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Founder & Editor
Strategy · Editorial · Product
Built Pivot after watching too many football parents — including himself — drown in noise. Background in product, parent of two players. Writes the Tribune lead each week.
SYDNEY, AU
About · The desk · Made in Australia
We built Pivot because nobody else was watching the part that mattered.
The football industry is full of dashboards measuring children. None of them watch the part that decides whether the child is still playing in five years — the conversation in the car, the silence after the mistake, the long arc nobody’s keeping. Pivot is the quiet record of that.
Our mission
Protect the person inside the player — by educating the adults around them.
Kids don’t quit football because they aren’t good enough. They quit because the fun died. The adults around them — parents, coaches, agents, scouts — quietly decide whether it stays alive. Pivot exists so those adults have reliable, science-based, structured information to make decisions from facts, not fear.
What we oppose
- The Industrial Complex. An ecosystem that treats children as financial assets, sells false “pathways”, and prioritises profit over development.
- The Vicarious Game. Unintentional pressure parents place on children when they project their own insecurities onto the field.
- The Measurement Trap. The belief that what gets charted is what matters. The most important parts of a football childhood don’t fit on a dashboard.
The masthead
The desk behind the Tribune.
A small editorial team plus a standing panel of advisors who review, challenge, and improve what we publish.
CM
Carlos
Senior Editor · Australian voice
Pivot's senior editorial conscience. Pushes for plain English, the Australian club reality, and short sentences. The reason articles get rewritten three times before they ship.
MELBOURNE, AU
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Behaviour Change Lead
COM-B · BCT mapping
Maps every Tribune article to specific Behaviour Change Techniques so the advice is testable, not vibey. Background in health behaviour science.
ACADEMIC ADVISOR
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Pathway Mentor
Coaching · Academy systems
20+ years across grassroots, state programmes, and academy pathways. Translates the politics of the system into language a parent can actually use on Tuesday night.
FORMER ACADEMY COACH
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Sport Psychologist
Inner Game · Identity · Pressure
Reviews everything we publish on confidence, identity, anxiety, and the car-ride-home moment. Practising clinician with youth-sport caseload.
PRO REQUESTS PANEL
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Performance Nutritionist
Fuelling · Sleep · Recovery
Keeps us honest on growth, sleep debt, and what 13-year-olds should actually be eating between training and bed. Spent a decade inside professional football.
PRO REQUESTS PANEL
Pro Requests are answered by a wider panel of vetted experts — coaches, psychologists, nutritionists, pathway mentors.
How the Tribune is made
Where the information actually comes from.
Pivot is opinionated, but our opinions show their working. Every piece of content runs through the same six lanes before it reaches you.
Framework01
COM-B model
Capability, Opportunity, Motivation → Behaviour. Every Tribune piece is mapped against COM-B so we know which lever the advice is actually pulling.
Method02
Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs)
Articles cite specific techniques from the BCT Taxonomy v1 (Michie et al.) — not generic 'tips'. If a recommendation doesn't map to a BCT, it doesn't ship.
Evidence03
Peer-reviewed research
Sleep, PHV, motor learning, pathway exit rates, parent-coach communication. We cite the source where it matters; we don't dress opinions up as science.
Practice04
Pitch-side reality
Our advisors coach, counsel, and consult inside the system every week. The Tribune is reviewed by people who still answer the question on a Tuesday training night.
Voice05
Australian football context
We write for Australian grassroots, state programmes, NPL, and academy realities — not transplanted European or American assumptions.
Loop06
Parent feedback
Conversations across WhatsApp and the web surface where the library is wrong, thin, or out of date. The Tribune evolves where parents tell us it has to.
Editorial standards
Four lines we won’t cross.
№ 01
We won't measure your child.
No heatmaps, no percentile dashboards. Pivot holds the picture around your kid — not a leaderboard of them.
№ 02
We won't fake the science.
Every claim maps to a source. AI responses cite the Tribune. If we don't know, we say we don't know.
№ 03
We won't sell your data.
Conversations are yours. No selling to third parties, no training other people's models on your child's context. Ever.
№ 04
We won't write to be neutral.
Some things in youth football are wrong. We name them. The Tribune has a side: the kid's.
Get in touch
Argue with us. Pitch a piece. Tell us we’re wrong.
The Tribune gets better when parents push back. If we got something wrong, missed a research update, or wrote past your actual situation — the door is open.