Unscripted Non-Profit Podcast
Melyssa Jaskiewicz
on building the girls' sports pipeline
Melyssa Jaskiewicz, Leveling the Fields · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Unscripted Non-Profit Podcast
B E S T Q U O T E S
“All girls are good at something, but we're not all good at the same thing. You can't hand everyone a soccer ball and be like, all right, we're done here.”
— Melyssa Jaskiewicz
“You can't take those kids with a lot of energy and very fast brains and then expect them to sit still for eight hours. That's just not how it works.”
— Melyssa Jaskiewicz
“We have a school on a wait list and we need $14,000 to be able to pull that school off of a wait list. Can you give me $100? And it's just awkward.”
— Melyssa Jaskiewicz
Unscripted Non-Profit interview with Melyssa Jaskiewicz
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted podcast host.
I'm here with Melyssa Jaskiewicz, who is with Leveling the Fields.
Not field. It's multiple fields that she's leveling.
She's going to tell us what that means in a moment.
But first I gotta ask her the question: why should we trust you as a marketing expert?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Wow. I guess you probably shouldn't.
You don't know me.
Let's see. What gives me trust? I guess background.
I've been in sales and marketing for over 20 years, and somehow I'm still standing.
So I guess there's the little bit of clout that we can all say we have with this many years of experience.
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
There's a variety of things that one does to stay in a single industry for 20 years.
So I think that cumulatively starts to count at some point.
It's crazy, right? There's this imposter syndrome.
I've been doing this for 20 years, and I still second guess myself when I deliver that SEO audit.
I still second guess myself when I jump on that call.
But I also then talk to folk and I'm like, wow, they really have zero clue how any of this works.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Everyone's just thinking it, let's be honest.
Twenty years of tech, from hardened computers to pro sports
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
But tell me some of those pieces cumulatively.
What are some of those big blocks that you did in those twenty years?
Is there any standout client or project or company that you worked with that was formulative to your current worldview?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
My worldview. Yeah, I think so.
I've been across a couple different industries at this point.
I've been in sports, obviously. It was my longest. I was in pro sports for over 15 years.
Before that, I've always been in tech though.
So I was in hardened technology for quite some time. I used to sell hardened computers into the three-letter agencies.
And that was pretty interesting. We saw some really, really cool tech.
And I think that that's always been the common denominator of everything I've done. It always comes back to tech.
So I think with that comes that excitement of we've just really always been evolving in that area in the world.
And so it's just so cool to see where we are now, where we were, and things that you thought were so cool and so amazing are just common now.
I remember we went to Booz Allen Hamilton and we did this technology petting zoo, and I was 16, 17 at the time.
And the guy took his mouse and went across to the other screen, and all of us were like, my God, that's so cool.
And to see that evolving, looking back now and seeing all those points where we thought something was so revolutionary, and then you fast forward five years and there's something even more revolutionary.
So just knowing that something new is coming all the time and being curious about what it's gonna be, I think that that's really shaped a lot of my journey.
The rate of change and the rules of communication
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
I was just talking about this with my wife, because she's like, the rate of advancement of technology seems to be accelerating.
And of course I have to be the naysayer and go, well actually, according to that law of improvement, we're actually behind, because batteries took so much longer to advance in their capability for storage, mostly for mobile devices.
It's been a big limiting factor, but there have been larger advances in batteries.
I'm thinking back to, I'm a millennial, and I grew up and we had a rotary phone.
We were excited when we got our 286 PC in our home, and I had Lemmings as my first.
But there was that transitory moment where, hey, if they needed to get a hold of me, they yelled from the front yard.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Lemmings. I love that game.
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
And hopefully I had to stay within relative earshot and get home before the sunset. And those were the rules of communication.
Now there's AirTags for kids, and people are sewing it into their clothes, and is the remote tracking for your tablet on?
My daughter's lost her tablet twice.
So the advancement of technology has increased, and I think it does impact the way that we interact with the world and kind of changes the shape of things for the next generation.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Yeah, for sure. I was the same way.
You were home when the streetlights came on. If the streetlights came on and you weren't home, you were in trouble. And that was that.
And I have two teenagers and I track their phones. I know where they are pretty much at any moment.
