Dispatch 5
Company Update #5 - Please don't make athletics any more lonely
Jeff Nyquist
From the outside, a college athlete looks like someone at the peak of life. Young, strong, part of a team, chasing something that matters. Robin, my co-founder, lived the inside version. He was a four year scholarship athlete at Temple University. He totaled three minutes of playing time.
Robin was surrounded by teammates, coaches, and training staff all day. But the coach who decided whether he played was also the hardest person to talk to about playing, and the teammates closest to him were competing for the same opportunity. He had no good way to say out loud what the experience was doing to him, so he carried a lot of it alone.
The questions wait until the performing stops
Years later, Robin and I built Sam. With Dr. Liz Taylor at Temple University, we ran an NCAA-funded study across eight universities. One result made us think about Robin’s experience again: 90% of engaged athletes told us they used Sam in bed, with peak usage between 8 pm and 9 pm as they processed the day. That made sense to Robin immediately. We had not designed Sam around a specific time of day, but it made sense the moment we saw it. An athlete’s day is packed with performing: practice, class, treatment, and film. The deeper questions wait until the performing stops. Playing time. Where things stand with the coach. The argument with a teammate who is still sitting there. At night, those questions finally get their turn, and athletes reached for Sam because there was no one else awake to reach for.
As a psychologist and neuroscientist, I know why that need runs so deep. I know how deeply social we are wired to be. Most of the good parts of life happen in relation to other people: a teammate who sees you as a person first, a coach who helps you find your place, a friend who shares your wins and losses.
Often, an athlete just wants one person to know what happened that day. A partner, a parent, a teammate who gets it. Unburdening is powerful. The weight gets lighter when someone else knows, has your back, and is in it with you.
The hard part is getting from wanting to talk to actually doing it. They may not know what they think yet, much less how to explain it. They have to figure out who to tell, when to tell them, and whether they are ready to say it out loud. Finding clarity and the words is one of the great struggles in life, especially when you are young.
At night, all of the day comes flooding back, with even less opportunity to share it. The training room is empty. Anyone in sports knows athletic trainers do far more than tape ankles; they are often the people who best know what is going on inside athletes’ heads. The academic advisor’s office is closed. Calling home can create a second job: managing everyone else’s concerns and expectations on top of your own.
This is not only a nighttime problem. Athletes open Sam on the walk back from a hard meeting with a coach, on the bus ride after a bad practice, on the morning of an exam in a class they are struggling in, and anytime a busy schedule slows down for a few minutes. They use those minutes to sort out what happened and what they want to say about it, so the conversation they need to have with a person goes better. The needs are there all day. At night, there are fewer distractions and more time to think about what happened.
”Please don’t make it any more lonely”
I was talking last week with a leader in athlete support, someone who has spent years working with elite athletes. He told me about a conversation with an athlete about the future of AI in sports. The athlete said, “Please don’t make it any more lonely.”
This athlete said the quiet part out loud. We need to be reminded how common it is to feel alone in sports, even when an athlete is surrounded by people all day. Head coaches feel a version of this too. Leading a program can be one of the loneliest jobs in sports.
It also gets to one of our bedrock beliefs at Journai: real happiness and success happen off the phone, in real life. The phone is an important cause of the isolation. We are all guilty of checking out and even dissociating on our phones. It’s just so damn easy to do. But we all know that all the good things are experienced, not scrolled: At practice, at the dinner table, on a bus full of teammates. A screen is not where a life goes well.
The attention economy points at a nineteen-year-old
Most consumer technology, including much of AI, is built on the opposite assumption. Attention is the asset. Capture it, hold it, grow it. The company wins when you cannot put the product down.
Here is what makes this moment different. A handful of Silicon Valley companies are shaping AI for all of us, and they are the same companies that perfected the attention economy. Everything they sell is framed as optimization: 10x your output, automate your inbox, let AI manage your relationships. We have all opened the note from a coworker that was obviously written by AI. It lands empty, and everyone can tell. That is what optimization does to human things. You cannot optimize your way to connection.
Now point that machinery at a nineteen-year-old alone at 10 pm. An engagement company sees a user with hours to capture. We see an athlete who needs to make sense of a hard day, get off the phone, and get to sleep.
So we built Sam to work in brief, high-value bursts. To hold an athlete’s attention just long enough to find clarity, remember what matters, and decide what to do next in real life. Then Sam hands the attention back. An athlete should get nudged off the phone rather than stuck in it.
I know that sounds like bad business to some people. I think it’s the oldest good business there is: create incredible value for the people you serve, and the business will figure itself out. And the need is not abstract. For decades, youth was the happiest stage of life. That pattern collapsed in the early 2010s, and Americans aged 18 to 29 now report more distress and loneliness than any older age group. By 2023, Americans aged 15 to 29 were spending about six hours a day alone, up 45% since 2010. That is the generation we serve.
Trends like these can start to feel inevitable. Our NCAA study suggests they are not. Among engaged athletes, 73% reported greater confidence in handling challenges across sport, academics, and life than when they started. A more confident athlete becomes more independent and intentional on their own. That confidence changes real decisions. An athlete who can put words to a problem might bring it to their coach instead of quietly heading for the transfer portal.
