Paul Variano: Welcome in. This is The Coach's Board, the playbook for modern youth sports. I'm Paul Variano. Every episode we sit down with someone who actually runs this game. My guest today has been inside American football at just about every altitude the sport has. As a player, an NCAA All-American offensive lineman and a Hall of Famer at the University of New Haven, Go Chargers, with the New England Patriots camp in a season of pro ball in England after that. As an executive, he ran NFL Youth Initiatives and helped take NFL FLAG around the world in the nineties. He was there lighting the fuse 25 years ago. He's been a general manager in the Arena Football League. An executive at Radio Disney. He started his first business at 23, Today, he is the founder of GamePlanU, where he builds commercial pathways for college athletes, sports innovators, and content creators. Rob Thompson, welcome to The Coach's Board.

Rob Thompson: Thank you.

Paul Variano: Thank you for coming on. We are incredibly grateful and excited for you being one of our very first guest for our Faceoff segment, one-on-one conversation with founders and leaders of the game. Rob, your journey over the last twenty-five years has been incredible, why don't you walk us through it?

Rob Thompson: I never planned any of it. I was just one of those athletes that when it was over I didn't know what to do. I needed to reinvent myself. I needed to figure out what's my new identity. But I was lucky enough to extend it, that journey by playing over in Europe. That was such a great educational and awareness and discovery for me of not only I got to extend another year, which is fun and I never expected it but I got to meet a lot of people over there that were involved with NFL International. Because the year I was there was between the World League and NFL Europe. I played in England where the NFL headquarters was in London and we are able to play, two seasons and it was just a lot of football, but I get to meet a lot of people, do a lot of cross promotional stuff. And it opened my eyes. It was about the discovery, there is another world out here. Not just coaching as a transition, which a lot of people do, which I also did. But it was more about the business side and how it all connects together. That was the first step of my eye opening. Then I went into college coaching. I went from Europe over to college coaching with my old line coach, Tony Sparano, who went on to be the head coach of the Miami Dolphins and the Raiders. He said, Hey, get your butt over here once you're done playing, once you're done over there messing around. And I went right into camp at Boston University as a line coach and I realized I didn't really like it. I didn't like the day to day part of it. I was just burnt out mentally and I don't know if I was ready to come off a twenty two game season right back into a college season and the grind of that. Probably had a lot to do with it. But again it was part of my transition from being an athlete into the the business side of it. it was painful. Where do I fit in? How do I fit in? then I was in charge of JUCO recruiting and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with helping athletes and their families make one of the biggest decisions of their life at seventeen, eighteen years old was where are you going to college? I loved that part of it. At that time that was nineteen ninety, ninety one. There was no recruiting services. There was no national recruiting service. There was just relationships you had as high school coaches. And there was a list out Street & Smith's. So give you the top ten or the top hundred kids at every position. Across the country. That was it. I'm like, how else are you gonna supposed to find these players? So I started my first company then. I left coaching and I said, I want to try, I'm gonna start this recruiting. I'm gonna find these diamonds in the rough. Especially I always knew college football coaches don't fly to the northeast. They fly south and west. So how do I get them to come east? Unless you're recruiting, the Ivy League kids how else do you find them? I started a recruiting agency at twenty three years old. It quickly got absorbed by a bigger global agency called Athletes Inc. then from there I did summer camps to identify kids, O line, D line camps. I bundled this recruiting camp business and I ended up at the NFL during their Play Football initiative, which is nineteen ninety four, it's a long time ago, it was thirty two years ago. I was part of the team that launched NFL FLAG, the crazy idea of the NFL FLAG five on five flag football for boys and girls six to fourteen years old. I was part of that initiative and then from there it just launched. I figured out I love helping athletes, whether it's their career development or whether it's something in their life that will help them, discover who they are and utilizing sports to do that. I was twenty-four, twenty-five years old, married with a kid on the way, I had to accelerate everything quickly. Entrepreneurship was the one thing that allowed me to discover who I was and make that transition from athlete to business leader.

