⏳ Read Time: 10 min, 2,232 words

Every once in a while, we like to update you all on the “goings on” at BETTER.

Our vision at BETTER is big. Feels too big sometimes. It’s daunting.

But, we get to be encouraged week in and week out by all of the various leaders we are having conversations with that spur us on. Continue to inspire us. And fuel our belief that we can do this.

We thought maybe it could be an encouragement to you, too. So, we wanted to show you. To give you a “peek behind the curtain” at all the things we are working on and doing.

We’ve put a list below this intro so you can see what we will be detailing. But, if you’re not interested in that, we totally get it. This week won’t be our normal weekly leadership-oriented newsletter. But, we do ask that you read the next section.

We have so many new readers, we want to take a second to remind everyone about what we mentioned above - our Vision.

Our Vision at BETTER is a world where young people can discover who they were made to be.

Our mission is to raise the level of leadership in athletics.

Those might seem unrelated to someone who doesn’t work in athletics. But, to us, they are one and the same.

As best we can tell, the leadership role most impactful on the next generation is the role of COACH. It’s not teachers, unfortunately (though of course, teachers do incredible work - Seth is a teacher). It’s not the church.

It’s coaches.

And we believe that is so important. In fact, we kind of believe it might be the most important leadership position in our society.

And yet - talk to any coach. They feel under-supported, under-resourced, and quite frankly, they’re unequipped to lead young people as well as they should.

That is why BETTER exists. There’s a gap between how important coaching is and how well coaches are able to do it. Jeremie, Kevin, and Seth were all doing that in our own ways and simply decided 3.5 years ago to join forces and do it together.

We exist to close that gap.

There are around 500,000 coaches in this country tied to a scholastic entity, middle school through college. That doesn’t include club coaches. Just think of the millions of young people those leaders are intentionally leading every day.

We want to help those coaches directly. But, also to interrogate the systems that support them. Athletic Departments, school systems, programs, youth sports cultures, and help.

Everything we detail below serves that Vision and Mission.

So, if you don’t read any of the rest of this newsletter, know that we are grateful you are here. Just reading this each week helps serve that Vision and Mission (not to mention the role most of you play each day, directly).

Thanks for being on our team.

Not much has changed here, except that since August 2025, we’ve renewed our effort to speak with and be physically present with coaches and leaders as much as possible.

We often remind each other that there’s nothing like getting to be with a coach or AD and be a person of peace for them.

From big events with 5,000+ folks to rooms of 20 of NCAA’s Top Executives, we’ve been speaking more than we ever have.

In just the last two weeks, Kevin spoke at the Women's College Gymnastics Association and the ASPDA College Football Nutrition Symposium. He’ll be back out on the road for two athletic department retreats in the next 2 weeks and a keynote at CABMA in June.

In three weeks (June 2-4), Kevin and I will be leading a workshop for CALS at their AD360. It’s an invite-only event for top executives in NCAA athletics. Then, on the 4th, we’ll speak to a larger group at CALS 1-day.

But it hasn’t just been the glamorous gigs. If a group reaches out and asks, and they can cover our travel, we are going if we feel it advances that mission above.

And that’s not going to change for the rest of 2026.

Coaches conventions, AD conventions, conferences, and executive retreats. (Not to mention 1-on-1 coaching and the various cohorts we lead).

This is what helps us advance and evangelize the mission we discussed above. As sad as it is to say, we have to keep convincing coaches, coach leaders, and athletic directors how much this coaching thing matters. How important it is. And how we cannot afford to get it wrong.

It’s why we have things like this newsletter and why we’ve built world-class tools like the Culture Playbook.

And as always, our work in NCAA Athletics with some of the foremost leaders and ADs there is the backbone of our business and gives us incredible insight into the most chaotic leadership environments in sports.

We’re breaking this one into three parts.

We’ve detailed this before. But this is nothing we could’ve asked for or tried to do. It kind of just fell in our lap.

If you don’t know the story, we were working with college golf coaches - helping the coach lead themselves and their program BETTER. Eventually, some of them said, “This has been so good for me, but will you do this for my players too?”

So we did. We adapted our work slightly to focus more on individual performance (rather than team dynamics), and it went really well.

Then, some of our tools started making their way around groups of golfers. Pretty soon, we were getting about a call a week from a pro golfer.

As of today, we are working for two pro golfers. A top-15 golfer in the world and a top-10 golfer on the Korn Ferry Tour. We’ve had conversations with about a dozen more. But we have chosen to slow down and really focus on seeing what we can learn by going deep with a few rather than wide with many.

It’s been amazing. We are excited for what’s to come. They see it as some form of mental performance. But it’s really not all that different from the work we do with every coach we meet. You have to know yourself first so you can lead yourself.

We’ve now done this process with about 15 golfers, which has helped us build a pretty robust process we believe in (and we have the data to prove it works). Each step contains a tool, an exercise, and a system to install into your performance.

