In Episode 9 of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow welcomes Charli Turner Thorne — Hall of Fame head coach of the Arizona State University women's basketball program for 25 years, former head coach at Northern Arizona University, Stanford graduate, two-time USA Basketball assistant coach, and gold medalist at the World University Games. She is nationally recognized for her emphasis on leadership, mental performance, and holistic athlete development, and she currently teaches an optimal performance class at ASU while serving on the Phoenix Mercury coaching staff. She and her husband Will raised three children, and the conversation moves fluidly between her decades of coaching experience and what it was actually like to be a sports parent on the other side of the sideline.

“

I tell parents all the time — don't call your kid in college and ask, first thing out of your mouth, how's basketball going? That's like the worst thing you can do. Ask how they are. How's school. What else. And then let them bring it up.

”

Charli grew up in Southern California as a latch-key kid — riding her bike to games, playing in the park, showing up to her brother's baseball practice and getting asked to play because the team was short a body. She was a multi-sport athlete through high school, playing basketball and softball and dabbling in soccer and flag football, before basketball gradually became her focus. A strong performance at Stanford's basketball camp led to a scholarship at her dream school. After graduating she pursued graduate work at the University of Washington while coaching, then took her first full-time assistant job at Santa Clara before landing her first head coaching position at Northern Arizona. ASU came calling — seven people had already said no — and she turned them down three times out of loyalty to the players she had recruited at NAU before finally saying yes. She stayed for 25 years.

The parenting section of the episode is one of the most candid in the series. Charli admits that with Connor, her oldest son and a talented soccer player, she got caught up in it — tracking his progress, invested in the trajectory, more locked in than she later realized was healthy. She learned from that experience and brought a different perspective to Quinn, her youngest, who came out of the womb wanting to shoot a basketball. When Quinn was young, Charli actually coached his team herself — partly because it let her control practice times and actually be present, something her coaching schedule rarely allowed. She recruited the parents carefully, building the culture of the team the same way she built it at ASU.

“

It's eating me up inside, but I keep my mouth shut and I stay in my lane. I'm not their coach. If I try to weigh in on that, I am messing my kid up immensely. There's got to be one voice.

”

Her most important piece of advice for sports parents is deceptively simple: wait for them to ask. Her own father used to critique her games after the final whistle, and one day she pushed back. To his credit, he never said another word about her performance again — not through high school, not through college — until she asked him. That moment shaped how she approached her own kids and how she counseled parents throughout her career. Don't call your college athlete and ask how basketball is going as the first thing out of your mouth. Ask how they are. Ask about school. Ask about friends. Let them bring up the sport.

On the question of staying in your lane as a parent, Charli is equally direct. When something was eating her up inside about a coaching decision, she kept her mouth shut and stayed in her lane — because she understood from the other side of the relationship that a parent's voice in a player's ear, no matter how knowledgeable, is noise that undermines the one voice that matters: the coach's. She never talked to a coach about her kid's playing time or position. She built relationships with coaches instead. And she draws a clear distinction between the interventions parents should make — speaking up about bullying, abuse, or hazing — and the ones they shouldn't, which is almost everything related to playing time, position, and performance.

“

If there was a completely cray-cray parent — if you're acting a fool, if you're a bad actor in the stands — we will not recruit that kid. We passed on some good players.

”

The culture section is where Charli's coaching philosophy comes into sharpest focus. At ASU, culture wasn't a value on a poster — it was the operating system of the program. Every team meeting until games started was at least half cultural content: the Four Agreements, the pillars of joy, mental and emotional training frameworks. The program had a life coach, Carlette Patterson, for nearly 20 years — a safe space where players could be vulnerable and work on life skills in a way that was coordinated with what the coaching staff was seeing on the floor. Charli's core belief, which she says took her years to fully internalize as a young coach, is that if her players were in a good space as people, basketball would take care of itself. That philosophy, she says, is not happening enough at any level of the sport.

“

The most important thing is that my players were in a good space as people. Basketball would take care of itself. That's what's not happening enough at all levels — that mental, emotional training.

”

The recruiting section contains a message every youth sports parent should hear. Charli's program was explicitly transformational, not transactional — and that meant the parents of recruits were part of the evaluation. If a parent was a bad actor in the stands, disruptive, acting a fool, the program passed on the player. They passed on some good players. She also notes that at showcase events, college coaches are watching the parents on the sideline — and a loud, embarrassing parent is a red flag that will follow a recruit's name in a coach's notes.

The mental health section covers the full arc of Charli's evolution on the subject. As a young head coach at NAU she made the classic mistake of pushing a player to compete against medical advice, got shut down by the team doctor, and learned immediately that it was not her lane. From that point forward she became increasingly conservative — by the end of her career she was holding players out even when trainers and doctors had cleared them, because she could see they weren't mentally ready. She describes the infrastructure she built at ASU: weekly individual check-ins with every player, a coordinated network of coaching staff, athletic trainers, strength coaches, a sports psychology-trained counselor, and Carlette Patterson as the connective tissue. Tranquility Cove — a small outdoor space with fountains and lavender just outside her office — was available to anyone who needed to decompress, and she often held check-ins there.

“

Almost all of our players over 25 years were multi-sport athletes. You're just not as good an athlete if you play one sport. You're more at risk for injury, more at risk for burnout, and you're probably not balanced.

”

She shares a statistic that Todd calls banner-worthy: 94% of women in C-suite executive positions played sports. She pairs it with the finding that 52% of those women were college athletes — remarkable given that only about 5% of female athletes ever play at the college level. Her point is the one she carried into her own parenting: sport is an education unto itself, and in many ways more valuable than anything learned in a classroom. The goal was never a scholarship. The goal was toughness, relational intelligence, and the mental and emotional strategies that carry people through the rest of their lives.

On multi-sport athletes, Charli is unequivocal: almost every player who came through her program over 25 years was a multi-sport athlete. She wishes there were a study tracking the injury rates and burnout rates of the specialized players who weren't, because she believes the data would be decisive. Single-sport athletes are less complete athletes, more prone to overuse injury, more prone to burnout, and less balanced as people. Her advice: play an instrument, be in a play, hang out with friends. Balance is not a distraction from athletic development. It is athletic development.

The identity loss section is personal. Charli has a former player who has built a business specifically to address what she calls the lost years — the period after competitive sport ends when athletes don't know who they are outside of the identity they've carried since childhood. Charli's response as a coach was to build programming around it: internship conversations, career exploration, staying connected with players long after they graduated. But she is honest that for some players, especially those who were entirely one-dimensional, the transition is genuinely hard and takes time. Her closing message on the subject is about FOPO — fear of other people's opinions — which she calls possibly the most toxic and destructive force operating in modern society, especially among young people. The antidote is a purpose identity rather than a performance identity: knowing who you are, not just what you do.

The rapid-fire closing is sharp. The most underrated quality in a great teammate: selfless. The hardest part of coaching that people don't see: the uncontrollables. A lesson she wishes every coach understood: the importance of mental and emotional fitness strategies and coaching the whole person. One thing she wishes every sports parent understood: if your child is having fun and getting better, that's what you should center on. The mental skill every young athlete should develop early: ignore the noise. The most coachable trait she's seen in elite athletes: work ethic. The one word she hopes every player who played for her would use to describe her: love.

Her definition of being Valiant: a joyful spirit with a relentless mindset — not allowing fear and doubt to get in the way, operating from a purpose-driven identity rather than a performance-driven one, treating every challenge as something to grow through rather than something to survive.