Paul Variano: I think so many elements of sports in itself prepared you for each one of those transitions. I always think about youth sports and whether you're starting on a new team and a new organization, there's relationships that can help you from previous ones, but there's also opportunity to make new relationships in the new opportunities that are presented to you. You're definitely someone who's taken advantage of each one of those opportunities. A little bit more about what you're building now with GamePlanU. What is it, what you're working on, and how is it supposed to better the youth sports community?

Rob Thompson: GamePlanU you is the tail end of I call it the cradle to grave life span of an athlete. You start them off at NFL FLAG at six years old, you provide the structure, the fun, you've provide all that part of it. Now they have a pathway into the Olympics and into college, which when we started NFL FLAG, that was never the idea. It was psychological if a ten year old girl twenty years from now, thirty years from now has kids, chances are she's gonna become a consumer and chances are she's gonna allow her children to play football if she understands it and she's already experienced it. That has held true. It was always, how do you get more kids to play? You put a ball in their hand and you let compete against it. that was the first phase. Now I'm at the tail end of my career. I'm at the tail end of these athletes from what I said before, the cradle to grave, following them along there. It's kind of morbid, but that was a slang back then. That's how he described it. We want to finish that part out. What I realized when I returned to my alma mater ten years ago, and I had a different lens from being at the NFL and Disney and Arena Football and Private Equity, I had a different lens that I brought to higher ed. This is prior to everything being disrupted now. I don't wanna say I saw it coming, but I understood how far behind college athletics and higher ed is and it's unfortunately is exposed during COVID. I think a lot of people realize there's a lot of warts in this industry.

Paul Variano: Tell us about what some of these warts are. It's hard to find them sometimes on the bottom of the foot. You sometimes need a doctor to help fix it as well. I'd love to hear more about the diagnosis what's the remedy, the medicine that we could take potentially.

Rob Thompson: I think higher education in general has shifted. A lot had to do with social media and what kids think of the perfect situation. There's a couple pieces of it. I think the Power Four schools, especially the schools with palm trees and pools, I think they've become all inclusive resorts that have education. I think the other ones that have gone all in on the academic integrity are now realizing that they have to go all in on entrepreneurship. It has to be part of that journey or an option, which it never was before. I think kids and students are smarter now, knowing that they can use what we're doing right now on a cell phone and monetize that. The entrance point into starting a side hustle or business, it's such a low barrier now financially. It just takes attention and execution and a really good idea, or you can follow what other people are doing. So I think the avenues to making a living are not about workforce development anymore. It's probably thirty percent workforce development and the other seventy percent is entrepreneurship in some form or fashion, or even if it's just a side hustle. I think the infusion of immigrant families and What I have found that immigrant children all are used to growing up with parents that are entrepreneurs that are hustling, And they're in the service industry or they're they're trying because that's the world they came from and they don't know any other way. So their children watch and work and learn. Some go the other distance I want to use my brain. I want to be a doctor, 'cause that's what they think they should be. Then there's other ones that are coming up and they're We're just I grew up blue collar, this is what I know. Building those pathways for students has completely changed since COVID, has accelerated it. five years ago there was probably 130 to 140 innovation entrepreneurship centers on college campuses. Now there's over 400 of them. the warning signs went up. It wasn't necessarily the enrollment cliff that they claim it to be. they never adjusted to what the students want. There's 500 schools that went out of business in the last 10 years. 500. Only 10 of them had football. The school with the most student athletes on their campus is what school, Paul, for 10 points?

Paul Variano: The University of Michigan would be my guess.

Rob Thompson: Harvard.

Paul Variano: Wow. sh and I'm sure you're well aware, Rob, that Harvard has the largest endowment for college universities and I wanna say it's a little north of fifty billion.

