Be Smart. Don't Be Scared.
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Episode Summary
Todd Merkow sits down with Jonathan Carone — founder and host of Healthy Sports Parents, former youth and competitive athlete, youth sports coach, and sports parent. Jonathan describes himself as the epitome of a marginal athlete: good enough to make all-stars in rec league, never quite good enough to stick on a school team, and completely fine with that. He played rec basketball through eighth grade, a season of travel baseball, and spent his high school years not as a player but as a student coach — learning the game from the dugout, from the JV coaches, from the varsity staff, and eventually from a year as a college intern with the same high school program. He is now the PA announcer for his hometown high school baseball team, a role he first held as a senior in high school and returned to after moving back to town five years ago. His day job is marketing and web design. Healthy Sports Parents is the thing that combines all of it.
The episode opens with Jonathan's origin story as a coach, which begins in eighth grade. He didn't make the school basketball team that year, but they let him coach the students-versus-faculty game. The next year, facing a cut from the baseball team, he told the JV coach he was more interested in learning to coach than playing. They kept him on the roster as a student coach. He never played again, but he spent the next three years learning from the JV and varsity staffs, and his freshman year of college he interned with the same program. His formative coaching memory is not a win or a loss — it's Craig Newsom, his coach at age ten, who two years later umpired one of Jonathan's games, pulled him aside after the final out, grabbed a bucket of baseballs, and spent fifteen minutes at nine o'clock on a Friday night soft-tossing to show him how to hit to the opposite field. Newsom had no stake in Jonathan anymore. His son had aged out. He just cared enough to do it.
The parenting philosophy section is the most developed in the episode. Jonathan's north star, borrowed from pastor Andy Stanley: he is not trying to raise a good kid. He is trying to raise a fully functioning adult who has every tool they need. That long-term vision gives him the space to not feel the pressure of tomorrow. He didn't learn how to process disappointment until he was in his early thirties, in counseling, looking back at decisions he'd avoided and failures he'd mishandled because no one had ever taught him what to do with them. His answer: use sports as a purposeful place to experience failure. Put kids in safe environments where they can make choices, experience the natural consequences of those choices, and develop intrinsic motivation — not because mom and dad bulldozed the way, but because they wanted something and learned what it takes to get there.
I'm not trying to raise a good kid. I'm trying to raise a fully functioning adult who has every tool they need. That long-term vision gives me the space to not feel the pressure of tomorrow.
The rec soccer section is the most concrete illustration of the philosophy in action. Jonathan coaches his daughter's U-12 rec team. He started the season by having every player rotate through every position — a decision he backed up by showing the parents a video from Wake Forest Men's Soccer Coach Bobby Muse, the winningest men's soccer coach in the country since 2015, telling the girls to play every position, learn the game, and love the game. One parent pushed back in the group chat. Jonathan responded in the chat with his reasoning, then offered to continue the conversation in person or by phone so nothing would get lost in text. He didn't sleep well that Friday night. The next morning, the other eight sets of parents individually thanked him for how he handled it. The team lost the first two games, tied the next two, and won all four of the compete games at the end of the season. The most important outcome had nothing to do with the record: a girl with ADHD and autism who hated playing defense discovered, through the rotation experiment, that she was actually good at it — and in a late-season game, after Jonathan moved her to defense at halftime, she carried the ball the length of the field, crossed it to the middle, got an assist, and scored. He looked at her running back to defense and said, do you trust me now? She said yeah.
I never learned how to process disappointment as a kid. What if we use sports as a purposeful place to experience failure, so our kids can learn how to process disappointment and keep going?
The Healthy Sports Parents origin story is a single image: a father yelling at his daughter at an eight-and-nine-year-old soccer tournament until the daughter leaned into her mother crying, and the father kept yelling. Jonathan looked at that dad and thought: he didn't wake up this morning planning to make his daughter cry. Something happened during that game that triggered something buried inside him — an insecurity, a fear, a past experience — and he lost control. Jonathan saw his own father on the sidelines when he was in fifth grade. He started the podcast in November 2024. The second week, a reel about the death of rec league got over six million views across Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok in two weeks. He gained 25,000 followers in two weeks. A year after the first episode, he had 135,000 followers across social. He has since interviewed Ray Allen, signed with a literary agent, and is working toward a book. His core belief, confirmed by everything he has heard: most parents want to do better. They just don't know how.
