Episode 3: Skye Eddy & The Sideline Project — Level-Headed and Sometimes Stressed

A youth All-American out of Reston, Virginia. Four years in goal at UMass and a fifth at George Mason, where she was Defensive MVP of the 1993 NCAA Final Four. Then the W-League with the Philadelphia Freedom, a season in Italy and a coaching job at the University of Richmond. And then Skye Eddy did the thing almost nobody in youth sports does: she stopped working on the kids and started working on the adults. Today she's the founder of Soccer Parenting and The Sideline Project, a fifteen-minute certification for the adults on the sideline, with a goal of a million certified adults by 2029.

This is Episode 3 of THE FACEOFF, and it's a conversation about the people in the bleachers. Skye's thesis fits in four words: most sports parents are level-headed and sometimes stressed. The Sideline Project isn't built for the parent who gets ejected. It's built for the rest of us.

WHAT'S IN IT

• Why she switched. A playing and coaching résumé, and still "I wasn't showing up correctly for my children." If it's hard for her, it's hard for every parent, so instead of calling parents the problem, educate them.

• The goalkeeper's view. Picking the ball out of the net and starting again, and why coaches and club leaders should treat parents as collaborators instead of a burden.

• Supportive, distracting, hostile. Every parent thinks they're in the first bucket. What distracting actually sounds like from the stands, the quick throw-in that steals a kid's chance to learn, and why the certification is a call to action for all parents, not just the hostile ones.

• How it reaches people. A $9.99 certification for parents, a free Team Kit for coaches in any sport, club partnerships that require it at registration, and a course available in Spanish.

• The wall. Investors told her the product wasn't right. She went back to the first course she ever wrote, cut the rest and started tracking the numbers for real. Forty-four thousand parents certified, and she isn't raising.

• A million by 2029. Why the federations will have to come on board, why she isn't making those asks yet, and why the number itself is the story.

• Monday morning. Be curious: for coaches and club directors, about what the parent is actually thinking; for parents, about where the stress is coming from.

• Rapid fire. The phrase every parent should delete from the car ride home.

FIND SKYE AND THE SIDELINE PROJECT

https://thesidelineproject.com

Get certified: https://thesidelineproject.com/certified/

Free coach Team Kit: https://thesidelineproject.com/team-kit/

Soccer Parenting: https://www.soccerparenting.com

THE GROUND RULES

Nobody paid for this conversation. Nobody gets published without seeing the cut first, and Skye saw hers. Anything a guest says as fact gets checked before it appears in print, or it's attributed to them by name.

The written version of this conversation is THE FACEOFF VOL IX, free at https://thecoachsboard.com. If you run a club, a facility, a league or a team, or you're building something for the people who do, we'd like to hear from you.

The Coach's Board is the playbook for modern youth sports — the daily briefing for the people who actually run it.

Instagram · X · TikTok: @thecoachsboard