So it's definitely very different.
And I think that for them to go backwards, like if we dropped them into 1985, they would be very confused as to how do you even navigate communication for plans?
Like how do you do that?
And it's like, yeah, we had to make plans, you had to stick to them, because everyone knew where to meet and when to meet.
And you couldn't just change on the fly or cancel last minute. You had to tell someone.
So even at that base level, totally different.
The mission: more women in leadership, with sports as the catalyst
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
So what you're working on for the next generation, what would you say that looks like?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
I think everything we're doing really is working on the next generation.
So our organization is on a mission to get more women into places of leadership using sports as the catalyst.
So what we're actually doing day in and day out is going on site to elementary schools and introducing sports to girls from third to fifth grade.
And the whole intention of that is to allow them to get more exposure, find what they love, find what they're good at.
And therefore introducing them to a lifelong journey of confidence and resilience and grit and all these things.
So that's really our goal for the next generation and the women that are coming up next: to make sure that they feel empowered.
And feel confident to do whatever it is that drives them.
Whatever they see out there that they want to go after, we wanna make sure that they have the tools and the confidence to get there.
All girls are good at something, just not the same thing
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
Makes sense.
I have a thirteen year old daughter, and last year my wife enrolled her in a local karate dojo.
She's on the autism spectrum somewhere and definitely ADHD.
I've got the ADHD, my wife's a bit autistic, and so we needed something physical for her to do, but needed to find a good niche.
And I have to say, I did carry some animus over from my early experiences with sports, where I was the runt of the litter.
I was the person on the baseball team only because they literally could not play a game without me as a player.
So I'm standing in the right field. It's the last game, the last pitch, last person up, and all I have to do is not strike out.
And I struck out.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
No, not the memory you want.
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
And so I had to overcome that, because I knew that she needed a friend grouping that was outside of the context of homeschool, giving her another place in entry.
And she's really taken to it, and now she can kick people in the head really well.
'Cause she's almost as tall as I am when she's thirteen.
She was sparring the other day, and I'm like, well, boot to the head.
She didn't catch the reference, so I showed her the video with a taekwondo leap.
And she was just busted up laughing for like thirty minutes, wanted to watch it twelve times.
And then next time she sparred I'm like, boot to the head, boot to the head. And so she's just kicking this guy's head.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Of course. I love it.
It's interesting. I always say all girls are good at something, but we're not all good at the same thing.
So you can't hand everyone a soccer ball and be like, all right, we're done here.
Some girls love soccer, but some hate it.
You can't just keep dumping everyone in the same pond and expecting them to be fine.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
As a parent, it's the most amazing thing when you find that your child has found their thing.
Whether it's professional sand castle making or volleyball. Whatever it is, you just want them to find their thing.
And so the more things that we expose them to, the greater the likelihood that they're gonna find one of those things that's theirs.
And there's so much behind finding your thing and feeling like, ooh, I like this, I'm good at it.
I have confidence now, because I found something that really gels with me.
And I think there's also a part of identity. I start to identify with that.
And there's so much that we learn as we grow on who we really are, and how we want to be perceived, how others perceive us, and how we perceive ourselves, and finding our identity.
And I think that finding your thing, be it music or sports or whatever, it does help with that.
It helps you connect to something, and then you don't feel so lost.
Why the coaches are the school's own teachers
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
What's been some of the challenges of the group dynamic?
'Cause sports are good on certain levels, because you're introduced to the challenges. There's the game itself, or the points that you have to score, and the physicality of it. You can level up those things.
But what have been some of the things organizationally to keep in mind any time that you put together thirteen, fourteen year olds?
They don't have a concrete sense of right or wrong developmentally.
Developmentally they're looking to their peer group.
So if you put a peer group of fourteen year olds together, sometimes you get some very questionable decisions as far as behavior or activity.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
That is definitely true.
I think the good part here is that we do middle school clinics, but our main flagship program, which is Empower Play, is third through fifth grade.
So we've got eight to eleven year olds, so it's a little easier then.
But the one thing that we really pride ourselves on is we actually hire teachers from that school to be the coaches in our program.
And by doing that, we are putting money back in a teacher's pockets, which is wonderful.
