Dispatch 4

Company Update #4 - Coaches carry it alone

Jeff Nyquist

The more time we spend with teams, the more obvious something becomes.

Athletes have structured support. Counselors, advisors, tutors, trainers. Sometimes wellness officers and nutritionists. The support still misses them at times, but the scaffolding is there. Coaches have far fewer people to talk through what they’re carrying.

We didn’t expect to find this. We started Journai for athletes. But as we got to know teams and organizations, the issue became really undeniable, and the personal stories were powerful. One coach went to get her hair done over winter break. The stylist asked if she was new to the area. She said, “No, I’ve been here before. It’s just been two years since my last appointment.” She’s so consumed with everyone else’s needs that she rarely does the basics for herself.

The relationship math problem

Here’s something obvious in hindsight that I missed until we spent real time with coaching staff.

Every athlete experiences their coach as “my coach.” Singular. That’s how it feels from their side, and it carries expectations. Each athlete wants the kind of relationship and attention that takes real time. The math breaks almost immediately.

The coach is holding 25, maybe 35 or 40 of those relationships at once. And every athlete deserves the version where their coach remembers what they said last week. Where the follow-up happens. Where nothing falls through.

That’s not realistic. And the cost of the gap is real.

For most athletes, one of the top sources of real distress is the lack of playing time. It’s what keeps them ruminating about a mistake at practice past 1 a.m. It’s what has them seriously thinking about transferring, not just dreaming about it. And it can turn a normal day into a small crisis: getting subbed out, not starting. The reason it cuts so deep is that, to an athlete, playing time is a direct reflection of their worth — to the coach, to the team, to the program, and ultimately to themselves. Left to define that worth on their own, it becomes their default measure of the questions underneath: Does anyone here value me? Do I have a purpose among these people? This is where a coach has enormous power. By counterbalancing, a coach can help an athlete feel like they belong and that they’re still enough — and that takes more than a text after a game checking in on the player you didn’t sub in. It’s the steady, genuine version of that attention that matters.

Some of that happens through old-fashioned trust and relationship-building. The player who mentioned something about her family two weeks ago: Did you circle back? The sophomore whose confidence quietly collapsed after he lost his starting spot: did anyone notice before he stopped talking altogether? The conversation you meant to have on Tuesday that got swallowed by a travel day, a recruit visit, and an eligibility crisis?

But everyone gets the same 24 hours. The coach’s day is already overscheduled, and the load of developing 30-plus relationships is not feasible. Caring harder only goes so far before the math hits a wall.

And coaches are people too. Not everyone is naturally gifted at being a people person; some lean more toward introversion, and none of them were trained for this side of the job. Many wish this part could be handled by someone else. This is the part of the job we don’t hear about until the conversation gets honest. The kind that’s more vulnerable, and far more important to everyone’s success and wellbeing. Coaching is much more than strategy and logistics. The emotional management, the relational logistics, the weight of issues that stay unresolved and unspoken, that’s probably half of what we call development. It gets ignored and becomes invisible because we accept it as unsolvable. We go numb to what coaches are holding. They aren’t only tracking who needs reps and who’s underperforming. They’re absorbing 30 people’s anxiety, family situations, confidence spirals, academic pressure, and relationship drama. Every single day. And there’s nowhere to put it down.

Most of this lands on people who were never trained for it. We spent time with a coach whose teams win consistently. She’s confident in that part of the job: the tactics, the development of players who perform. But year after year, her athletes say the same thing, especially the ones who don’t play much. They don’t feel like they have a relationship with her. She knows it. She wants to be better at it. And she falls into the same patterns anyway, because she doesn’t believe the relationship side is something she can do well. How does someone like that solve it? Right now, there’s no good answer.

So coaches carry it home. They carry it to bed. They carry it into the next morning’s 6 a.m. weight session.

Bonnie

We’ve been talking with Bonnie Rosen, head coach at Temple University women’s lacrosse. She’s the kind of coach every athlete deserves, deeply invested in the whole person, not just performance. She’s also proven this can be a winning formula. She’s in her 30th year as a head coach.

We’ve met with Bonnie regularly for the past year. We talk about everything. She’s the one who showed us the sheer variety of demands. Each day starts with a plan, then turns into a reaction to what happens instead, and the scramble to keep every ball in the air.

What came out of those talks with Bonnie and other coaches was a vision for a support tool for athletes, built around a few simple, high-impact tools. First, the ability to capture everything fast. The message a player’s body language sends, again and again, when they get a coaching note on defense. The conversation you forgot to follow up on, then remembered on the drive home. Sam connects those notes by athlete and theme, and holds them as your memory. Whenever you need it, you talk with Sam about a player the way you’d talk with an assistant coach who never forgets. Multiply that by 30 athletes, and you start to see the effect.

