We talk to head coaches all the time. They constantly tell us how they help their players grow, handle life, and feel valued. One coach told us it is “easily fifty percent of what’s going on in my world every day. Easily. And when it’s not addressed, it shows up on the field.” Much of that work starts when one of her 35 players asks, “Can we talk?”
Coaches field everything from quick logistics questions to playing time “for the 500th time.” As one coach put it, “We have to come into a conversation being ready to do it well, just like athletes do. And often we don’t know what we are walking into.” Until they know what a conversation is about, they can’t tell whether to drop everything, ask the player to wait, or set aside time to prepare.
Even a good meeting can end with the player taking away something different from what they meant, so the same conversations keep coming back. Over a season, that wears down good coaches.
The conversations that never reach the coach
The harder cases are the conversations a coach never hears. A head coach with thirty years in the game told us about her team captain, who fell apart in an elimination game. The loss cost the team a spot in a postseason tournament. At her exit meeting, the player told the coach she had been struggling with debilitating performance anxiety all season.
The coach had no idea. She described sitting there asking herself two things: Why didn’t I see it? And why didn’t you tell me? In her words, the player’s silence “impacted many other people.” Had she known, she could have gotten the player help sooner and maybe saved their season.
Smaller versions of that silence happen every season, and some of them put a coach’s job at risk. A freshman who was expected to play a big role transfers. Unhappy players take their complaints to administrators.
Knowing someone takes attention
Both stories took me back to the years I spent running my family’s home health and hospice company. In 2007, I moved home to Marquette to run the company my mother founded in 1973. We had more than 100 employees, and I knew every one of them and the names of their kids. For eight years, I wrote personal letters to the people who worked for me.
Each letter made me ask whether I knew that person as well as I thought I did. I learned that kind of attention from my mother. Growing up, I watched her sit at kitchen tables with families who didn’t know how to say the things that mattered most. She believed that being alone in their challenge was the biggest problem. Before they could tell her what they needed, they sometimes needed help finding the words, and enough trust to say them.
I hear the same need in “can we talk?” Often the player hasn’t found the words yet. The player with performance anxiety never found them, and she struggled alone for a whole season. And no coach has time to sit down with every player on a 35-person roster whenever one of them needs to work something out.
Building Sam for Coaches
Coaches have clearly told us what they need: to have “the next conversation instead of the first conversation.” We built Sam to have the first one.
When a player wants to talk, they can start with Sam and clarify what they actually need. Sam can handle small things without interrupting anyone. Bigger ones reach the coach as a clear request, so the coach knows what it’s about and how to best prepare. Players who would otherwise stay silent can rehearse a hard conversation with Sam before they bring it to their coach.
For coaches, Sam is a place to keep track of every player. After practice, a coach can talk through what they noticed, even on the drive home, and Sam keeps it. Before sitting down with an athlete, the coach can see what has changed and what still needs a follow-up. Because Sam works from each coach’s goals and notes, coaches can also trust it to reach out to players on their behalf.
Coaches need help with their own thinking, too. Taking away a player’s starting spot is a hard decision, and explaining it to someone who has done everything asked of them can be harder. Sam gives the coach a private place to work out what needs to be said clearly and what the player should leave knowing about how to earn the spot back. The coach still makes the call and has the conversation. We want them to walk in prepared.
Our eight-university study results came in
On the athlete side, our NCAA-funded study shows what happens when players have somewhere to start. Eighty-nine athletes at eight universities had 1,226 conversations with Sam over ten weeks, mostly between 6 and 10 p.m., when no coach is around.
One player told us that Sam encouraged her to talk with a team captain about a conversation she needed to have with her coach. She followed through, and the captain played the role of the coach so they could rehearse it together. Over the season, she went from being “really nervous to talk to” that captain to feeling she “could go to her for anything.”
She found the words, and someone on her team she could trust. Among athletes surveyed during the study, 85 percent said they could be honest with Sam about things they wouldn’t share with others, and 62.5 percent said something they talked through with Sam led to a conversation with someone in their life.
That is the point of Sam: to get athletes talking to the people around them, and to help coaches be ready when they do. It’s what I mean when I say the future of athlete development is more human.
What comes next
Our Back-to-School Challenge with the American Conference is underway, with student-athletes taking small steps that improve their campus life, like introducing themselves to a professor. We’re launching Sam for Coaches to our first programs, ahead of our planned national rollout in January 2027.
If a coach or investor comes to mind as you read this, an introduction would mean a great deal: jeff@thejournai.com.
Thank you for being part of this.
Jeff
P.S. Journai is one of five tech startups chosen for a pitch contest at the CORI Small Towns, Big Ideas event at Dartmouth on October 29. I’ll tell you how it goes.