What We Check Before We Put a Coach in Front of Your Kids

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Every program director I talk to eventually asks the same question without asking it directly. They don't phrase it this way, but what they want to know is who is actually going to be alone in a room, or on a call, with their young men for the next ninety days. That's not paranoia. That's the job they're doing on behalf of every parent who trusted them with their kid.

Most coaching and mentoring pitches skip straight past that question and go to the curriculum. The schedule, the framework, the pricing. All useful, none of it the thing a smart buyer actually needs answered first. So here it is, plainly, before you have to dig for it.

Who Is Actually Running the Sessions

There's no bench of coaches here and no subcontracting. Every session, every cohort, every call, is run by me, personally. Twenty-two years mentoring and developing people inside a structured leadership chain, on top of twelve years coaching youth baseball and four years coaching basketball. I'm not listing that to impress you. I'm listing it because it's the honest answer to the question you're actually asking: who is this guy, and how long has he been doing this.

If your organization needs a background check or professional references before signing, I'll get them done, no pushback and no delay. Professional liability coverage works the same way. I don't carry it by default at this stage of the business, but I'll put it in place if that's what your agreement requires. I'd rather tell you exactly where things stand right now than have you find out after everything's already signed.

What "Safe" Actually Means in Practice

This is coaching, not clinical treatment, and I say that plainly instead of letting anyone assume otherwise. I'm not a licensed therapist or counselor. I don't diagnose anything and I don't treat anything. What I do have is a protocol, built and agreed to with your organizational contact before session one, not improvised in the moment something serious happens.

If a young man discloses self-harm, harm to someone else, abuse, or substance dependency, he gets referred to the right resource immediately, and your organization is notified at the same time, not after the fact. You already know what happens before you sign. That's the difference between a policy and a promise.

How the 90 Days Are Actually Watched

A cohort isn't six sessions with a long silence in between them. Your organizational contact gets a written progress summary every month, not one report dropped on you at the end when it's too late to adjust anything. Every man's commitment gets logged session to session, so you can see exactly where he's tracking individually, not just how the group feels in general on a given week.

Between live sessions there's a structured reading plan and a group thread that keeps the work alive without turning into a second program you have to manage on top of everything else you're already running. None of that reporting is automated. I'm the one reading what gets logged and writing those summaries, because the entire point of putting a person in front of your kids instead of an app is that a person, not a dashboard, is paying attention to each one of them.

What Closure Actually Looks Like

A lot of youth programs end the way they ran: the bus pulls up, everybody goes home, and that's the last anyone hears from the program. This one doesn't work that way. Session six closes with each man naming what he's building and what he's doing with it next, not just finishing a reading list and shaking hands. Every man takes the Forge Score at intake and again at the close, so the gap between those two numbers is something concrete you can hand to your board, not a feeling someone reports back to you secondhand.

Then there's a thirty-day group check-in, built into the program from the start, not an afterthought I tack on if I happen to remember. Closure is part of the design, the same as the opening session is.

If a program can't tell you who's actually running it, what happens the moment something goes wrong, how the work gets watched week to week, or how it ends, that's the real gap worth asking about. Not the one you came here already expecting to ask.