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 4 of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow sits down with one of his oldest friends in youth sports — Mike Strati, a former collegiate and semi-professional soccer player at the University of New Mexico and the New Mexico Chili's of the USL, a coach with nearly 25 years of experience at the youth, high school, and collegiate levels, and the founder of Strategic Alliance, a company that uses personality analytics to help businesses build better teams. Todd opens the episode by admitting something he has said privately for years: he envied Mike throughout the youth sports journey. This conversation is about why.

In Episode 5 of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow sits down with Steve Borelli — sports special editions editor at USA Today, weekly youth sports columnist, Georgetown English graduate, and the man his readers know simply as Coach Steve. Steve has spent decades coaching his two sons in baseball, basketball, and flag football, and since March 2023 has been writing a weekly column for USA Today that has become one of the most widely read and shared voices in the youth sports parenting space. Todd found him through a LinkedIn post and knew immediately: this is someone parents need to hear.

In Episode 6 of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow sits down with Dr. Bob Dranoff — former commissioner of the East Coast Conference in Division II, former athletic director at multiple levels of college athletics including Division I, Division II, Division III, and junior college, and current professor at St. John's University and St. Joseph's College. Bob reached out to Todd on LinkedIn the day Valiant Sports Society launched, and Todd knew from their very first conversation that this was a voice parents needed to hear. Few people alive have seen college athletics from as many angles — and fewer still have also sat in the stands as a sports parent, watching their own daughters navigate the same system they spent a career running.

In Episode 7 of Be Valiant, Todd Merkow sits down with Kevin McCabe — a man Todd has known for nearly 30 years, going back to their days together at Fox Sports Arizona. Kevin is the host of the Kevin McCabe Show on Arizona Sports 98.7, a weekly radio program that brings high school athletes and coaches into the studio to be celebrated, not analyzed. He has been covering Arizona prep sports for more than 40 years, starting in Flagstaff in 1981 and working his way through Tucson and eventually Phoenix, where he covered everything from the Suns to the World Series to Charles Barkley's Finals run — and kept coming back to high school sports every time, because that is where his heart has always been. He is known across the state simply as the Dean of Arizona High School Sports.

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 Skye Eddy — former Division I goalkeeper at UMass and George Mason (Final Four), briefly professional in Italy, All-American, US Soccer coach educator, founder of SoccerParenting.com and The Sideline Project, and mother of two — for a conversation that Todd calls the one he wishes he'd had when his daughters were still playing. Skye is a Title IX baby who grew up as the game was exploding, went on to coach at the national team programming level, and then discovered, when her daughter Callie started playing in a paid club environment, that being a former professional player and an active high-level coach did not make her a good sports parent. That gap — between knowing the game and knowing how to show up for your child — is what SoccerParenting.com was built to close.

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.