Rob Thompson: Yeah. There's a lot to that. There's a lot to unpack there, what does Harvard know that everybody else is following, they know that student athletes are high performers. They know that student athletes at the end of the day give more they're closer to the university and thankful for their experience at the university. There's your giving and returning to campus. But also athletes have two character traits that most people do not have. That's ambition and grit. Those two right there. You cannot teach it. They know that every one of those 1300 student athletes at Harvard and at Yale, and the list goes on, all have ambition and all have grit. That's why when I look at how do you place these pathways for these student athletes now On a course for maximizing what their two traits are, ambition and grit. And that's why 90% of female executives are former college athletes. There's something there that a lot of people don't talk about. On your resume and on your LinkedIn account, which most student athletes fail to do is list that as their experience. Forget the server, forget an internship, unless it's like you're going down the pathway of accounting or legal or medical. Your experience is that I'm a student athlete. I was a student athlete for four years. I was one of five percent of high school athletes. There's over eight million of them. there's only five hundred thousand roster spots, which people don't know that these schools do not have unlimited roster spots, you only have five hundred thousand roster spots, a half a million compared to eight million at play high school. So these kids are five percent. Five percent of college students and they're the higher performers and they have a higher grade point average across the board, It's just facts. What most people think about when they think about student athletes in entrepreneurship, which they get wrong, is that they think about football and basketball players. That's where they automatically go to and they get stuck there. They get stuck of, are those kids even going to go? Do they even go to class? It's the arrogance and the ignorance. That's what it is. These kids are special in a lot of different ways, but everybody gets stuck under perception because that's all they see in the media. These kids are greedy, the NIL, the portal, college sports is ruined, for growth in any business that you go through, you're gonna have this bumpy road. You're gonna have this resistance and people are gonna create a narrative because they read about it, they look at it, and they see what they what they see on social media, these talking heads who never worked in college athletics, who were never athletes, who were never coaches, were never administrators, they're making up assumptions in their head of what they're reading. Anybody could do that. Be on the other side of the table and understand where it came from, the purpose of what it was for, for NIL, Giving these kids the permission to explore entrepreneurship as a viable career option. It was in their minds, the NCAA, these kids should get a little piece of that t-shirt that they sold at the bookstore. That's how they explained it when we sat on those calls with the NCAA and their conferences. They're gonna get a little piece of the licensing deals. They're gonna be able to have a YouTube channel. That was their knowledge of it, Name image and likeness is what I did at Disney when I signed, the Jonas Brothers to be an on-pack for GoGo squeeZ. That was a name, image, and likeness deal. They use the same language. You can tell attorneys put together, It should have been something completely different. It should have been like player marketing. Something in those lines. Not name, image, and likeness. It killed it, it just killed everybody's perception of it. So GamePlanU is to provide this pathway to give these kids. More of a permission but a commercial pathway and a bridge to take those ideas to help them create a new identity, a new value when they're still playing that doesn't disrupt their day or take away from their focus on doing what they're there for, to go to school and to be an athlete. This gives them that extra little side hustle, hey, can I sell my own t shirts on TikTok? Can I get a licensing deal to do that? Can I do one on one coaching with youth sports? Can I create a nonprofit organization? Five years ago they get their wrists slapped for doing that. They could be in violation of NCAA rules. We're educators. Our job is to get these kids to figure out and go through a career discovery process. And up until this point, just like myself, in nineteen eighty nine, I Got my diploma and kicked out the door, and they don't want to know you until you stroke back a check for a donation. You're on your own. Luckily I was able to expand that, I had that extra year to figure it out, to be over in Europe, to look around, to go through that discovery process because you're going to figure out what you don't want to do long before you figure out a career path that you love. for a lot of people, it takes four to five years after college, If you have an idea, you go down a career track and God forbid you run into a bad boss or a bad business and That's it, I'm out of here. I gotta go do something else. You automatically go back to I want to work in sports again. I want to be in sports, how do I get there? It's too late sometimes. GamePlanU is the pathway, the bridge that we're building right now. I started GamePlanU ten years ago. Up until this point, because of NIL, it has now opened the eyeballs of administrators. presidents of school, athletic directors to say maybe there's another way that we could add value to the kids' experience at our school. And it doesn't have to be about chasing brand deals or alumni that's gonna pay me to show up to kids' birthday parties. It's gonna be about real career opportunities, discovery through entrepreneurship, as simple as that.

Paul Variano: have there been any stories that you could tell us? any individual that you've worked with recently?