But for us as an organization, it's really great because there's already a connection.
They're already seen as teachers that are respected. The kids automatically know the hierarchy. They know who's in charge.
And the teachers know the kids on a certain level. Some of them are different grades or what have you.
It makes that transition from the school day into sports a lot easier.
And you're always gonna have kids that step outside those boundaries.
But in hiring teachers, they automatically know how to handle that, because that's what they're doing all day, every day.
And so that's really been a saving grace, having these teachers come in as our coaches who already have these incredible skill sets on how to manage that age group, how to manage a classroom.
All those skills are really, really beneficial.
ADD, dyslexia, and asking fast brains to sit still
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
What about sensory differences, or ADD, ADHD, autism? What's been your viewpoint on that, either personally or as an organization?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
I grew up dyslexic and ADD. I was diagnosed back in the eighties. So a long time ago.
So it's very near and dear to my heart.
And I think that the biggest disservice we have done to especially ADD and ADHD kids is limit the amount of physical activity.
We should be having PE every day. And we're not.
So you can't take those kids with a lot of energy and very fast brains and then expect them to sit still for eight hours. That's just not how it works.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
And so by introducing these sports to these girls, especially the ones that run fast, this is a fantastic avenue to get some of that energy out, to express themselves in other ways.
And the other thing is, I wasn't a great student. I struggled a lot in school, but I really excelled when it came to certain sports.
And I was good at it, but I loved it. And we were all more equal.
So I think that that was a really nice thing to have, and you can really only get that in that kind of situation.
So as a whole, as a nation, when you have children whose brains run quickly, getting their body to move on a more regular basis helps to level that out.
So I do think that this is fantastic.
We had one girl who was getting in trouble all the time in school. She couldn't sit still, getting in trouble, pushing buttons.
And when we introduced the Leveling the Fields program to that school, the coach came back to me and said, hey, just a heads up, we got four weeks in.
And she started using us as kind of like a, hey, we'd really hate to miss, we really hate to stay late.
She basically used us as this let's be really on today so that we can get to Leveling the Fields quicker.
She said that they started to change.
The days where they had Leveling the Fields as that goal to get to, she saw a lot less disruption in the classroom.
The kids were so excited about that. They didn't want to lose it.
Now, we don't want it to be taken away, so we tell them don't do that.
But they were so excited for it, and I think that's just a really, really beautiful thing.
And I think that's extremely important for kids who don't necessarily do great in a normal core setting.
How you organize the organs of an organization
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
Tell me a little bit about the organization of your organization.
How have you organized the organs of your organization?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
How do you do what you do?
So we are a primarily volunteer organization, and we have six committees.
So we have a marketing committee, a programs committee, development, grants, events and operations.
And at the top of each of those committees, we have a committee chair.
And then that person has committee members on their team, usually two to three, and then we have what are called our contributors.
So our contributors are people that maybe just do one project, or they're just on one task where they kind of do their thing siloed, or they're working for a finite period of time.
And so each of those committees meets either once a week or once every other week.
And then I meet with my committee chairs once a month as a group, but I meet with each of them individually every single week so that we're on the same page on what they're working on, what we need them to be working on.
It's been absolutely amazing to see these women get on board and just be like, yep, let's do this.
And just to bring in all these incredibly smart and intelligent and skilled people into my universe has just elevated our entire game.
If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
So I always tell people, I'm really, really good at this little bit of stuff, but I need people that are good at all these things, if we want to be as big and as successful as I see us being.
And so I tell my kids all the time: if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
You need to be around people that are gonna push you, that are going to elevate you, that are going to make you think and really justify what you're doing.
Because you need to know all the holes, because you need to be ready for them.
And so that's how we operate.
We use Slack every day, all day, to communicate in each of our channels and make sure that everyone knows what's going on.
We get together for events that we have. We have fundraising events throughout the year, little ones and big ones.
And then twice a year we do an all hands meeting. We all get together, all 30 of us.
We do a big presentation on here's where we are, here's where we wanna be.
The teams that maybe have only seen each other on Zoom get to meet in person.
So that's one of my favorite things that we do throughout the year.
