Greg Stewart spent the first 25 years of his life trying to prove to people that he wasn't disabled despite being born without half of his left arm. Once he changed his mindset, he found the sport of shot put and won two Paralympic gold medals.

Greg is a three-time world champion in para standing volleyball, a U Sports Defensive player of the Year in able bodied basketball, and he stands seven foot two. But the most interesting thing about him isn't his resume. It's the path he had to walk to get there. A path that ran through able-bodied sport, university, rock bottom, two lost jobs, and an eventual breakthrough: accepting himself exactly as he was.

In this conversation, Greg talks about what sport means when you spend years doing it for the wrong reasons, why failure is one of the most important things we can teach young athletes, and what the word inclusion actually means when you strip away the box-ticking. He shares the three values he brings to young athletes — trust, ownership and integrity — and makes a compelling case that the real problem in youth sports right now isn't the coaches or the kids. It's the parents... who he also believes are the solution.

Greg is 40 years old, newly married, a brand new father of a three-month-old daughter, and studying for his master's in counseling. He has more to say about sport, identity and mental health than almost anyone we've had on this show.

🎙️ Better Sports Parents: helping parents positively contribute to the youth sports environment. Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

01:36 Introducing Greg Stewart

03:46 How Greg Got Into Sport

05:03 "You Can't Coach Height" — Using What You've Got

05:38 Starting in Grassroots: Soccer, Lacrosse and Everything Else

07:15 What His Parents Got Right: Encouragement Without Force

08:41 Did Sport Feel Like a Place He Belonged?

11:43 25 Years Trying to Prove He Wasn't Disabled

13:09 Leaning Into Able-Bodied Sport: What He Was Really Chasing

15:02 Having Success Without Having Joy

16:51 Chasing External Validation for 25 Years

17:16 Rock Bottom: Almost Failing Out, Fired From Two Jobs

19:36 How He Found Joy in Sport Again

20:26 Failure Is Important

22:26 How He Discovered Shot Put

25:24 Physical Health and Mental Health Are the Same Thing

28:12 Finding Flow State in Sport

30:07 What Greg Tells Young Athletes: Trust, Ownership and Integrity3

3:15 Are Parents Owning the Right Things?

35:19 Your Discomfort Is Leading the Way: A Message for Parents

38:17 Mental Health Support in Sport: What's Changed and What Hasn't

39:23 Why We Need to Let Kids Fail 41:20 Do All the Sports

43:18 Youth Sport Has Become Too Commercialized

44:13 The Coaches Who Shaped Greg

46:04 Ownership and Trust: Who Really Runs the Team?

48:38 What Inclusion Actually Means

52:03 Where Does Healthy Competition Belong in Youth Sport?

55:56 The Objective vs. The Purpose: A Crucial Distinction

57:42 Greg's Biggest Issue in Youth Sport Today: Parent Involvement

01:00:04 How to Bring Parents Along: Lead by Vulnerability

01:02:32 The Listeners We Really Need to Reach

01:03:30 The Mindfulete

Resources

Greg Stewart

The Mindfulete

Jumpstart

Jay Triano has spent almost all of his 67 years in sport. He's a former captain of Canada's Men's Basketball Team, the first Canadian head coach in NBA history with the Toronto Raptors, and a current assistant with the Dallas Mavericks. He's also the son of a high school basketball coach and the father of three kids who all played youth sports, which means he's seen every side of the equation.

In this conversation, Jay draws direct lines between how he was raised in sport in Niagara Falls and the NBA coach he became. He talks about playing basketball, volleyball, baseball and track until he was nearly 18, why Steve Nash never acted like the best player in the room despite being exactly that, and what a parking lot practice with no hoops taught him about fundamentals that individual skill sessions never could.

Jay is direct about what he sees wrong in youth sports today: parent-driven environments that prioritize exposure over development, social media that skips all the steps, and a growing culture of selfish play filtering down from the professional game. And he's equally clear about the fix: fun, teamwork, open communication, and coaches who understand that they're coaching twelve kids, not just yours.