As it stands, our current pathway is:

Fear → Purpose → Drift → Competitive Joy

From that work, in an effort to help the golfers know themselves as golfers, we help them build a robust tracking and data system. We’ve shown it to you before, but it looks something like this.

How can you know where to get BETTER if you don’t have clear objective data that shows you where you currently are?

It’s our inchworm idea come to life.

Well, pretty soon, we were building team-wide dashboards for the college golf programs we work with. They look something like this:

All of a sudden, we realized we built a tool that every golf coach would want to see. An objective way of understanding how good their golfers are.

We are calling it Roster IQ. For programs already working with us, we’re adding a customized dashboard (alongside this performance dashboard) to help coaches track and measure how well a player fits the program's culture and values.

They can see talent and culture all in one place.

We could talk about Roster IQ all day, but we won’t get into the weeds here. Why are we so interested in something like this? It helps a coach (remember the mission) understand the job they are doing. Which in turn, helps their AD know how they are doing.

The team-wide dashboard serves as the coach's individual dashboard.

Notice how the team in the dashboard above is currently ranked #11 in SEC in raw strength, but is ranked 4th in the SEC in overall player growth. Note: This program is also ranked in the Top 25. Imagine being Top 25 but 11th in your league. Welcome to the SEC (don’t get offended, other conferences).

But now we can prove they are trending up and in the right direction. No more guessing. The coach has clear data indicating where their program is headed.

But, suffice it to say we are in the process of getting Roster IQ in front of as many coaches as possible. Imagine being able to evaluate recruits and transfers against your current team and culture.

Pretty cool.

Reach out to us, golf coaches: We know quite a few NCAA golf coaches read this newsletter. We’ve built Roster IQ to cover all of D1 golf, both men’s and women’s. We’d love to show you Roster IQ and can have your team dashboard ready to go in seconds. Seriously, as readers of this newsletter, you are “our people”. We want to help our people out!

Since word has gotten out that over the last two years we’ve worked with some pro and top amateur golfers, by far the biggest request we’ve gotten from interested parents, coaches, and even ADs is…

“Could you talk to my son/daughter?”

We’ve hit a pain point. There is not enough good, healthy stuff out there for juniors to get it right the first time.

When we work with a pro, we often have to undo many of the bad habits they’ve developed during their junior-athlete years. What if they could learn it right the first time?

We aren’t interested in developing a performance center. We aren’t looking to become sports psychologists. But, we will build things that help coaches. So, for the last 12 months, we’ve worked with nearly 20 top junior athletes (including a top-ranked 11-year-old pickleball player - let’s go BETTER Pickleball!) across all sports. Like we said. We don’t want to build a performance center, but we wanted to experiment with junior athletes.

What from our pathway works? What needs to be adjusted? And what we’ve built is something we think is truly exceptional and one-of-a-kind. How would we do it with an 11-year-old versus a 35-year-old professional athlete?

So, we are in the process of finalizing and releasing a course for junior athletes that any coach (or interested parent) can have their athlete take, which would teach them the pathway we’ve outlined above.

Fear → Purpose → Drift → Competitive Joy

We think of it as a series of ideas, exercises, and systems we’d install into every athlete’s performance if we could.

We’ve even developed a pretty robust assessment called the Mental Performance Index (MPI) to see where athletes currently stand and which part of our pathway above they need to focus on (more on MPI next week!)

So, be looking forward to that!

Hey, remember our book?

We released the physical version in January, and we couldn’t be prouder of it. 🙂 We’d been releasing each chapter through our newsletter months before that.

It’s by far been the most successful “release” of anything that we’ve ever put out in the 3.5 years that BETTER has existed.

And we hear stories every single week of more and more coaches finding value in both the content and structure of what we built.

But, remember? It was only the first of three parts!

We haven’t forgotten. The entire thing is already written. But with all of our golf stuff that sort of came out of nowhere, it’s taken a backseat. But don’t worry! We are (very, very soon) going to release some information about the next section of our book: three PowerBooks that make up the “Lead Your Staff” portion of the BETTER System.

We can’t wait to get it in your hands. Thanks for being patient.

How do we wrap this State of BETTER?

We’re just talking out loud now.

But again, if you’ve read this far, thanks so much for being here. This newsletter is a huge part of our mission. It’s the primary way we serve coaches and advance our mission.

As a gift for reading this far, we’d love to give you the first part of our junior athlete course, “Addressing Fear,” if you’d be interested. Just reply asking for it and we will send it to you!

So, whether you are a coach, an AD, an athlete, or just an interested leader — seriously — thank you so much.

If you are interested in hearing more about ANY of the stuff we’ve described above, simply reply to this email, and we’d love to show you more. We’d also love to just say hello.

Jeremie, Kevin, and Seth

Get BETTER’s Culture Playbook. A system designed to install a thriving, healthy, high-performance culture. Join over 1,000 coaches who use our Culture Playbook from youth club teams to national championship NCAA programs and everything in between.

Our first book, Lead Yourself First, is our field manual for coaches to build their Leadership. We’ve heard from many coaches who have read it, love it, and are taking their staff through it.

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