The skill that didn't transfer: asking for money
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
So what's the biggest learning curve that you've had to overcome in transferring your sales skills, your marketing skills, to the world of nonprofit?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
The biggest problem that I have had is asking for money. I am not good at that.
It's very hard to get in front of someone who you're friends with or you have a relationship with and say, hey, we have a school on a wait list and we need $14,000 to be able to pull that school off of a wait list. Can you give me $100?
And it's just awkward. It's just very awkward.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
I've been in sales the whole ride up, but I've always had something. It was always business to business, or I was holding something that I could say, do you want this?
And so it's a different vibe. It's just tricky.
Obviously, I'm getting better at it, because if you don't get good at fundraising in nonprofit, you will drown.
But that's been a very interesting transition. I'm very much more business development than I am sales.
And so the relationship part of things, that's where I really thrive, and that's what I love.
But asking is kind of awkward. Every day I get a little bit better at it.
I just don't want anyone to ever feel like I'm only maintaining the relationship with them for them to fund my nonprofit, because that's never the case. And it's not nice.
I truly care about all the people in our orbit.
And the people that do donate to us, I'm just so incredibly grateful.
And I want to get to know who they are, why they donated to us, why they like us, and what we can do to make sure that they feel appreciated.
And I think that relationship side is very similar. Just trying to make sure that the people in your orbit, they were clients, now they're donors.
And make sure that they know how much we care about them and appreciate them and like them in our world.
Visibility, AmeriCorps, and the second half of the grant
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
It seems to me that a lot of the work of a nonprofit is really gaining that visibility for either your mission or the outcome of that mission.
I worked with AmeriCorps when I was a teenager, and had the benefit of a great program where we trained trainers for a computer education program at local churches.
So we would basically be planting computer school seeds to upskill people so they didn't work fast food anymore, but they could get an office job.
Because they were feeling trapped. You're thirty, forty, and you got into some trouble with drugs, and you don't have the skills of making an Excel sheet.
You don't have the basic computer automation skills that people just take for granted in an office workspace.
I had one lovely lady. My gosh, Carol.
The first class I said, okay, take your mouse up and move the cursor over to the icon.
She takes up her mouse, puts it on the screen, and moves it over.
But by the end of the semester she was emailing spreadsheets, and she was able to get a secretary job after that.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
It's amazing.
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
But the job wasn't done, because we still had to tell people what we had done.
So the second half of fulfilling the grant was writing emails and connecting with the church board so that we could have the pastor stand up and recognize the people who had graduated that computer class, to gain visibility for the next round for it.
And there's kind of that circle on it.
AI as a collaborator, not a graphics generator
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
I'm curious, either in your quest for visibility, or in your workflow to get that visibility, have you leveraged AI at all?
I know my friend Matt Brooks of SEOteric refers to AI as the worst customer support representative if you don't educate them, but the best if you give them something to feed on.
So what has that looked like for you?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
I use AI all day, every day.
I have a Claude and a ChatGPT. I have a paid subscription to both of those, and I have trained them well.
In terms of how we use them for visibility, I don't typically use them as much for external things like creating marketing graphics or things of that nature.
But I use them a lot in terms of drafting emails to specific people, to making sure that what I'm writing is strong enough.
I'll write something and then I'll put it in chat and say, okay, clean this up, or make this better, or soften this up. And then I'll reread it and edit that.
I really, really love to collaborate. And working from home and being the only staple in the organization that's not a volunteer in the revolving door, it's been nice to actually have this AI collaborator to go back and forth with, to say, well, here's what I'm thinking. Well, no, not that.
And it's really funny, because the nicer you are to your AI bot, the nicer they are to you.
And so often it'll say, that's great thinking, Melyssa. And I'm like, well, thank you.
It's very, very helpful in grant writing.
Because I've been training my ChatGPT for two and a half years. I've been training Claude for about six months. And that's been really amazing.
I've got Claude connected to my Gmail. So I can say, hey, go through and clear out any of the bounce back emails, give me an Excel list. And then I upload that into HubSpot and say, tag all these as bounced.
So it's been a huge part of our day to day life and how we're doing things on the back end.
From an awareness standpoint, we have a thousand followers on Instagram.