🎙️ Better Sports Parents: helping parents positively contribute to the youth sports environment. Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

01:35 Introducing Jay Triano

03:18 A Life in Sport: 67 Years and Still Going

04:16 How Jay's Dad Shaped His Love of the Game

05:37 Multi-Sport Until 17: Basketball, Baseball, Volleyball & Track

06:44 Unstructured Play: Street Hockey and Stats in the Front Yard

07:20 How Multi-Sport Cross-Training Made Jay a Better Athlete

08:21 Raising His Own Kids: Let Them Love What They Love

10:00 What Youth Sport Looked Like When His Kids Were Young

11:32 What Jay Looked for in a Youth Coach

12:31 Youth Sport Today: Parent-Driven and Overspecialized

13:55 NIL, Agents at Young Ages & Money Changing the Game

14:17 Higher Skills, Lower IQ

15:47 Too Many Games, Not Enough Practice

18:25 Multi-Sport and Learning to Fill a Role

19:08 Steve Nash: The Best Player Who Never Acted Like It

22:14 The European Model: Growing Together

24:15 Canadian Basketball's Rise and the Affordability Problem

26:14 If You're Good Enough, You Will Be Found

28:04 What Jay Wanted His Kids to Get Out of Sport

29:51 Learning From Bad Coaches Too

29:58 The Coaches Who Shaped Jay

33:32 The Biggest Mistake Jay Made as a Young Coach

36:11 Number One Advice for New Coaches: Make It Fun

38:19 How to Recognize and Reward Every Role on a Team

40:16 Phil Jackson's Rule: Acknowledge the Screen, Not Just the Bucket

44:54 What Jay's Dad Said After the Games

47:15 The Volunteer Coach and Referee Crisis

48:07 No Secrets: Jay's Rule on Parent Communication

52:10 He Wasn't Going to Cut a Kid in Grade Seven

53:51 What a Good Youth Environment Actually Looks Like

58:23 Developing Canadian Coaches: A Missed Opportunity

01:00:14 A Simple Thank You Can Keep a Coach Coming Back

01:02:16 The Parking Lot Practice That Built His Fundamentals

01:04:06 Social Media Is Skipping All the Steps

01:06:01 Are We Over-Parenting? Kids Need Difficult Situations

01:07:38 Learning to Be Coached Hard

01:09:06 Jay's Biggest Issue in Youth Sports Today

Resources

Jay Triano

⚠️ This episode deals with serious topics including mental health, self-harm, and abuse. If you or someone you know needs support, contact Kids Help Phone (1-800-668-6868) or the Suicide Crisis Helpline (988).

Brock McGillis became the first openly gay player to have played professional hockey, but the path to that moment nearly cost him everything. Depression. Daily drinking. Self-harm. A sport culture that told him, in a thousand small ways every day, that he couldn't be himself.

Today Brock runs the Shift Makers tour, visiting over 250 hockey teams across Canada in a single season. What he finds in those rooms is alarming: over a thousand players disclosing thoughts of self-harm or suicide, thousands more sharing mental health struggles, and more than 50 who had never told anyone they'd been sexually assaulted — until they told him.

In this conversation, Brock talks about why sport culture continues to silence young people, what true inclusion actually looks like versus what organizations claim it looks like, and why the answer isn't more analysis — it's action. He also shares the story of Brendan Burke, whose friendship and tragic death became the catalyst for everything Brock does today.

This is one of the most important conversations Better Sports Parents has had.

Better Sports Parents is helping parents positively impact the youth sports environment. Subscribe for new episodes every week

Chapters

00:00 Opening

01:36 Introduction & Content Warning

03:17 The Shift Makers Tour: 250 Teams in 200 Days

04:11 How Locker Room Culture Programs Kids to Conform

08:13 How Do We Go From Thinking the Right Things to Actually Doing Them?

