CONVERSATIONS IN YOUTH SPORTS | PART 1 OF 2
What do a former finance consultant and a former management consultant have in common? More than you’d think.
I sat down with Adam, founder of Satori (the only nonprofit in the country systematically measuring player, parent, and coach experience across youth soccer clubs), and we found ourselves finishing each other’s sentences. He’s been building the data system I’ve been arguing for. This is the conversation.
TWO BUSINESS MINDS WHO ENDED UP ON THE SOCCER FIELD
Michelle:
“Adam, tell us about yourself. You didn’t grow up wanting to be a youth soccer coach. So how did you end up here?”
Adam:
“My background is finance and management consulting. I spent about 12 years in a combination of those things plus people analytics in the corporate world. Pretty quickly you get used to solving every problem with data. We’re working with executives of really big companies and a big part of the solution is to measure what’s happening. So once you know what’s important, you figure out how to measure that and all the subcomponents.
I always had this gut feeling I would enjoy coaching. I finally made time to start, and within a year or two I found myself spending more time thinking about what I was going to do at training than preparing for my next corporate meeting. So eventually I made a decision to go full-time youth soccer, without a specific objective in mind. Eight years later, here we are.”
Michelle:
“That’s so interesting because that’s exactly why I reached out to you. I came from corporate America too: American Express, call centers, customer experience strategy, and I kept sitting on sidelines thinking the same thing I’d thought in every business context: who is asking the customer how this is going? In youth sports, the answer was almost nobody. So I went back to school and wrote my dissertation on it. When I saw what you were building with Satori, I thought: this guy gets it.”
Adam:
“And that’s the fun part that maybe not everybody is clear on with data: I don’t live in it. To me, the point of good data is to learn faster. It’s still about humans. It’s still about people playing together on a team and a coach interacting with them. The data is just a way to learn faster what’s working and what’s not. That’s it.”
FROM THE BOOK, THE CX OF YOUTH SPORTS
In my book, I describe the youth sports world the same way I saw call centers at American Express: athletes and parents are the customers, coaches are the agents delivering the experience, and leaders are the process owners. The call center agent is not a free agent; coaches are guided by their organization’s ethos and their own limitations. And just like in any service business, the customer is often not at the center of the discussion. That has to change.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Both Adam and Michelle came to youth sports through business, and that lens is exactly what the industry is missing. The skills developed in data-driven corporate environments aren’t just useful in youth sports. They’re urgently needed. Measuring what matters isn’t a luxury. It’s the whole game.
SATORI: BUILDING THE FEEDBACK LOOP NOBODY ELSE BUILT
Michelle:
“We didn’t really introduce Satori. Tell us what it is and how it started.”
Adam:
“It started almost by accident. A club I was working with wanted to do a parent survey and asked if I had any insight. I’d worked at Pfizer: 85,000 employees, an engagement survey with a 91% response rate. I’d seen that done really well at massive scale. So I just took the extreme simplified version of that and applied it to this youth soccer club to help them get better insight from their parents.
That kept going. Some other clubs found out. US Youth Soccer found out. And next thing I knew I had people wanting this for their organizations. Satori didn’t exist yet. But the decision point came: do I go strictly down the coaching path, or do I also help youth soccer in a way nobody else is doing?”
Michelle:
“And there’s literally nobody else doing it, right? That’s actually what struck me when I was doing my dissertation in 2021. I started researching the customer experience of youth sports academically and found almost nothing. What little existed was outdated and simplistic. The world has changed dramatically and the research hadn’t kept up.”
Adam:
“We have a monopoly, though not because we want to. Because there’s literally nobody else measuring parent, player, and coach feedback to find insights on the player, parent, coach experience. There’s a lot of data out there on on-field performance (touches, passes, goals, shots), but what about the qualitative, experiential things? How can we help quantify that so we can learn from it?
Last year we had more than 65,000 parent survey responses across 40 clubs. On the travel side it’s probably a 50% response rate. So half of parents respond. These are very different than the typical survey with low response rates.”
BY THE NUMBERS: SATORI
65K+
parent survey responses collected by Satori last year across 40 clubs, with approximately 50% response rate on the competitive travel side.
That’s not a survey. That’s a listening system.
2 DIFFERENT APPROACHES WITH 1 SAME RESULT - RETENTION
Michelle’s PSAT research model (Parent Satisfaction) identifies four core drivers that map directly to what Satori measures:
Coach-driven experience: Is the coach creating joy, developing players, and communicating well?
Club-driven experience: Does the organization communicate its values and listen?
Program structure: Is the schedule and commitment level appropriate?
Team management: Is there belonging, fair playing time, and cohesion?
These aren’t soft questions. When measured and addressed, they predict word-of-mouth behavior, player retention, and team reputation. Parent Satisfaction is not a feel-good metric. It is a business metric.
SATORI’S APPROACH
Satori exists because no one else built the feedback loop. High response rates only happen when people believe someone is actually listening and acting on what they hear. The methodology works because it’s grounded in the same rigor that corporate engagement programs use, just applied to the youth sports context where it was always needed and never deployed.
Focus on high survey participation rates across parent, coach and players
Focus on team level indicators to support coach feedback loop
THE BIGGEST RESEARCH FINDING: HAPPY KID, HAPPY PARENT
When I look at the PSAT research, the single biggest driver of parent satisfaction is deceptively simple: the parent’s perception of their child’s happiness.
Happy child, happy parent.
Which is why everything in my framework comes back to three anchors:
Joy-Making
Learning and Development
Community.
Not as marketing words. As measurable outcomes.
Adam reiterates this in his approach to performance management at Satori.