And I copy and pasted every single one of them and dropped them into Claude and said, of all these people, who would be the best to collaborate with to expand our IG reach? And it came back and told me.
So it's been really cool and fascinating.
And the better I get at my prompts and what I want it to do, thinking about things in terms of everything I do every day, my thought is, could I put this in Claude? Could ChatGPT do this?
Response time is a nonprofit's speed-to-lead
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
Ignitvio did a study that eighty percent of businesses don't respond within the first day, even when people are reaching out and trying to get business from them, particularly in the home service sector.
Now, I'll flub the exact numbers, and my own Claude will yell at me later when I'm processing this transcript that you said the stat wrong again.
But it occurs to me that processing your inflow of potential donors or messages or connections is just as important for a nonprofit as it is for somebody who's selling.
Because people get busy, and while the mood strikes they think, I should check into that level playing field thing. And then they'll forget it the next week and think, why do I need to level my foundation? What was it again?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
What was I doing? Yeah.
There's actually a stat out there, I don't know it off the top of my head, about the time it takes a nonprofit to respond to a volunteer inquiry.
And how quickly you respond is correlated with the likelihood of the person coming back on, or staying on, or what have you.
So I don't know all the stats behind it, but I interviewed someone the other day for a volunteer position that we have open, and she told me that she's been volunteering for a local shelter.
And when she reached out to them, she didn't hear back for almost a year.
And I said, what?
Now, that's an extreme one, and I'm sure it got lost or whatever.
But you do hear a lot about people that reach out to volunteer and they don't hear back for a couple of weeks or what have you.
So putting a volunteer manager in place for us was incredibly important. And we get back to people within a couple of hours.
Setting volunteer expectations up front
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
We also know that sometimes because of what we do, we have a lot of interest, which has been amazing. A lot of people want to be a part of what we're doing.
But we're not your typical show up, pack a bag and then leave. We're not your typical daily volunteer organization.
We expect a lot from our volunteers, and they're really the ones running our organization.
So we do get that a lot where people will reach out and be like, I want to volunteer with the girls.
And I'm like, you can help us with the summer camp, but during the year, no.
We have paid, hired, structured programming. We pay our coaches.
We have them go through a four-hour training before the program starts, before the season.
We can't just take somebody off the street and be like, sure. We have to get them SLED-checked. There's just so many hoops to jump through when you are going on campus to an elementary school, and we have all that down.
So there is a little bit of a misunderstanding sometimes of what people think volunteering for us looks like and what it actually is.
But again, we just have to take that in stride and explain really, really clearly what we're looking for.
And if someone's not really into that, hey, if you wanna join our mailing list, donate, you can still be a part of what we're doing.
But we wanna be super, super clear up front about what we're asking of people.
Collaborations and partnerships in the community
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
When it comes to that business development side that you mentioned, is collaboration with different businesses in the community something that's part of your workflow currently, or something on the roadmap?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Both.
So we have done some collaborations thus far. We want to do more.
We've worked with yoga studios who have donated a class to us and basically said, okay, anyone who comes to the class today, we're gonna give a portion of our proceeds to Leveling the Fields.
We've worked with businesses that said, hey, we're doing an event, why don't you come and set up a booth for awareness?
So things like that we've done. We would like to do more.
Sometimes we do end up going down more of a partner road.
One of our partners is the Raines hotel group, and they've been amazing.
They actually had one of their hotels host our birthday party, and they gave us all the food for free, the space for free.
It was really amazing. We were just so, so grateful.
We're doing another event with them this fall.
So in those types of collaborations, it's a lot deeper. There's a real partnership there, and we would like to do more of that.
I think that there's a lot of women owned businesses and businesses that cater to women that really see what we're doing and get it and understand it.
And so I think those are the ones that typically are like, yeah, we want to help. What can we do?
The stat that started the organization
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
What's a surprising statistic in your industry that either stops people, or stopped yourself when you found it out?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Well, the one biggest stat that was kind of what we were all based on was that only twenty-four percent of C-suite executives are female, but ninety-four percent of them played sports.
And that usually makes people react. It made me react.
That's why we're here, and we started this whole thing.