09:15 The Push-Up Story: How Shift Makers Was Born

10:06 Challenging Bravery: "Tell Me Something You Wouldn't Tell a Teammate"

12:10 "The Locker Room Should Be Disneyland"

15:04 Why Kids Won't Talk to Parents and What Brock Does Differently

19:17 The Real Reason Kids Don't Come Forward

22:14 Why Brock Becomes the First Person They Ever Tell

23:11 Parents Need to Humanize Themselves Too

30:38 What to Do When Your Teenager Won't Talk to You

34:19 Why "I Didn't Mean It Like That" Is Not Good Enough

35:08 How the Culture Became Brock's Identity and His Prison

38:11 Who or What Finally Made Him Be Himself

43:27 Brendan Burke: The Friend Who Changed Everything

43:58 What True Inclusion Actually Looks Like in Sport

46:36 Why "We're a Family" Is Often Hollow

51:26 Stop Talking. Start Doing.

54:21 The Vicious Cycle: Coaches Doing What Was Done to Them

58:51 Talk to Them as People, Not as Hockey Robots

1:00:47 Resources for Self-Harm and Mental Health Support

1:04:14 The Biggest Issue in Youth Sport Today: Affordability

1:07:21 Why Sport Can Still Be Great

Resources

Brock McGillis' advocacy and speaking platform

Kids Help Phone

⁠Jumpstart

Chris Pronger's NHL resume reads like a fairy tale: second overall pick, Stanley Cup champion, two Olympic gold medals, Hart Trophy, Norris Trophy, Hockey Hall of Fame. But ask him what the hardest thing he's ever done is, and the answer isn't hockey. It's parenting. In this conversation with Scott Rintoul, Chris draws a direct line between the low-pressure, multi-sport, creativity-driven childhood he had in Dryden, Ontario and the Hall of Fame career that followed. He talks candidly about the two rules he gave his own kids — work hard and have fun — and what happened when one of his sons stopped doing the second one. Chris doesn't mince words on the state of youth sport. He believes we've monetized and commoditized childhood sport to the point where the kids have been forgotten entirely. He's watched joy get extracted from talented players at every level, seen parents chase triple-A status for the wrong reasons, and watched super teams steamroll opponents while teaching kids nothing about adversity. His message is simple: fun comes first. The passion, the work ethic, the resilience... it all comes later. If it isn't fun, the rest of won't matter.

🎙️ Better Sports Parents: helping parents positively impact the youth sports environment. Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Chapters

0:00 Opening

01:35 Introduction: Chris Pronger

03:40 The Hardest Job of His Career: Parenting

04:48 Being a Parent vs. Being a Friend

06:00 How Chris Was Parented in Sport

08:08 Low Pressure, High Support: What His Parents Got Right

09:29 Unstructured Play and Why It Made Him Better

11:01 Multi-Sport: Why Chris Played Everything

12:41 Taking Breaks From Hockey, Even as a Pro

13:49 Are Kids on the Ice Too Long?

16:28 When It Should Be About Fun, Not Wins

19:22 Travel Sports: How Much Is Too Much, Too Soon?

23:31 His Two Rules as a Sports Parent

24:07 The Conversation He Had With His Son Who Wasn't Having Fun

26:12 Pressure to Have Kids in Hockey?

29:04 Studying the Game as a Kid

32:40 Passion vs. Fit: Follow What You Love

39:08 Parents: Who Are You Doing This For?

41:13 Triple-A or Bust: The Stigma That Kills the Joy

42:27 Even NHL Scouts Get It Wrong

48:58 Standards: Where Do They Come From?

