He grew up in Brooklyn, taught middle school in Brownsville, and watched eighth graders check out at "mitochondria" — not because the science was hard, but because the word was. So James Kelly left the classroom and built LitZone, a sports app for kids in third through eighth grade that sneaks daily reading and math practice into kid-friendly sports news and fantasy football. No ads, no chat, nothing scandal-driven. This fall it passed 5,000 users, almost all from fantasy football, with schools, families and after-school programs all paying.
This is Episode 4 of THE FACEOFF, and our first recorded in person: twenty-five minutes with James, courtside at Brooklyn Bridge Park. A note on the sound: we recorded outside, so the first thirty seconds are a little rough. It cleans up as we go.
WHAT'S IN IT
• The problem in the classroom wasn't biology. It was reading. Everything in LitZone traces back to that.
• Broccoli on the pizza. The reading and the math are the broccoli; the Knicks, a fantasy draft and Josh Allen's completion numbers are the pizza. The sportiest boys, the ones no fantasy novel ever reached, were already reading ESPN every day. LitZone meets them there.
• Same game, leveled by grade. A third grader gets a 200-word story and "eight completions out of sixteen, what fraction is that?" An eighth grader gets a 500-word recap and pre-algebra on yards per reception, all mapped to the standards teachers already use.
• Kid-safe sports content is an open lane, and it's paying. Schools, families and after-school programs; for club directors and after-school operators, a ready-made way to turn the sport kids already love into reading time.
• For founders: slow, slow, then all at once. Backed by Blue Ridge Labs and Camelback Ventures and nearly three years in, James still calls it climbing a mountain without a rope. Then 1,400 sign-ups landed on one Monday in September.
• Talk to your users, not experts. The team built a whole story layer this summer and the kids clicked right past it to draft their teams. Ask "which of these three?", never "do you like this?"
• Rapid fire. The best pizza in Brooklyn, the worst train line in New York, Mets or Yankees, and a LeBron-to-Miami yellow-cab story.
FIND JAMES AND LITZONE
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/litzone_sports/
X: https://x.com/LitZone_Sports
James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-kelly-7357861a1/
THE GROUND RULES
Nobody paid for this conversation. Nobody gets published without seeing the cut first, and James saw his. 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 X, 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