Rob Thompson: bunch of cool stories, especially with student athletes. Nick Lord, who was the founder of NOCAP Sports, is a good example and meeting him earlier on and seeing his transition from being a basketball player at Gettysburg and pivoting over to, creating marketplaces and revenue channels for athletic departments utilizing alums the first version or the second version of his business was just a marketplace for student athletes connecting them to brands and quickly realized that number one, the kids that you think are doing NIL, student athletes rarely even answer your texts or, your emails or let alone, promote a product for fifty bucks. I think people are slowly realizing that, especially brands. but the solution is every university, I don't care in athletic department, I don't care what level you are at, they need revenue. Nick created a mousetrap to do that and a pathway to do that, connecting alums back to other alums and doing referral fees back on products and shipping or whatever. Nick was one of them that he's just a great guy. I'm really happy for him. there's a couple other ones. Protein Pints was a good one that came out of Michigan State. those guys I seen them in the beginning where they wanted to sell ice cream at gyms. I'm like, no one eats ice cream after you do squats, but it's a healthy alternative, healthy ice cream alternative if there is. these guys just happen to be on Michigan State that has their own creamery. it's saved them in manufacturing and testing and recipe development. now they're in, five thousand, ten thousand stores with Walmart and Costco and Target, and they're just absolutely killing it now. there's Book It, Book It with Trent. we met Trent. and Nick Yale who are two different startups. Trent was more about one on one gambling. he came from TCU and it was more one on one betting between the fraternities and parlays and the shtick on him was that anything he bet on usually lost. he leaned into that and created this whole social media phenomenon with betting one on one we put these two guys together at our sports business down at the Pro Bowl, right before COVID. and Trent is doing great right now. Book It Sports and Book It with Trent. those are a couple of examples of folks that came through. there's a bunch of but those are ones that probably people may have heard of. right now working with colleges to implement a track within their innovation centers is what I'm doing. one of our pilot programs is with Illinois Wesleyan. we're building out a whole year program for their eight hundred student athletes, which is a lot too. we're building that pathway for them. we're gonna be doing demo days and pitch competitions that are going to be across campus and across verticals, so different tracks. I'll be leading the sports innovation track in the athlete entrepreneurship programming. giving them exposure, giving us student athletes exposure to opportunities like a normal non-student athlete they could do capstone projects for decades they've been able to work on entrepreneurship startups with resources and grant money. There's never been that for a student athlete. Now there is. a prototype program we're doing at Illinois Wesleyan and some other pilot programs we're going to do with schools here in Connecticut where I'm based. ultimately we'll do a national pitch competition and a national championship almost in a March Madness format. it's going to be based on three different categories technology, basically AI, performance, which is science, it's medical wellness, overall athlete performance. And the last one is bold ideas, is community impact. that's where you put the next five on five flag football. That's where put the next sport, the next idea that connects it. our thesis has always been impact in a way we watch, connect and consume sports. anything that falls into that is really what we're looking for. yes we're gonna expand it, we're gonna scale it. we are piloting it in the school. this is the first time we've worked directly with this school. It's always been independent working with sport, always had a champion somewhere at a college. whether it was a sport management program or an AD or a president or the innovation. you always got a trickling of ideas and wasn't always student athletes, it was anybody. But now it's a focus on student athletes. and that's what we're doing. So we created a portal. It's called GamePlanU 360. in there there's learning modules, there's a lot of group sessions, but more importantly, you get to meet people who's out there who's in the same space where maybe you wouldn't have met her before. created this community of educators and athletes and content creators like yourself, And investors. and we're working on an angel network. called 1880 Ventures and 1880 is the year that American football was created by Walter Camp here in New Haven where we're based. Walter Camp was a student athlete when he created the rules. he was the captain of Yale football. to save the sport he had to create these rules that was a line of scrimmage because American football was basically rugby and soccer back then. line of scrimmage, first down all the rules that we know today. Walter Camp did that in 1880 as a student athlete. he's kind of the original innovator in all of this. He's also the guy that created the NCAA. He was also the first athletic director. He created physical education classes in 1917 for World War One. that was ultimately into the public schools. the impact that Walter Camp had on the NCAA college athletes, he was the original athlete, entrepreneur and innovator. that's an homage a little tip of the cap to Walter Camp here in the same town that I grew up in. 1880 Ventures is going to be an angel network where angels could invest in a lot of these startups. and it's a membership based program where they get access to all that deal flow, annually.

Paul Variano: being 30 years in the sports industry, I'm sure you come across a lot of great ideas. talk with a lot of different investors. curious about the deal flow and your perspective, what do you think is is being overbuilt right now?