49:37 Victimhood, Accountability and When His Game Turned Around

51:39 Blame Culture in Youth Sport and How to Fix It

53:33 The Monetization and Commoditization Problem

56:28 FOMO and the Genie That Won't Go Back in the Bottle

58:34 Super Teams: Why Chris Hates Them in Any Sport

59:01 Adversity as a Gift

01:05:07 What Youth Sport Teaches Future CEOs

01:09:44 Chris's Biggest Issue in Youth Sport Today

Resources

⁠Chris Pronger's Book: Earned⁠

⁠Chris Pronger: Hockey Hall of Fame⁠

Adam Van Koeverden has paddled over 120,000 kilometres in his lifetime. He's a four-time Olympian, a multiple world champion, and one of the most decorated kayakers Canada has ever produced. He's also Canada's Secretary of State for Sport, and that may be where his biggest race is being run.

In this conversation, Adam traces the full arc of a sporting life that began with a mom who needed somewhere for her kid to go after school. The Oakville canoe club was affordable, it was welcoming, it ran on volunteers, and it changed everything. Adam wants every Canadian kid to have access to that same kind of experience, and he's now in a position to do something about it. He talks candidly about the $755 million federal investment in sport recently announced, and what it's actually designed to do. As Adam puts it, every world champion Canada has ever produced started out splashing around in swimming lessons or kicking a ball at a community center, and the foundation for elite sport is an active society.

He also weighs in on the issues sports parents know too well: early specialization, the pressure to travel at young ages, the cost of living squeezing family budgets, and the gap between what the research says about youth development and what's actually happening on the ground. He shares his honest view on what a good youth coach looks like, what his own parents did right, and why the Norwegian model keeps coming up as the gold standard. And he makes the case that physical activity and play are human rights.

Chapters

0:00 Opening

1:35 Introducing Adam Van Koeverden

5:11 The $755M Announcement: Largest Sport Investment in Canadian History

8:00 How Will the $755M Show Up in Your Community?

8:28 National Sport Organizations & the Alignment Problem

12:37 Hockey Canada and the Trust Deficit in Governance

14:30 Do We Need to Overhaul National Sport Organizations?

15:38 Underfunded at Every Level

16:39 Nation Building Through Sport: Why Adam Put His Name on a Ballot

18:24 What Parents Are Telling Him

21:46 The Case for Coed Sport Until Age 12

23:19 Can Government Incentivize Multi-Sport?

26:18 School-Based Sport vs. Club Sport: The Balance We've Lost

27:31 Not-for-Profit vs. For-Profit Sport

29:20 Sport Saves Kids

30:42 Adam's Youth Sports Journey

32:45 Why Kayaking?

34:12 Physical Literacy for All Canadians

37:12 Screens and the Generation That Stopped Moving

39:44 Competition vs. Participation

41:49 What Adam's Parents Did Right

43:05 The Norwegian Model: Kids Are Not Olympians

45:43 The Foundation for Success in Sport

46:39 What a Positive Sporting Environment Actually Looks Like

49:08 Valuing Coaching

54:48 Cost of Living, Sideline Pressure and Sport on the Chopping Block

56:05 What Does Success Look Like for Canada in 5, 10, 15 Years?

59:48 Adam's Biggest Issue: Declining Participation

1:00:46 Reasons for Optimism

Resources

⁠Canada's $755M Investment⁠

⁠Future of Sport in Canada Commission Report⁠

⁠Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities

Laurent Duvernay-Tardif contains multitudes. He's a Super Bowl champion with the Kansas City Chiefs, a practicing physician in Quebec, a business owner, and the founder of a foundation dedicated to giving underserved children access to both sport and the arts. He is also one of the most thoughtful voices on youth sport you will find anywhere.

In this conversation, Laurent traces the full arc of a remarkable life: from a childhood spent sailing with his family across the Caribbean, to playing badminton and violin alongside football as a teenager, to meeting with the Dean of Medicine before meeting a single NFL team, to sitting out a season to serve on the front lines of COVID relief. At every step, his story challenges the assumptions that dominate youth sports culture today.