When Bonnie described what it was like to use the prototype, she didn’t talk about features or efficiency. She said, “It feels like a place to think.”

Bonnie showed us that this goes beyond player relationship management. She works with Sam as a thinking partner for all of it. Her coaching philosophy. The tactic she tried in practice today. The new roster she’s building. The last-minute bus she needs to charter. All of it. Sam learns her context, her values, her struggles, and helps her think clearly when the job makes that the hardest thing to do.

The same story, all over the world

Everything I just described was informed at scale by conversations we’ve been having internationally. Over the past few months, we’ve talked with several national leagues and government organizations that oversee Olympic sports in their countries. They’d seen our work with athletes and wanted to talk about coaches. We’ve sat with dozens of their coaches and the leaders responsible for developing them.

What they told us was the same story, on a scale we hadn’t imagined. This isn’t just elite programs. It’s the entire coaching workforce. Grassroots volunteers to high-performance staff. They’re burning out and churning out of the system at an unsustainable rate. So these organizations are rethinking how their countries support the people who show up every day to develop others.

During one of these conversations, one of their leaders shared something that reframed the problem for me. He works at the system level, responsible for how an entire country develops its coaches across the whole pipeline. But on evenings and weekends, he also coaches a small swim club as a volunteer. No staff. No mentorship structure above him. He’s holding context for every swimmer, every parent conversation, every training decision, alone.

He isn’t unusual. He’s the norm. There are millions of grassroots coaches doing exactly this. They don’t have a sports psychologist on call. They don’t have a director of player development down the hall. They just have the kids in front of them, the plan in their head, and the hope that they’re getting it right, one decision at a time.

He explained that what we’re building matters far beyond the elite level.

Something bigger forming

I’m going to be careful here, because I don’t want to overclaim. But I have to share what I’m seeing.

The relationship math problem isn’t unique to coaching. We feel it ourselves — working with coaches, athletes, customers, and the friends of the company who’ve carried us this far, we keep running into the same wall: how hard it is to give everyone the attention they deserve, and to hold ourselves to the standard of value we want to provide. It’s the same problem facing anyone in a leadership position who holds context for many people at once.

The pattern repeats everywhere. The person at the center cares deeply. The relationships are asymmetric, heavy on one side. The system gives them no infrastructure to carry that load. And both sides risk burning out or going through the motions. Mary Kay Ash, who built one of the country’s most successful sales companies, said her secret was simple: she pictured an invisible sign around every person’s neck that read “make me feel important.” It isn’t just a sales principle. It’s how we all get through the day without dread. Not every day will go well, but we can at least feel part of something, contributing to a purpose larger than ourselves. Those connections give us meaning and some resilience.

We’re not building for all of those people right now. We’re building for coaches and support staff. But the architecture we’re creating, a system that remembers what matters, organizes it by person, and helps you show up with clarity, isn’t limited to sport.

I’m not ready to say exactly where this goes. But it has to do with helping people carry the weight for others without being crushed by it, and feeling like they’re doing it well. Helping people be the best version of themselves.

This is why I often say that I’ve finally found my life’s work. This is just so damn interesting and meaningful to me, and it fits my skill set very well.

What I’m sitting with this month

Coaches keep telling us the same thing: “We need something like that for us.” We’ve heard it at Temple, from national sport organizations abroad, and from coaches who pull us aside after we present the athlete research.

I think about the coaches I grew up around. Good people. Carrying too much. No one checking in on them. My mother saw the same silence with families in hospice and spent her career giving them the support they needed. Maybe we’re doing something similar, on a practice field instead of a living room.

The core question hasn’t changed: how do we make it easier for someone to talk about the truths they’re carrying? We just learned it applies to more people than we thought.

If this resonates

If you want to talk with Sam yourself, we’ll send you a link to the beta app.

We’re also raising a seed round, to accelerate development ahead of our NCAA national deployment in January 2027, and to meet the demand we’re seeing from large international athletic organizations.

The NCAA has signed a distribution agreement that gives us access to all 1,100 member universities and more than 500,000 student-athletes. The coaching workforce, in the U.S. and now internationally, opens a second front. These openings have to be handled well. We need capital to build the product these partners are asking us for, and the right people around the table.

If you understand what’s at stake for the people who carry the weight, athletes and the coaches who guide them, I’d welcome a conversation.

And if investing isn’t your lane, introductions have changed our trajectory before. If you know a coach who should hear about this, please send it their way.

If you’d like to try Sam yourself, just reply and I’ll send you a link.

Thank you for being in this with us.

Jeff & Robin