Trust is the hard part
How they accomplish this with Sam is relatively straightforward. They need time, space, and trust. Time and space are the easy parts, because Sam is on their phone, ready when they are. Trust is harder, and it is the reason a third party matters. A coach cannot be the practice ground for a conversation about the coach. A parent cannot hear a worry without carrying it. Sam gives athletes a place to be unsure, get perspective, and find their footing before they bring something to the people it affects. Even then, trust had to be earned.
We started with a document we call Sam’s Constitution. It names Sam’s values in priority order: safety first, then honesty and trust, dignity and respect, and helpfulness. The order matters when values compete. An athlete’s conversations belong to the athlete. Coaches and administrators do not have access to an athlete’s private conversations. Except when safety is at risk, the athlete decides what to share with the people around them. The narrow safety exceptions are explained before an athlete even begins talking with Sam. Sam reminds athletes of those boundaries over time, because people deserve the dignity and respect to be reminded of the boundaries of the relationship.
The study gave us one way to see whether athletes felt that trust. 85% of engaged athletes said they felt comfortable being honest with Sam about things they might not share with others. Nothing else works unless we hit numbers like this. Hopefully, we will get even better over time.
The midnight problem
Late-night use also means Sam will be there when some athletes are really struggling. People who work in student support know the midnight problem. Campus resources close for the night. Students don’t stop struggling when the offices close. Some students turn to general-purpose AI in these moments simply because it is available. Every athletic department will face this question soon: when your athletes talk to an AI at midnight, and they will, what was that AI built to do? Sam was written around dignity, respect, and getting athletes back to the people in their lives. Most alternatives were built to hold attention, because that is the business they are in. That is why guardrails matter.
Sam is not an open-ended, general-purpose chatbot. We built checkpoints into Sam’s conversations so the guidance stays grounded in what is productive for the athlete, not what is most agreeable, engaging, or entertaining. A separate safety layer checks every exchange for signs that someone is moving from struggling toward crisis. If that line is crossed, Sam starts a handoff to a named person at the athlete’s school or organization. General-use AI can’t do that. Our safety team confirms the handoff happened. Athletes hear exactly how this works before their first conversation, and Sam reminds them over time. We filed a provisional patent application covering parts of this architecture this month.
We are also clear about what Sam cannot do. No lived experience of being cut. No ability to sit beside you on the bus home after a loss. Athletes deserve to know what they’re talking to.
Getting athletes back to the people in their lives
The larger point is simple. Sam should help an athlete get back to the people in their life.
62% of engaged athletes in the study told us they had a real conversation with a coach, teammate, advisor, family member, athletic trainer, or counselor about something that first surfaced with Sam. This is the result that matters most to me. It tells us the work did not stay in the app.
Robin knows exactly what he needed back then. A place to be vulnerable at night, some perspective on what was in his head, and someone to hold him accountable to do the hard right thing the next day. He also knows what he did not need: an agreeable AI telling him his coach was the problem and keeping the wheels spinning until three in the morning. As he put it when he read this draft, ‘I was already doing that myself.‘
A Practical AI Guide for Athletic Organizations
One more update from this month. We spent time at several conferences this summer, and the interest in AI was everywhere. So was the uncertainty about how to use it well. For all the caution in this letter, we think AI is an incredible technology. That is why we are devoting our working lives to building it the right way. The organizations we met do not need convincing that AI is coming. They want help using it in ways that benefit their people while they stay at the steering wheel. And no one building the general-purpose models is calling athletic departments to ask how this should work for athletes. So we did the asking, and then we wrote down what we have learned. Between the three of us, we have lived this problem as college athletes and coaches, studied it across a research career, and spent a career building technology for sport.
So we published A Practical AI Guide for Athletic Organizations and made it free. It includes five steps for adopting AI well and ten plain questions to ask any vendor. Two matter most for products like ours: What are the guardrails, and what is the evidence behind the claims? We put athlete-facing AI in the category with the highest burden of proof. That puts us there too. A general chatbot with a sports logo on it is not a sports product.
If you’d like the guide, Sam’s Constitution, or both, reach out to me at jeff@thejournai.com and I’ll send them.
If this resonates
We started Journai from a simple belief: AI is a powerful tool, and athletes deserve the care it takes to build it right. We now have a rare window to act on that belief at scale. Our NCAA agreement opens the door to 1,100 member universities and more than 500,000 student-athletes starting in January 2027, and international athletic organizations are asking for the same thing. We are raising a seed round so we can meet that moment well: more product and design talent, more engineering, and more people who know sport. If you understand what is at stake for this generation, I would welcome a conversation. And if investing is not your lane, introductions have changed our trajectory before. If you know someone who should hear about Journai, send them our 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
P.S. Vikram Rojo joined us this month as our founding product designer. He has already reviewed nearly fifty customer-discovery conversations and mapped the jobs that athletes, coaches, and staff are asking Sam to do. His research and design skills are already showing up in the next version of the product!