Laurent argues that sport and physical activity have quietly become two different things: one is an industry of performance, the other is a lifelong health behaviour. He believes the youth sports environment has tilted too far toward the former, narrowing the pipeline of kids who stay active. He talks about what Andy Reid understood about coaching that most coaches never do, describes the Kansas City locker room as a place where Travis Kelce's interest in fashion was treated with the same respect as a surgical reduction of a fracture, and how that culture of permission made the team better. He also opens up about his LDT Foundation, now active in over 60 schools & 400 summer camps across Quebec, which fuses sport and art to serve children who would otherwise have neither. And he makes a case that the goal of youth sport should not be to produce more elite athletes, but to produce more active humans.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

01:36 Introducing Laurent Duvernay-Tardif

05:32 Why He Never Gave Up Medicine for the NFL

08:26 What Makes Andy Reid a Special Coach

09:57 Youth Coaches Who Let Him Stay Multi-Sport

11:30 How Martial Arts, Badminton Made Him a Better Lineman

12:50 His Parents' Approach

13:56 Two Years Away From Organized Sport

16:09 Being Left on an Island

17:06 Coming Back at 15: Hungry for Sport Again

17:58 Playing to Have Fun

19:32 What His Parents Asked After Games

20:47 The Contract Call: His Mom's Reaction

22:22 What Unconditional Love Looks Like in Sport

23:38 Why He's Not Ready to Coach Yet

24:02 What a Good Youth Coach Should Be

25:48 What to Look for in a Team Before You Enroll Your Kids

27:33 The Performance Industry vs. The Community

29:21 Building a Bigger Funnel

31:22 Importance of Elite Sport

33:17 Why More Participants Means More Champions

34:40 The LDT Foundation

37:10 Why Summer Matters Most for Kids Who Need It

38:09 How Playing Violin Made Him a Better Athlete

40:06 The KC Locker Room: Pokemon Cards, Fashion & Surgery

43:44 Why Football Became His Sport

46:08 Mahomes, Kelce and the Case for Multi-Sport

47:11 Were You Free to Play as a Kid?

48:01 Connecting People Through Sport

50:06 Why Kids Should Try Every Position

51:11 Affordability and Access: The Gap We're Creating

53:06 Don't Push Too Hard Too Soon

53:51 Where Should Money in Youth Sport Go?

55:39 Why Intergenerational Play Matters

57:15 The Most Influential Thing a Parent Can Do

57:56 Screen Time & Social Media

59:01 The Biggest Issue in Youth Sport

1:01:02 Jumpstart's Rethink Initiative

Resources

LDT Foundation

Jumpstart

Jumpstart's Rethink Initiative

Ryan Huska has seen youth sports from just about every angle. As head coach of the Calgary Flames, he operates at the pinnacle of professional hockey. But as a father of three, he's also lived the full experience of the sports parent. Certain aspects of what he sees concerns him.

In this conversation, Ryan reflects on two decades of parenting in youth sport and pulls no punches. He believes early specialization is producing a lo of technically gifted players who've lost their feel for the team game. He traces that back to a youth sports culture that rewards individual development over collective play, and that has created so many leagues and avenues that kids never learn how to handle adversity, adapt to a new role, or simply fall down a level and work their way back up.

Ryan talks about the car ride home, the importance of asking open-ended questions instead of offering critique, the value of multi-sport development, and what he learned about hard work and teamwork during his Memorial Cup years with the Kamloops Blazers.

He also addresses the proliferation of leagues and options that let families opt out of any environment that challenges them, a trend Ryan thinks is sending the wrong message to kids, fragmenting communities, and creating more problems than it solves.

🎙️ Subscribe to Better Sports Parents, a podcast dedicated to helping parents more positively contribute to the youth sports environment.

Chapters

0:00 Opening

01:35 Introducing Ryan Huska

03:27 Is Being a Sports Parent More Stressful Than Coaching the NHL?