“That’s what our surveys measure too. Is the coach creating a fun environment? Is there a sense of belonging on this team? Is there real improvement happening on the field? When I look at my own coaching scores. I track my results season to season, and those three dimensions basically tell you everything. Where are the relative strengths? Where are the gaps? And once you know, you can actually do something about it. “Let’s say I wanted to improve my belonging score. If it didn’t change, okay: what else can I try? Who else can I talk to?””
Michelle:
“And that’s the CX mindset applied at the coach level. Every action, every decision, every evaluation should trace back to one of those three anchors. If it cannot connect to Joy, Learning, or Community, you should be asking whether it’s actually serving the program.”
KEY TAKEAWAY
The data confirms what any good coach already senses: when a child is happy on the team, the parent is satisfied with the program. Joy is not a soft outcome; it is the most powerful predictor of retention, word-of-mouth, and long-term commitment. Building a program around Joy, Learning, and Community is not idealism. It’s strategy.
NONPROFIT IS A BUSINESS. SO IS YOUTH SPORTS.
Michelle:
“This is something I say that makes people uncomfortable: whether a youth sports program is nonprofit or for-profit doesn’t determine how well it’s run. What determines that is whether leadership treats it like a real organization with real customers.”
“Nonprofit is a business. I don’t know why people think it’s not. You go to business school and get an MBA with a specialization in nonprofit, because it’s a different accounting method, but it’s the same idea. Create as much value as possible. The difference is where the value goes. Who’s the beneficiary. That’s the only real difference. But how you run it, the innovation, the learning, the data, the strategy: it’s nearly identical.”
Michelle:
“Exactly. And what you’re doing with Satori is the professional version of what I lay out in my book as the CX Operating Plan, a cascading measurement and accountability structure from the total organization down to each individual coach and team. The metrics aren’t complicated: parent satisfaction scores, player happiness scores, retention rates, word-of-mouth scores. You don’t need expensive software. You need a spreadsheet, a survey, and leadership that actually reviews the results and acts on them.”
Adam:
“And you can feel the quality degrade when it’s not being managed well. Just to drop a research nugget: there’s a pretty significant difference in player experience for a coach who has one team versus two. Coaching two teams tends to have significantly lower scores across all the questions. The idea is just being spread thin. If you’ve already got a full-time job and you have two teams, you can feel it.”
FROM THE BOOK, THE CX OF YOUTH SPORTS
Running a youth sports program “like a business” means: knowing your customer, measuring whether you’re delivering, holding coaches and leaders accountable to specific outcomes, and adjusting based on what the data tells you. In my book I describe the role of a Chief Customer Experience Officer (CCEO), a dedicated person (full or part-time) who owns the CX Operating Plan, leads surveys and focus groups, develops coach and parent education, and reviews scorecards monthly. This role isn’t corporate excess. In youth sports, it’s the missing piece.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Youth sports organizations that treat themselves like real businesses, measuring performance, managing coaching quality, listening to customers, are the ones that thrive. The data doesn’t make youth sports less human. It makes it more accountable to the humans inside it.
THE PARENT IS THE CUSTOMER AND THE MOST UNDERUSED ASSET
Michelle:
“I think nowadays parents have way too much information and it’s not being used in an efficient way. So how do you manage the chaos of the parents? A kid should be dreaming, but the parents should be the balance. What does that look like in practice?”
Adam:
“There’s a limit to how much influence we have over families. But me personally, and this is something I’ve learned from top coaches I’ve interviewed through the Satori process: connection with the parents, connection with the family, seeing the team as more than just players and coach but also parents. That’s not to say parents are decision makers on what we do on the field. But a parent’s support can go a long ways. Nobody cares about their kid or spends more time with their kid than they do. So if we all care about the development of this player, we should be working together.”
Michelle:
“My research shows this exactly. Parents who feel engaged, informed, and respected show higher satisfaction, are more likely to recommend the program, and are more likely to return next season. But parents who feel ignored or left out of communication become detractors. In youth sports, where peer networks drive enrollment, a detractor is expensive. It’s not about giving parents power over tactics. It’s about aligning them with what actually develops players.”
Adam:
“Helping parents be aligned around what’s probably the most valuable things for us to focus on. It first starts with having that trust and relationship with the parent. If we don’t trust each other, if we don’t understand each other, there’s not going to be any impact.”
FROM THE BOOK THE CX OF YOUTH SPORTS
The research found that parent engagement has four levels: under-involved, moderately involved, appropriately involved, and over-involved. The sweet spot is appropriate involvement, which is what organizations should design for.
The strategies to get there: strong communication, parental learning opportunities, and programs centered on development rather than results. When parents understand and believe in the developmental philosophy, they become the program’s greatest advocates. An educated parent is an asset, not a liability.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Parent education and communication are not soft add-ons to a CX strategy; they are the foundation. The most satisfied families aren’t the ones left alone. They’re the ones who understand what the program is trying to do and feel like partners in making it happen.
READ MORE: Part 2 of this conversation
Why kids are quitting in high school and what the data says we should do about it. The fragmentation of youth soccer leagues, the blowout crisis, private equity versus community clubs, and what a truly CX-centered program could look like in your community.
About the Author
Dr. Michelle Mullman | Author of The CX of Youth Sports: Strategies to Move Youth Sports Towards Joy, Learning and Community. Her research and consulting work uses the PSAT methodology to evaluate opportunities at the coach, club, program, and team levels.
Learn More about Kuriositee Consulting:
About Adam Kuhn
Adam Kuhn is the founder and owner of Satori which provides a survey process for soccer programs. Adam is also a youth soccer coach with Chicago Fire and previously worked in Management Consulting and Finance before his full shift into the world of youth soccer.