Rob Thompson: this is the third wave that I've seen in my career with I guess you could say youth sports, the interest in youth sports. this is definitely not the first wave of private equity in youth sports. This goes back to the days where Streetball Partners, Host Communications, owned and operated, Hoop It Up basketball, NFL Air It Out, NHL Breakout. this goes back to the eighties and nineties. it's been around for a while. back then it was definitely a grassroots, more of a traveling carnival tournament business for youth and adults. at the same time when we got involved with NFL FLAG, there wasn't the third party operators as there are today. it was you did a grassroots program. You partnered with the Parks and Recs, the YMCAs, the boys and girls clubs, the school systems, you had a true partnership, but they had it operated for you. Well what the challenge was They didn't want to operate anymore, they were tired. they had staff that would turn over a lot and became very challenging to keep any consistency. ultimately what's we started seeing popping up was and the way that the the league was formatted was it was built for with margins in it for a third party mom or dad or local entrepreneur to grab it and run the program with all of our playbooks. here's our playbook, here's how to do it. We don't want you to do practices. It's definitely non contact. And you're catching leagues that were all full contact I saw that in the mid nineties when we started NFL FLAG. for ten years I set up pretty much every league in the United States and have unbelievable, crazy, wild stories But that was the first tranche, of that. Then I saw it again right before the market crashed thousand eight, two thousand nine, so then I started seeing technology pop up with registration platforms, live streaming platforms, the aggregation of these club sports that started popping up, like lacrosse and soccer. There are these multiple sports, multiple market club sports teams, travel teams that were popping up that were worth a ton of money and they started aggregating them. now mid two thousands. you flash forward almost twenty years later now you're seeing a different type. you're seeing these indoor complexes you're seeing these multiple sports complexes. you're seeing these academies, copying IMG. it's easier to live stream and aggregate live streaming, obviously through content creation and content creator ecosystems. it's just shifting its attention. a lot of it happened when a lot of these multiple sports complex were opened up, a lot of them were independently owned because you get dads at a lacrosse tournament sitting around counting heads and counting parking and counting concession. They're like, I can do that. And they failed. And they then they build an indoor facility and it goes under within three years because they couldn't figure out how to keep it occupied Monday through Friday, nine a.m. to five. then more sophisticated organizations came around and understood the financing, the P3s, the partnerships with the cities, partnerships with the universities, they figured out the model, partnerships with mixed use, That was all happening twenty years ago. Now you're sitting here and now it's a vanity play. It's the same thing. Private equity wants to come in, they want to aggregate everybody together, they wanna put under one roof. They've already aggregated enough of baseball and soccer and they were easy to do because there was a lot of club teams that guys had started it twenty years ago, which were mostly all retired coaches, They figured it out the tournament business. it's a unbelievable monopoly. Like I own a club in Albany, New York. I'm gonna go play in yours in Syracuse and in Connecticut and Long Island, but now you've got to play in mine and we're gonna each walk away making three, four hundred thousand dollars and that supplements our teaching and yeah, then I'm gonna sell it. To a private equity group for a a million and a half. And here you go. Here's the keys to our storage unit. And that's the direction I went later on. I went into private equity. we did a roll-up? We ended up buying the legendary properties of Hoop It Up 300 basketball. my life came full circle, the tournament business wore out. Now it's the elite business, So anyway, so I I see this tranche, I see this phase of acquisition and consolidation. if you don't have any real estate tied to it or part of it, I don't see it working. I don't think if you don't have housing as part of these multiple sport complexes where you could actually house kids and make 'cause the money's in the heads and beds. I see some of these lower level soccer teams over in Europe. it used to be you go you buy a minor league baseball team if you owned a car dealership in town, Or you had a series of car dealerships, now these same guys want to have access to buy a pro soccer team because they watch Welcome to Wrexham, they're vanity plays for most people 'cause they want to be in sports. They think it's a cool unbelievable industry to be in. But if you don't know what you're doing if you've never been in it before, it's a quick crash and burn because the majority of these teams don't make money. I don't care what level you're at. now the infusion of private equity into college athletics, it's not the first time. Private equity has been involved in college campuses. How do you think these buildings get built? How do you think the apartments are built in the bars and restaurants in these neighborhoods been being built for the last fifty years. It's all private equity. It saves the school the money to have to put out and the funding for it and third party developers come in with the partnership and build them. They build dormitories, They build innovation centers, private equity's been in it for a long time. Now they're facing over to hey, how do you support athletics, well you create a commercial arm, which most of them have to do, and you give them a credit line to spend against it, but they don't own equity in it. They own a percentage of the profit that comes in. They own a percentage of the revenue that comes in. They don't own any assets, which most people don't know. So the narrative around all of this is to do what people love to do is bash athletics. because they're uneducated on it because not the whole story is being told. Now is it probably the best way to go? No. and if you're in that space, I heard a great argument about someone talking about the deficits in say like Penn State. if you think about it, Penn State, LSU, all these colleges are on a deficits. Rutgers is a prime