The Coach's Board

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

An All-American on the offensive line at the University of New Haven. A season of pro ball in England. Then the NFL, where Rob Thompson managed NFL Youth Initiatives and was part of the team that launched NFL FLAG. After that came an Arena Football front office, Radio Disney, private equity and a run of companies of his own. Today he's the founder of GamePlanU, which builds commercial pathways for college athletes, sports innovators and content creators.

This is Episode 2 of THE FACEOFF, and it's a conversation about pathways and money. Rob has watched investors come for youth sports three times in his career, and he's watching the third wave arrive now. His test for it is blunt: the money's in the heads and beds.

WHAT'S IN IT

• Athlete to founder. Europe, college coaching with his old line coach Tony Sparano, recruiting in the Street & Smith's era, his own recruiting agency at twenty-three, and the crazy idea of five-on-five flag football for boys and girls six to fourteen.

• Cradle to grave. NFL FLAG at the start of an athlete's life, GamePlanU at the end of the playing career, and why entrepreneurship is the bridge.

• Ambition and grit. The two traits he says athletes have and nobody can teach, why "student-athlete" belongs on the résumé as experience, and why he thinks NIL got the wrong name.

• Founders he's watched come through. NOCAP Sports and Protein Pints, and what each one figured out.

• What's next. Athlete-founder tracks inside college innovation centers, a national pitch competition, the GamePlanU360 community and the angel network he's building. Plus Walter Camp, New Haven and the line of scrimmage.

• The third wave. Traveling tournament tours in the eighties and nineties, platforms and club roll-ups in the 2000s, complexes and academies today. Why he calls the tournament business a monopoly, and why he doesn't see consolidation working without real estate.

• Eight million and half a million. High school athletes against college roster spots, and why flag football's pathway runs through college athletics.

FIND ROB AND GAMEPLANU

https://www.gameplanu.org

GamePlanU360: https://www.skool.com/gameplanu-academy-5140/about

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robthompson78/

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.

The written version of this conversation is THE FACEOFF VOL VIII, 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

Four Emmys. Twenty-five years producing the NBA on TNT, multiple Olympic Games, the NFL and HBO Sports. Six years running brand video at JPMorgan Chase. And then Gayle Jones's daughter — a soccer player since she was five — got cut from the top level of her club, and Gayle knew why before anyone said it out loud: a growing body that nobody was feeding right.

That is where FuelBoxx comes from. Gayle is the founder and CEO. This is the first guest episode of THE FACEOFF, and it is a founder story told without the launch-story polish: the control-room habits she had to unlearn, the pivot she didn't plan, and a category she says youth sports has professionalized around while skipping entirely — "everything but nutrition."

What's in it

• The transitions. An essay about Muhammad Ali's torch got her to the Nagano Olympics. NBA on TNT, then the dream job at Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Then a pregnancy, an NFL travel schedule, and a husband who said "I can't be a single dad" — and a job in marketing inside a bank where nobody thought there was one.
• "It has been a faith walk." Live television is built on perfection: one shot, everything ready. Founding a company is the opposite — you go live before you're ready and let the market teach you.
• What broke. FuelBoxx launched direct to parents. Acquiring one family at a time was the hurdle, so she moved to programs: a school-branded digital storefront the athletic director shares once, and parents opt in. No inventory, no retailing, nothing new on the AD's plate.
• What's actually in the box. Pre-game: an energy bar, pretzels for sodium, applesauce, dried fruit, hydration. Recovery: the same idea plus protein, inside thirty to sixty minutes. Real food, on purpose — built with a sports dietitian, made for a kid, not a pro.
• An eight-year-old is not a varsity athlete. What good looks like at eight (a normal meal, hydration, something small before the game) versus sixteen (bigger bodies, five- or six-day weeks, real attention to carbs before and protein after). Parents shouldn't need a degree in sports nutrition to feed their kids.
• It takes a village. The question for a club director: do we actually have a fueling plan, or are we leaving it to families? For a coach: fueling belongs in the same conversation as sleep and training. For a parent: notice what you're handing them in the car — without judgment.
• The Monday-morning answer, rapid fire (best food city: New York; the broadcast for her tombstone: Real Sports; the concession-stand item that should be illegal: fake cheese on nachos), and where the Emmys live — and why she keeps them close.

Find Gayle and FuelBoxx: fuelboxx.com · Instagram @fuelboxx · FuelBoxx on LinkedIn · Gayle Jones on LinkedIn

If you run a club, a facility, a league or a team — or you're building something for the people who do — hit reply on any issue or find me at thecoachsboard.com. Follow the show wherever you're listening, and send this one to the athletic director who's still ordering Gatorade powder by the tub.

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.

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.