But when I give talks to different networking groups or groups around town and I put that statistic up on my slides, you will inevitably see people click in their heads and be like, yeah, I played sports and I learned all this stuff.
So it makes sense when you tell people, once they think about it.
But the 94% is shocking. It is so high. And that does make people react.
Two boys for every girl: a pipeline problem, not a desire problem
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
The other one that is kind of strong is in South Carolina specifically.
There's two times as many boys playing high school sports as there are girls.
And if you think about it, that's horrible.
That means that there's not enough teams. There's interest. There's a lot of girls that want to play.
So that means that there's not the structure for them to play. There's not the youth sports programs that lead into the middle school programs that lead into the high school programs.
So if there's no pipeline, then the high school can't get a team if there's no one to play on it.
So it's like this chicken-and-egg thing.
And that's one of the issues that we're trying to figure out and solve: how do we grow the pipeline to be able to go to the high school and say, hey, okay, now you need to get a girls lacrosse team, because we just went out to the seven elementary schools that feed into you.
And they're all interested. We've run the program, they've got the basics. Let's go.
So it's an uphill climb.
But I think that some of those stats were the ones that were like, whoa, that's pretty intense.
Even the fact that female athletes are less likely to become pregnant as a teenager and less likely to end up in a domestic violent relationship.
So those also surprised me, where I was like, it makes sense once you think about it.
But you never thought about it. You've never put those things in the same sentence.
Options, not desire: the real barrier
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
Is there something about the family connection too, like the families that take the time to be engaged with their children's activities are possibly more supportive than a household that doesn't take time for those things?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
I don't know a whole lot about that avenue.
Usually a lot of the times we see the blockage in participation as not so much the desire, but more the options.
I've got kids that want to play more, but there's not a youth program close enough to them that they can do it.
When you've got either a grandparent as the primary, or two working parents that are maybe doing shift work, or if they don't have as flexible of a schedule, getting a kid across town an hour away or half an hour away, or getting stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, it's just not gonna happen.
And so that's more what we see as the barricade, versus the family's desire.
Where to find Leveling the Fields
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
That's fair enough. To kind of wrap up here, give you a chance to give a shout out for any resources.
If people want to learn more about your organization, get involved with your organization, where should they go? How can they connect with you? And is there a specific geographic location you work out of?
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Right now we're in Charleston, South Carolina.
We have a plan to expand throughout the Southeast and then throughout the nation over the next 20 years. So by 2044, we'll be in every state.
Right now, obviously South Carolina, but we can be found on everything as @LevelingTheFields.
So that is our website, levelingthefields.org. It is also us on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok, on YouTube. Same handle on everything. So we're really easy to find.
J E R E M Y R I V E R A
Well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your mission, and if anybody's listening and wants more details, I'll be adding those links to the show notes.
Thanks for stopping by, Melyssa.
M E L Y S S A J A S K I E W I C Z
Thanks, Jeremy. This was wonderful.
Key Takeaways
→ The stat that built the organization. Only 24% of C-suite executives are women, but 94% of those women played sports. Melyssa is not arguing that sports are nice to have. She is arguing they are the cheapest leadership pipeline anyone has found.
→ Two boys for every girl is a structure problem, not a desire problem. South Carolina has twice as many boys as girls in high school athletics. There is no youth program feeding the middle school feeding the high school, so the high school cannot field a team even when the girls want one.
→ The barrier is logistics, not parental interest. A grandparent as the primary caregiver, two parents on shift work, 45 minutes of traffic. That is what stops participation, not a family that does not care.
→ Hire the school's own teachers as the coaches. It puts money back in teachers' pockets, the kids already know the hierarchy, and classroom management transfers for free. It is the single most reusable operational idea in the episode.
→ Fundraising is the skill that did not transfer. Twenty years of B2B selling did not make asking a friend for $100 any less awkward, and she says so out loud instead of pretending otherwise.
→ Response time is a nonprofit's speed-to-lead, and AI is a collaborator. A volunteer waited nearly a year to hear back from a shelter; Leveling the Fields staffed a volunteer manager and answers within hours. Behind that sit two trained AI accounts doing grant writing, Gmail bounce cleanup into HubSpot, and Instagram collaboration research.
