practice plan at the same time.

Every episode runs the three beats you are reading right now — don't oversell it, what is real, the takeaway — and every guest gets the same last question: it's Monday morning, a club director just watched this what's the one thing they should do this week?

You've met the first three in print. Kate Wellner, who built the back office for tournament directors. Carlos Rivera, who built the marketplace for the school gym nobody uses on Tuesday. Ian Babcock, 180-plus episodes into asking club directors the questions parents are too polite to ask. In the chair next week: a four-time Emmy-winning sports television producer who left the NBA and the Olympics to build a fueling company for youth athletes.

The takeaway. Two things, and both take a minute. Hit follow wherever you listen, then send this to one person who runs a program. And if you run a club, a facility, a tournament, a league, a team or you're building something for the people who do hit reply. We want you in the chair. The whole point of this show is that nobody's asking you anything. We are.

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

LOOKING AHEAD ⏭️

Next in THE FACEOFF 🤼: the first guest episode. Gayle Jones — four Emmys, twenty-five years producing the NBA, the Olympics and the NFL — on why she left television to sell game-day fuel to youth programs, and what broke when she tried selling it to parents first. 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.