If you love an athlete, this is for you. If you are an athlete, it is because of you.

Sometimes the difference isn't whether a young person has people who love them. It's whether those people know what they're looking at soon enough to help.

Youth sports have become a complex environment, and most families walk into it without much preparation for what it may ask of their athlete or of them. The Parent Tip-Off Experience gives them that preparation earlier, so the people closest to a young athlete understand the world their kid is entering and know how to stay connected while they're in it.

It isn't a love problem. It's an information problem.

Parents send their kids into rooms they'll never be allowed to walk into. The closed practice. The locker room. The weight room when the load gets heavy. The correction that lands harder than intended.

Then their kid gets in the car, and a parent gets about eleven minutes to respond to something they never saw happen, in a world nobody ever explained to them.

So they guess. They Google it at midnight. They ask the wrong question at the wrong moment, and the door closes a little more.

It isn't a love problem. It's an information problem. And information problems are fixable.

The support is already standing in the room. The athlete isn't reaching for it.

• 1 in 4 NCAA Division I athletes report depressive symptoms, roughly double the rate among college students overall.

• Fewer than half would feel comfortable seeking mental health support on their own campus.

• Comfort talking to a coach is falling, down to 54% for men's sports and 40% for women's.

And yet nearly 70% of student-athletes say they have people around them they trust. The people are there. The conversation isn't happening. That gap is the whole opportunity.

Sources: NCAA Student-Athlete Health and Wellness Study (2023); NCAA Student-Athlete Well-Being Studies (2020 to 2022); National Institute of Mental Health (2019).

So we move it upstream.

By the time these pressures reach a college counseling center, we're doing cleanup. We'd rather reach families while their kid is thirteen, fifteen, or seventeen, and prepare the people closest to them before the pressure arrives, not after it breaks something.

The return is simple, and it's what we're actually building toward: a generation of kids who walk out of their athletic careers with their worth intact.

The inaugural experience.

Saturday, November 14: The Parent Tip-Off Experience for parents and caregivers.
Sunday, November 15: Student-Athlete Experience featuring Kaleb Joseph.

Hundreds of San Diego parents and families will spend an afternoon inside a professionally produced experience built on one question: what is my kid actually walking into, and how do I support them when they come home?

• Keynote speakers, including athletes, telling the truth about what this world asks of a kid and of the family carrying it with them.

• An expert panel answering the questions parents don't know they're allowed to ask.

• Wellness and resources, including guidance on communication, connection, and well-being, plus take-home tools every family carries out the door.

Who's behind these?

The Parent Tip-Off Experience is built on over 20 years of experience working with people, families, and communities. It brings Heather Cleaves' field observation, storytelling, and community insight together with the social work and athlete wellness lens of Allie Chapman, MSW, ASW, and Mind Body Athletes.

The Parent Tip-Off Experience was created by Heather Cleaves, founder of The Heather Experience, a youth sports storytelling and advocacy platform focused on the human being inside an athlete. For more than 20 years, Heather has worked directly with people through relationship-based work, photography, and storytelling. Through The Heather Experience, that work has placed her alongside student-athletes, parents, coaches, and schools, documenting and exploring pressure, identity, communication, and emotional realities that come with competitive sports. Those experiences became the foundation of The Parent Tip-Off Experience.

The experience is built alongside Allie Chapman, MSW, founder of Mind Body Athletes, who brings a social-work and athlete-wellness perspective to the parent education, resources, and practical tools families will take home.

Your gift reaches families earlier.

Ticket sales fill one room. Partnership takes the mission beyond it, into recurring programming, school and team partnerships, continued research, athlete storytelling, and sponsored seats for families who can't afford a ticket.

Every one of these athletes takes the jersey off one day. And then they still have to show up to life.

Invest. Partner. Help us reach them while they're still reachable.

The Parent Tip-Off Experience is created and produced by The Heather Experience in collaboration with Mind Body Athletes, with a nonprofit fundraising partnership through More Than An Athlete Emotional Intelligence, a 501(c)(3) organization.