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.

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.