The episode closes with Jonathan's definition of Be Valiant: be smart about what you're doing. Don't be scared about it. Do the work so you can keep moving forward.
Most parents want to do better. They just don't know how. And I could have been that dad had my life gone a couple different ways.
Top 5 Takeaways
You don't have to be a great player to have a great impact. Jonathan Carone never made a school team. He was cut from basketball in eighth grade, nearly cut from baseball in ninth, and spent his high school years in the dugout learning to coach instead of on the field learning to play. His most formative sports memory is not a win or a loss — it's Craig Newsom, his coach at age ten, who two years later umpired one of Jonathan's games, pulled him aside after the final out, grabbed a bucket of baseballs, and spent fifteen minutes at nine o'clock on a Friday night soft-tossing to show him how to hit to the opposite field. Newsom had no stake in Jonathan anymore. He just cared. That is the standard. Not wins. Not development metrics. Not scholarship placements. Did you care enough to show up for a kid when you had nothing to gain from it?
Raise a fully functioning adult, not a good kid. Jonathan's north star, borrowed from pastor Andy Stanley: he is not trying to raise a good kid. He is trying to raise a fully functioning adult who has every tool they need. That long-term vision changes everything about how you respond to a bad game, a bad season, a cut, a conflict with a coach. If the goal is a fully functioning adult, then the bad game is not a crisis — it is a data point. The cut is not a failure — it is an opportunity to develop the tools for processing disappointment. The conflict with the coach is not a problem to be solved by the parent — it is a chance for the kid to learn how to advocate for themselves. The goal is not tomorrow. The goal is ten years from now.
Use sports as a purposeful place to experience failure. Jonathan didn't learn how to process disappointment until he was in his early thirties, in counseling, looking back at decisions he'd avoided and failures he'd mishandled because no one had ever taught him what to do with them. His answer: use sports as a purposeful place to experience failure. Put kids in safe environments where they can make choices, experience the natural consequences of those choices, and develop intrinsic motivation. A kid in Jonathan's town didn't make the baseball team in seventh grade. He's now playing Division II baseball for one of the top ten Division II programs in the country. It was not making the team in seventh grade that was the catalyst. His dad didn't make him do the work. The failure did. The natural consequence of his decisions up to that point motivated him intrinsically to go after the hard things. That is the outcome. Not the scholarship. The kid who learned what it takes.
Have your standards. Have your reasons. Be able to explain them. Jonathan's rec soccer story is a masterclass in coach-parent communication. He rotated every player through every position for the first four games of the season. One parent pushed back in the group chat. He responded with his reasoning in the chat, then offered to continue in person or by phone. He didn't sleep well that Friday night. The next morning, the other eight sets of parents individually thanked him. His conclusion: you are never going to please everybody. But if you have your standards, if you have your reasons, and if you can explain them, most parents will at least understand. The parents who agree are quieter than the parents who don't. They are not wanting to stir trouble. They are waiting for someone to lead. Be the person who leads.
Never do something you cannot explain. Jonathan's rule as a coach applies equally to parents: you should never do something that you cannot explain why you're doing it. He is so committed to this as a parent that his proudest parenting moment is that he has never once said 'because I said so' to his daughter. Every time she has asked why, he has been able to explain it. And every time he could not explain it, he stopped and asked himself: why am I saying no? If he couldn't give a reason, he didn't have a reason. This is the standard. Not perfect decisions. Explainable ones.
Pushing is exerting force onto something that doesn't want to go. Jonathan's distinction between pushing and leading is one of the most precise formulations in the series. Pushing is exerting force onto something to move it in a direction it doesn't want to go on its own. Leading is helping your kid find what they're passionate about, showing them how to get there, and then allowing them to make the decision — and experience the consequence of that decision without stepping in to save them from it. That is how you develop intrinsic motivation. That is how you develop resilience. Not by bulldozing the way. By letting them want it more than you do.
Most parents want to do better. They just don't know how. Jonathan's hypothesis going into Healthy Sports Parents has been confirmed by everything he has heard: it is a small minority of parents who are toxic on the sidelines. It is a small minority of coaches who do things the wrong way. They are just louder. The parents who agree with a better approach are quieter because they don't want to stir trouble. The bullies back down when they realize they're outnumbered. But when everyone stays quiet, the bullies run the show. The work is not changing the toxic minority. The work is equipping the quiet majority with the tools to understand what they're feeling, why they're feeling it, and a better way to move forward — so that when the moment comes, they are ready to stand up.
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