In Episode 2 of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow sits down with his oldest daughter Madison — a three-sport high school athlete, collegiate beach volleyball player at MiraCosta College, student athletic trainer for the ASU football program, and now an entrepreneur with her own fitness and wellness company, Lyt Active. What unfolds is a conversation about a young athlete who spent years being shuffled between positions, misread by coaches, and playing through injuries she probably should have sat out — until she found the one version of her sport that finally made sense.

In one of the most personal and emotionally raw episodes of Be Valiant, host Todd Merkow sits down with his youngest daughter Sydney — a three-time Arizona high school state soccer champion, ASU psychology graduate, and now a full-time Pilates instructor — to unpack the full arc of her youth sports journey. What begins as a story of joy, early success, and competitive fire quickly reveals the hidden costs that so many young athletes carry silently for years.

In Episode 8 of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow sits down with Linda Flanagan — freelance journalist, researcher, former cross country and track coach of 19 years, and the author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids' Sports and Why It Matters. Linda holds a bachelor's degree from Lehigh University, a master's from Oxford University, and a graduate degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. She was a founding board member of the New York City Chapter of the Positive Coaching Alliance, served on the Aspen Institute's Reimagining School Sports advisory group, and spent years as an analyst with the National Security Program at Harvard. Todd describes her book as the Bible of youth sports parenting — the resource he wishes he had found when his own daughters were in the middle of it.

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.

In Episode 10 of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow welcomes Kirsten Jones — Hall of Fame former Division I collegiate volleyball player at the College of William and Mary, 15-year Nike executive who held leadership roles in brand management, retail, and global marketing while working directly with elite athletes and teams around the world, author of Raising Empowered Athletes: A Youth Sports Parenting Guide for Raising Happy, Brave and Resilient Kids, host of the Raising Athletes with Kirsten Jones podcast, national speaker, workshop leader, and certified peak performance and leadership coach. She and her husband Evan — who played Division III basketball at Johns Hopkins and Division II at UC Davis before playing professionally in Europe — raised three children: CJ, Parker, and Kylie. Two of the three went on to play collegiately. The conversation is one of the most wide-ranging and practically useful in the series.

In one of the most emotionally significant episodes of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow sits down with Mark Hilinski — co-founder, with his wife Kim, of Hilinski's Hope, a foundation dedicated to mental health education, awareness, and suicide prevention for student athletes. Mark and Kim lost their son Tyler in January 2018. Tyler Hilinski was a 21-year-old quarterback at Washington State University, beloved by teammates, coaches, and everyone who knew him. He died by suicide. Months later, the family learned that Tyler had been diagnosed with CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy — at Stage 1. He was 21 years old.

Todd Merkow sits down with Jody Jackson — longtime Fox Sports Arizona broadcaster, current Diamondbacks reporter, and sports mom of two — for a conversation that moves easily between the press box and the bleachers, between the professional world of sports media and the deeply personal world of raising a pitcher and a quarterback in the competitive youth sports landscape of the Phoenix metro.

Todd Merkow sits down with Jeff Proctor — longtime friend, Valiant Sports Society board member, director, producer, game show creator, and now documentary filmmaker — for a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to be a sports parent when you've lived the athlete's life yourself.

Todd Merkow sits down with Lisa Proctor — career attorney, former competitive tennis player, 30-time marathon runner, and the mom at the center of the Proctor family story — for the second episode in a three-part series titled "When the Dream Unexpectedly Changes." Where Jeff's episode was the dad's perspective, this is the mom's: more emotionally present, more willing to sit in the hard parts, and more honest about what she'd do differently.

The Proctor Family Series concludes with the voice that matters most: the athlete himself. Will Proctor — multi-sport kid from Manhattan Beach, top-100 national prospect, true freshman starter at the University of Georgia, Cape Cod League champion, Saturday starter for the Bulldogs, and now filmmaker — sits down with Todd Merkow to close the arc that Jeff and Lisa opened. This is the athlete's perspective on everything his parents described, and it's more honest, more self-aware, and more useful for parents than almost anything else in the series.

Todd Merkow sits down with Linda Santo — sports media veteran, former colleague from the early days of regional sports television in Arizona, and the daughter of Ron Santo, the Chicago Cubs Hall of Famer — for a conversation that moves between the bleachers and the broadcast booth, between a childhood shaped by one of baseball's most beloved figures and a sports parenting journey that humbled her in ways she never expected.

This is the episode Todd Merkow says is the reason he started Valiant Sports Society. In Episode 31, he sits back down with his youngest daughter Sydney — not to revisit the playing days, but to go somewhere far more difficult: what happened after the game ended for good. Sydney came back for a second conversation because the first one, Episode 3, only told part of the story. This time, she tells all of it.