Episode 0: Start Here

No guest. Just me — who I am, why this show exists, what you're going to get, and who you're going to hear from. Then I get out of the way.

I coach youth travel hockey and I don't have kids of my own, which makes me the only person at the rink at six in the morning with nothing to gain from telling you your kid is good. If I say it, it's true. If I don't, that's also information.

The numbers in this episode, and where they come from:

• American families spend about $40 billion a year on youth sports — Aspen Institute Project Play

• $1,016 per child, per year, on one sport — up 46% in five years, roughly double inflation. The range in that survey ran from $0 to nearly $25,000. Same country, same age group, same Saturday.

• Participation is at an all-time high: more than 8 million kids played high school sports last year, and 68,847 girls played flag football, up 60% in a single year — NFHS

• And yet Connecticut lost 4,611 high school athletes in one year. Asked why, the head of the state association pointed at pay-to-play fees. Kids didn't lose interest. They got priced out.

• The National Association of Sports Officials surveyed 35,813 officials. Average age 56. Nearly 69% say sportsmanship is getting worse, more than half have feared for their safety at a game, and almost 12% — one in eight — have been physically assaulted during or after one.

• One for the coaches: USA Hockey put a stopwatch on a 12U game. Across a full 45 minutes, the average player had the puck for 38 seconds — USA Hockey ADM. That's the whole argument for how you run a practice, in one number.

Who's going to be in the chair: club and program directors, facility owners, tournament operators, athletic directors, coaches who built something kids come back to, officials, the founders building the software your club runs on, and the investors circling all of it. One thing they have in common — everybody on this show has actually run a season. No recruiting hype, no highlight reels, and no takes from people who have never run one.

How an episode works. Three beats, every time. Don't oversell it — the skeptical question, early and warmly. Then what's actually real. Then the last question every guest gets: it's Monday morning and a club director just watched this — what's the one thing they should do this week? If an episode doesn't give you something to do on Monday, I didn't do my job.

The ground rules. Nobody pays to be on this show. Nobody gets on because they bought an ad. Nobody gets published without seeing the cut first. Anything a guest says as fact gets checked before it appears in print, or it's attributed to them by name.

If you run a club, a facility, a tournament, a league or a team — if you officiate, if you train kids, if you run a rec department with four fields and no budget — I want to talk to you. If you're building something for the people who do, I especially want to talk to you. Hit reply on any issue or find me at thecoachsboard.com. I read every email. There aren't that many of them yet — that's the honest part.

Hit follow wherever you're listening, and send this to one person who runs a program. This thing grows by forwarding, not advertising.

The Coach's Board is the weekly executive roundup for the people who actually run youth athletics. Free every Monday at thecoachsboard.com.