On the wins we shared Monday, the work I see every week, and the foundation we're actually building.
Monday I sent an email with three first places. Juju Stefani, surf, took Round 1 of the São Paulo state Sub-18 women's bracket. Branca Fernandes Lago, jiu-jitsu, won the Orlando Open. Lola, track & field, placed first in her 1.5K at nine years old. Three sports, three first places, one month.
I sent it because the wins are real and the wins are worth marking. But the wins are not the work. The wins are the receipt for it.
Here's what I want to take you behind:
I talk to each of these athletes and families weekly. Not monthly. Not "as needed." Weekly. WhatsApp mostly, Zoom sometimes, emails, phone messages. I see training schedules. I see travel plans. I see rest weeks. I see the videos they send between sessions.
I saw Julia and her sisters do pop-ups on a balance ball after a long surf session on a Tuesday night, before their competition during the weekend. I saw Branca drill the same setup forty times in a single Florida afternoon the week before Orlando Open. I watched Ainsley supporting Lola in balancing her long runs and her soccer practices.
This is the part nobody sees on Instagram. The part that doesn't fit inside a first-place headline. This is what I sign up to see when we sign an athlete — because the wins are real, but the work is what they're actually doing.
Now here's the part of Monday's email I didn't send. I'll send it now because it changes how the rest of this post lands.
The probability of any single athlete on Earth becoming an Olympian is approximately one in 500,000. In the United States, using USA Swimming as the cleanest data set: about half of one percent of registered swimmers qualify for Olympic Trials. Of those at Trials, only three percent make the Olympic team.
In track and field — Lola's sport — a 2022 study followed 67,600 athletes and found that only 23.5% of top-100 U18 athletes ever became top-100 senior athletes. Almost three quarters of elite teen runners do not stay elite as adults.
And the most striking number I found: in a UK longitudinal study, 90% of the senior top 20 performers in track and field were NOT in the top 20 when they were under 13. The kid who dominates at 13 is mostly not the adult who wins. Some of the senior champions were not on anyone's radar at 12.
I do not know which of these girls will make it. I do not know if any of them will. Nobody does. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
I'm telling you this not because the odds make NOGG's work harder to justify. I'm telling you because the odds clarify what NOGG's work actually is.
If our job were producing Olympians, the math would be against us and we'd be lying to every family we sign. But that's not the job.
The job is this: each of these girls is being shown — at nine, ten, thirteen, fourteen — that her voice matters. That her dreams matter. That a real adult will invest in her work before there's a medal guaranteeing the return. The brand on her gear bears her name because she earned the right to put it there. That she's part of something bigger than her own training schedule, and so is every other girl on the roster.
Most kids don't get any of that. Especially not at her age. Especially not in a sport that doesn't pay attention to her until the NIL deal at 18.
These girls are learning what it feels like to be backed. They're learning what it looks like for an adult to take their work seriously when it's still inconvenient — when the audience is small, the result is uncertain, and there's no obvious return for anyone. They're learning what a movement feels like from the inside.
That's not a skill they use to win a medal. That's a skill they use forever. It changes how they walk into rooms at 20. It changes who they hire at 30. It changes what they refuse to settle for at 40. It changes whether they become the adult who does this for someone else later.
The wins are real. The training is real. The first places matter. But if every one of these girls walked away from elite sport at 17 and never returned, the work would still have been worth it, because the foundation we built with them is not a foundation made of medals.
It's a foundation made of being seen, being heard, being paid, being backed. At the age when most girls are told to be smaller.
That's what NOGG actually bets on. The foundation. The thing that holds whether or not the medal ever lands on top of it.
Monday's email was about the wins. This one is about what the wins sit on top of. The next first place is somewhere on the schedule. So is the next loss. Both will happen. Both are the work. Neither is the point.
The point is the girls. And the foundation. And the movement they get to learn from the inside, starting now, at the age when it matters most.
— Melissa
Founder, NOGG Club