04:02 How Youth Sports Has Changed

04:49 The Rise of Individualism

06:10 The Problem with Early Specialization

07:12 The Fear of Falling Behind

09:22 Late Bloomers and Different Paths to the Top

10:26 The Fire That Comes from Taking a Break Between Sports

11:33 When Sport Starts to Feel Like a Job

13:54 Getting Kids to Their Ceiling Too Fast

15:35 Entitlement & Learning to Accept a Different Role

17:09 Growing Up in a Small Town

20:25 His Parents' Role in Ryan's Sports Journey

24:05 How Ryan Learned to Talk to His Own Kids After Games

26:25 The Carpool Secret: Why Other Kids in the Car Changes Everything

28:23 Why Ryan Chose Hockey Over Baseball at 15

30:25 Getting Humbled at Kamloops

34:04 How a Part-Time Job Became a Coaching Career

36:47 Coaching His Daughters in Soccer

39:57 "Too Much Too Soon"

41:48 Does Specialization Actually Create Better Players?

44:22 Why Kids Need to Watch Full Games

47:36 Unstructured Play and the Loss of Creativity

48:13 Why Coaches Should Add Small Area Games Back

49:28 What Advice Ryan Gives Volunteer Coaches

51:10 How to Communicate With and Manage Parents as a Coach

53:11 The Problem with Too Many Leagues

55:51 Why Parents Are Losing the Plot: Intentions vs. Outcomes

57:08 The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Affordability Crisis

59:07 The ROI Problem

1:01:35 Ryan's Number One Concern in Youth Sports Today

1:03:19 What Ryan Hopes His Kids Took From Sport

Resources

Jumpstart

KidSport Calgary

Athletics for Kids

Dr. Oliver Finlay has seen youth sport from every angle: athlete, physiotherapist, performance director, and global sports investor. In this conversation, he makes a clear-eyed case for what's broken in North American youth sport and what needs to change. Growing up in the UK, Oliver played a multitude of sports, guided by parents who simply encouraged commitment and let sport do the teaching. The result was a confident adult whose business network is built on the same values he learned in locker rooms. What he sees across North America is something very different: a $40 billion industry that has turned child development into a revenue model. Over-coached kids who can't think for themselves. Early specialization pushed by clubs whose incentive is to fill programs, not develop players. Coaches with no formal training. And parents being told their child will be left behind if they don't commit to one sport, one team, one pathway — right now. Oliver breaks down why unstructured play produces 47% more physical activity than organized sessions, why the best athletes he's worked with played multiple sports well into their late teens, and why early specialization leads directly to overuse injuries, burnout, and kids quitting sport early. He also gets into what real team culture looks like, how to evaluate a club beyond the fancy kit, and the two investments he'd make to fix the system today.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

01:35 Introducing Dr. Oliver Finlay

03:26 Why youth sport shaped everything for Oliver

06:36 How sport transformed a painfully shy kid

08:52 Growing up multi-sport in the UK

11:14 What Oliver's parents got right

13:09 Europe vs. North America: a tale of two systems

16:34 When youth sport becomes a $30–40B business

18:51 The overcoaching problem and the robot factory

22:05 Sport for life vs. sport for performance

23:33 Access, equity, and why most kids quit within three years

28:34 The missing recreational pathway

30:52 Why collaboration is the key to fixing the system

32:23 Coach licensing: Europe vs. North America

35:27 The best coaches come from teaching, not playing

37:51 Burnout, overuse injuries, and undertrained coaches

41:32 The professionalization of youth sport

42:52 Early specialization: the biggest fallacy in youth sport

45:29 Why late specializers dominate international drafts

47:49 How to actually evaluate a club

49:37 What high performance really means, and when it starts

51:23 The car ride conversation: what to ask after the game

52:23 What real team culture looks like

57:13 Winning and development aren't mutually exclusive

58:33 Why winning-at-all-costs loses your best late developers

01:00:15 What organizations do that actually create lifelong athletes

01:03:12 Where to invest to fix Canadian youth sport

01:07:25 The biggest issue in youth sport today

Resources

Dr. Oliver Finlay - LinkedIn

Beautiful Game Group