Better Sports Parents

Brendan Morrison played over 900 games in the NHL and centred a line known as The West Coast Express, the league's highest scoring line for a couple of seasons. As a parent, he and his wife Erin have raised four children, all of whom became NCAA Division I athletes... but that was never Brendan's or Erin's goal. In this segment, Brendan discusses the pressure too many parents place on their kids in youth sports and how to keep a realistic perspective without killing your child's dreams.

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Canada needs change in its sport system; Radha Balani has seen this before. As an expert partner in strategy and leadership at Think Beyond, she spent decades inside the UK's sport system, including its radical 2015 overhaul. Since then, she's worked with several countries and companies directly, including Jumpstart and the Canadian Paralympic Committee. She knows exactly what it takes to change a national sport system at scale because she's lived it.
In this conversation, Radha traces her own youth sports journey growing up in a small English village, playing every sport she could find, and the progressive PE teacher who simply refused to put kids in boxes. She's candid that her own success was luck, not design — the system wasn't built for someone who looked like her, and she knows it.
Radha breaks down exactly why the UK's 2015 reform worked, why Canada's current moment looks similar but lacks a critical component that made the difference, and what it actually means to measure outcomes instead of outputs. She makes the case for a mixed economy of public, private and community sport, explains why affordability is the single biggest barrier in Canadian sport today, and lays out what model nations like Norway and Australia got right by treating sport as a vehicle for health and wellbeing rather than the end goal itself.
Better Sports Parents is helping parents positively contribute to the youth sports environment. Subscribe for new episodes every week.
Chapters
00:00 Opening
02:04 Itroducing Radha Balani
03:11 Liverpool, Her Father & John Barnes
05:09 Youth Sport Was Luck, Not Design
07:18 Injury, Identity & Losing Sport at University
09:39 Why She Loved Sport: Safety, Repetition & Belonging
11:59 Inclusion, Exclusion & Growing Up Different
16:00 Survivor Bias and Realizing How Lucky She Was
18:48 The UK's 2015 Turning Point
21:27 Canada in 2026: Similar Crossroads, Missing Piece
23:52 Why NSOs Can't Carry This Alone
27:14 The System Is Fractured — Can It Be Fixed or Rebuilt?
30:05 Is Sport in Canada Truly Unaffordable?
34:16 What's Missing: A Strategy, Not Just Recommendations
40:26 Norway, Sport as a Vehicle, Not the End Goal
43:55 The UK Tied Funding to Changing the Rules
45:15 Outcomes vs. Outputs: What Actually Changes Lives
49:01 Travel Teams, Sport Sampling & the Cliff Edge
53:32 Duty of Care: The Governance Piece Missing in North America
56:36 Paying Coaches for Training
59:14 Trauma-Informed Coaching
1:03:09 The Mixed Economy: Public, Private & Community Sport Together
1:06:14 Canada's Biggest Issue: Affordability
1:07:00 What Progress Actually Looks Like

Resources
⁠Think Beyond⁠
⁠Future of Sport in Canada Commission Report⁠
⁠Jumpstart⁠
⁠Kick4Life

Former CFL centre and Grey Cup champion Angus Reid is now a high school football coach, a keynote speaker, and recently authored his second book, "Teenager: A Story About Finding Your Way". In this segment, Angus shares why he refuses to charge kids for coaching, what children can teach coaches and parents if they take the time to listen, and the critical difference between being demanding and demeaning.
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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

Jesse Marsch, coach of Canada's National Men's Soccer Team, has seen youth sports development from every angle: as a player, as a coach, and as a parent. Jesse doesn't give parenting advice: he gives coaching insights rooted in decades of professional experience and the lessons learned from watching his own three children navigate sports across the globe. In this segment, Jesse reveals the secret he learned as parent that made him a better coach, how coaches can bring parents alongside them in their child's sports experience, and why a positive environment produces the best results for players of all abilities.
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