example. They're making seventy five million dollars a year in their broadcast. Someone's gotta pay for the soccer teams to fly all over the country for two or three days. And play in front of 47 fans. I don't mean to say it that way, but that's the facts. if you want Title IX and you want equity, then you have to be able to get off of the deficit because someone has to pay for it. It's got to come from somewhere. think about this, and this was an argument I heard. I said, finally someone said it publicly. That if the football team, and the basketball team weren't part of Penn State. Let's just say football. Are you still getting 60,000 kids to go to school there? When the school makes four billion dollars a year, and I'm just I'm not picking on Penn State. Four billion dollars a year in what revenue from tuition, From donations and heads and beds. Sixty thousand, probably on average about thirty thousand, because they got a lot of out of state kids. But they're state school. So is West Chester, so is Indiana PA, they got a pretty good football team But if that wasn't there, if football wasn't a part of it, do they still have sixty thousand? If football wasn't part of LSU, do they have still have sixty, eighty thousand students? No, it becomes a community college, let's just be honest about it. that's what it is. I can't tell you one thing academically either one of those schools are good for. I don't know. It doesn't matter, because kids are paying to go to school there. They show up on Saturdays, we're all white and screaming yellow, they're right in the parking lot. that's where the pride is. And yes, sure academically they're good schools especially Penn State, a research school and some of the things it does. I'm not picking on them, but the the point is if Notre Dame didn't have star football a hundred years ago, then it's Fairfield University. that's what it is. but football has driven the engine of higher education and enrollment for 150 years, starting with Yale and Harvard building seventy thousand seat stadiums in the early nineteen hundreds. They didn't do it because no one showed up and there was an interest. that interest created promotion, marketing, media. The value of having a college football program, having the value of being on live TV every Saturday or Thursday or Friday night, It's millions and earned media for that school's enrollment. Let's just have an honest conversation since the disruption of college and college athletics is happening. it's not the enrollment cliff. It's the value and the return of investment of what that experience has to be. Why is half of the Northeast and the Midwest all going to school down at SEC schools? Because it's a vanity play, and the kids know that the experience is going to be much better. Because why? Because mom and dad and my friend's dad are going to give me a job when I come back. I'm not going to Alabama and LSU from New Jersey and staying there. I'm coming back. 'Cause this is where the jobs are and where my relationships are, my dad parents' connections are. that's not every kid. But that's the majority of them. it's just reality of it. I think college is going to be become the haves. It already is the haves, but not the haves the with the money, the haves with the assets and the facilities and the weather. That's dictating where kids are going. the pro sports on their campus. That's the reality of it. Kids are willing to pay whatever that costs, and parents are willing to pay whatever that costs to say, hey, we're going to go to Alabama this weekend. We're gonna drive down from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, and Illinois and Ohio. That's where we're gonna go. That's where our kids are going to school. to close this loop is that the transition is much deeper than a lot of people are reading about and seeing, and you peel back the onion on it, is the youth sports culture of what's happening now. And the youth sports interest has been there for thirty something years. It's just changing hands once again, but it'll always go back to where I think the pathways are gonna be. Flag football is not where it is unless college athletics hugged it because they needed a Title IX sport, and it's a great female sport. It's a great female sport to watch. It's a great female sport to play. It's a great sport for girls to play. The confidence. it's a great sport all the way around. And without the pathway to college, there is no Olympics. I think that is the beautiful thing about it. I think that's gonna continue to happen as long as you have a pathway because a lot of colleges right now, especially division three, sixty to seventy percent of their enrollment are college athletes, i.e. Harvard, you got thirteen hundred athletes on your campus, that's probably forty percent of Harvard's enrollment. the reality of it. the more you look at that, there's eight million student athletes, there's only five hundred thousand roster spots. You gotta close that gap, the demand is there. You gotta half a million roster spots to a million roster spots. And you got keep on creating sports and opportunities for these kids to continue to play. Why? Because it's proven two things that they have ambition and grit, and those kids are going to be successful. create more opportunities for them. Stop getting in the way of academic integrity because that went out the window with COVID. now we have to redesign. College will never go away, college athletics will never go away. How it looks today. At some point it's probably gonna be all club sports except for the moneymakers, because you're gonna have to have an honest conversation. if you want to come to Penn State and you wanna play volleyball or you wanna play field hockey, you gotta pay for it. any Power Four school that has some type of vanity name to them, because that's what this game is about. parents don't send their kids to division two schools because it doesn't fit their narrative. It's just the way it is. Or division three school. People judge you more about where you went to college than what you did later on in life. that's how you're supposed to turn out the rest of your life or where you go to college. That was fifty sixty years ago. That's not happening anymore today. No one cares. No one cares. No one cares where you went to school, no one cares what your degree in, and no one cares what your GPA is. It's just the facts. it's nice at a cocktail party when you tell somebody you went to pick the name of the big name school, but how long does that last? you're trying to impress someone that you don't care about for two seconds.

