Episode 0: Start Here

Paul Variano Welcome in. This is The Coach's Board, the playbook for modern youth sports. I'm Paul Variano. This is the first one. No guest, just me, who I am, why this exists, what you're gonna get, and who you're gonna hear from. And then I promise I get out of the way. Quick version: I played competitive ice hockey growing up, played through college, and still play in adult league where, to be clear, nobody is developing. We are maintaining. Then 10 years in financial services. Where my actual job was connecting people. Executives, boards, founders, investors. I got good at it. And then I hit a point where I wanted to point at something I actually cared about. So a little over a year ago, I took the thing I've been doing in my free time and I made it the thing. I coach youth travel hockey now. Cold buildings before sunrise, all over the Northeast, watching kids get better. And honestly, watching their parents get better too. Nobody tells you that part. And I don't have kids of my own. So I'm the one adult at the rink. drink at six AM chose this, which also makes me the only person in the building with nothing to gain from telling you your kid's good. If I say it, it's true. If I don't, well that's also information. Here's what happened. In the parking lot, in the stands, in a hotel lobby at a tournament, I kept having the same conversation with parents. Private equity is buying up the facilities. A coach gets banned by one governing body and he's coaching again next season under a different one in the same state because the first one's rules don't reach the second one. A dad who's never coached anything is running an eight-year-old soccer practice with 20 kids and no idea what to do for the next 50 minutes. And everything got bigger. When I played, you scored, and the reward was your dad nodding once from the glass. Now there's a horn. There's lights, your kid has a walk-ups on it, little league. I've loved it. But somebody's paying for that horn. Somebody decided your kid needed one. And nobody's told the parents who. Real decisions were being made about all of it: the money, the buildings, what actually happened. To a kid on a Tuesday night in November, nobody was talking to the people making them. I'd spent 10 years watching the exact gap in finance. Everybody one introduction away from each other and somehow never in the same room. Youth Sports has it worse. The people doing the most interesting work here, running a club, building a facility, starting a company, mostly can't get a platform, especially if what they've built is a product or a service. Nobody's asking them anything. That's the gap, that's the whole reason. Let me put some numbers on there. Because I think most people, including a lot of people inside it, don't actually know how big this thing has gotten. American families spend about forty billion dollars a year on each sports. That's the Aspen Institute's number. Per family, the same research puts it at $1,016 a year on one child in one sport, up forty six percent in five years. Roughly double inflation over the same stretch. Add a second sport, and it's closer to fifteen hundred. And the range in that survey ran from zero to almost twenty five thousand Same country, same age group, same Saturday. Now, the good news. Because it's real, participation is at an all-time high. More than 8 million kids played high school sports last year, the most ever counted. 68,000 girls played high school flag football, up 60% in a single year. That's the fastest growing thing in American sports, and it's happening in your building. But here's the one thing that stopped me. Last year, Connecticut lost four thousand six hundred and eleven high school athletes in a single year, a four percent drop in a record year nationally. And then reporters asked the head of the estate association why. He pointed at one thing: pay-to-play fees. Kids don't lose interest, they get priced out. And then there's the part nobody's covering, which is the people in stripes. The National Association of Sports Officials surveyed almost 36,000 officials. Average age, 56. Nearly 69% say sportsmanship has gotten 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. There's no youth sports industry without those people, and we are running them off. One more, and this one's just for the coaches. USA hockey put a stopwatch in a 12 and under game across a full 45 minutes. The average player had the puck for 38 seconds. 38 seconds. That's the whole argument for how you could run a practice in one number. So in July, I started a newsletter. Every Monday morning, built like the business newsletters I actually read. Short, source, A little funny. If you read Morning Brewer, exec sum, that's the model we're going after. One number that reframes something. We have the scoreboard, which is what happened last week and what it means for you, stuff that's going on, what we're watching, one product we actually like with the price, who it's for, because that's the part that everyone really cares about. And also a drill that you can run on Tuesday's practice if you are a first-time head coach. And of course, one thing to laugh about on the way out. Every single claim carries a link at the moment we make it so you can check our work. Every number I just said to you, you can go look it up. That's the promise and it's the only one that matters. Since July it's grown to more than that. There's a Thursday edition built around one long conversation. There's a Sunday one that's nothing but open jobs across the business of youth sports. Who's hiring? Where to apply? Somewhere in that it stop being a newsletter and it started being a media brand, which was not the plan, but hey, here we are. Operators, builders, that's who reads it, and that's who's in it. Which brings me to the show and to the part I actually want to tell you about. Who's going to be in that chair? Club and program directors, the people who set the fees you're paying and carry the roster doesn't bill. Facility owners, the ones who found out what a sheet of ice or a turf field costs running eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night. Tournament operators who move a thousand families into one town for a weekend and somehow get blamed for the hotel prices. Athletic directors balancing a budget nobody would take. Coaches who built something that works. And I don't mean just winning. I mean built a program kids actually come back to. Officials, we just talked about that number. Somebody should be putting a microphone in front of them. Founders, the people building the software your club runs on, the gear your kid wears, the products on the sidelines. That's a real industry now with real money in it and somebody should be asking it hard questions. And of course, the investors circling all of it because the money is already here and you may as well understand how it thinks. Researchers as well, the people who actually study this and whose work almost never makes it from a journal to a practice plan. And the accidental operator, the parent who volunteered for one thing in September and by March was running the whole league. If that's you, you're exactly who I want to talk to. One thing all of them have in common. Everybody on this show has actually run a season. Nobody's coming on here to tell you how youth sports works because they read about it. No recruiting hype, no highlight reels, and no takes from people who have never run a season. So here's what I need from you. If you run a club, a facility, a tournament, a league, 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, because you're the ones who can't get a platform and that's the whole point. Hit reply on any issue or find me at thecoachsboard.com. I read every email. One ask and I'll make it once. Hit follow wherever you're listening and send this to one person. runs a program. all right, enough for me. Pull up a chair at the board.