Paul Variano: I think that's incredible advice, Rob, to a number of different stakeholders in an ecosystem that you've, engaged with over the thirty years. You talk a little bit about parents, the presidents, athletic directors, the players themselves. it's great advice that anyone can carry, if they're about to go to college, if they're about to go to high school, if they're graduating college and thinking about what's next in their career. before we close up, I wanna do a quick rapid fire. and then we'll let you go. favorite NFL team.

Rob Thompson: Don't have one. I've worked for the league for a decade, and I always follow people I know that still coach in the league, I grew up in Connecticut, but the hell you know? It's like either either you're a Giants or a Patriot fan and I'm neither.

Paul Variano: Favorite spot in Connecticut, for food after a game?

Rob Thompson: Pepe's Pizza on Wooster Street, Apizza.

Paul Variano: Coach or GM you idolized.

Rob Thompson: my line coach, Coach Sparano he was an unbelievable man and he was taken too soon and what a great, great guy. Great, great, great human being.

Paul Variano: the football drill you hated most growing up.

Rob Thompson: Up downs and I think everybody will agree to that one if you ever played.

Paul Variano: Mm.

Rob Thompson: Up downs are the worst. Yeah.

Paul Variano: your favorite pre game music.

Rob Thompson: I loved Phil Collins. I'm an eighties guy, so Phil Collins that was my soundtrack.

Paul Variano: one last question before we let you go. Where can people find you, Rob?

Rob Thompson: So go to GamePlanU, just a just a letter U. GamePlanU.org is a good way if you want more information on that. But connect with me definitely on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my go to. thank you, Paul.

Paul Variano: Well thank you, Rob. Thanks again for coming on and sharing your career journey and what you're building with GamePlanU and GamePlanU 360. We at The Coach's Board sincerely appreciate it and wish you all the best as you continue growing the organization and the community. if you're listening, make sure you check out GamePlanU and sign up to join the community. They're incredible resources and even more incredible people and leaders in the youth sports space, building and doing some really interesting things. I encourage everyone listening to check it out and shoot Rob a note if you're interested in learning more. Rob, thanks again. And go, Chargers.

Rob Thompson: Go Chargers.

Paul Variano: That's it for today's podcast. Thank you for listening. And if you're enjoying today's Faceoff guest interview with Rob Thompson from GamePlanU, be sure to hit that subscribe or follow button. Every Thursday, we sit down with the founder or leader in the youth sports space and get to hear their story, their journey, their success and failures, honest conversations with honest people. Be sure to tune in for next week. Thanks.