Only 24% of C-Suite Executives Are Women. 94% of Them Played Sports.

Melyssa Jaskiewicz built Leveling the Fields in the gap between those two numbers, and she is closing it one elementary school gym at a time.

Prefer audio? Listen to the full episode on Unscripted Non-Profit.

I open every Unscripted Non-Profit interview by asking the guest why we should trust them. Melyssa Jaskiewicz answered, “I guess you probably shouldn’t. You don’t know me.” Then she spent the next forty minutes making the case anyway. Twenty years in sales and marketing, fifteen of them in pro sports, and now a nonprofit in Charleston, South Carolina that treats girls’ athletics as infrastructure instead of a nice-to-have. If you run a small nonprofit, there is more usable operating detail in this conversation than in most conference tracks. Listen to the full episode on Unscripted Non-Profit.

The Stat That Started Leveling the Fields

Here is the number Leveling the Fields was built on: only twenty-four percent of C-suite executives are female, but ninety-four percent of those women played sports. Melyssa reacted to it, and then she built an organization around it. She still puts it on a slide when she speaks to networking groups, and she watches the room do the math in real time. “You will inevitably see people click in their heads and be like, yeah, I played sports and I learned all this stuff.” The 24% is the problem. The 94% is the lever.

Two more numbers surprised her along the way: female athletes are less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, and less likely to end up in a domestic violent relationship. Her read on all three is the same. It makes sense the second you think about it. You have just never put those things in the same sentence before.

The mission that falls out of it is deliberately narrow — get more women into places of leadership, using sports as the catalyst. Day to day, that means the flagship program, EmpowerPlay, goes on site to elementary schools and introduces girls in third through fifth grade to sports they have never tried, with middle school clinics on top of it. The point is exposure, not recruitment.

“All girls are good at something, but we’re not all good at the same thing. You can’t hand everyone a soccer ball and be like, all right, we’re done here.”

Melyssa Jaskiewicz

If you have ever watched a kid get handed the one sport the district happens to offer and quietly decide that sports are not for them, you already know what she is describing. The more things a girl gets to try, the better the odds one of them turns out to be hers, and what comes with that is bigger than a skill. It is the moment she says I like this and I am good at it, and starts building an identity out of it. As Melyssa put it, it helps you connect to something, and then you do not feel so lost.

Two Boys for Every Girl Is a Pipeline Problem, Not an Interest Problem

In South Carolina, twice as many boys play high school sports as girls. Most people hear that and reach for a story about what girls want. Melyssa does not. There is plenty of interest, she says, and plenty of girls who want to play. What is missing is structure. There is no youth program feeding the middle school program feeding the high school program, so the high school cannot field a team because there is nobody to put on it. Chicken and egg, and the egg keeps losing.

That reframes the entire job. The goal is to walk into a high school and say you need a girls lacrosse team now, because we just ran the program at the seven elementary schools that feed into you, they are interested, and they have the basics. An uphill climb, in her words. But it is a climb with a route, which is more than most people get.

The family barrier is not desire either. It is options and logistics. A grandparent as the primary caregiver, or two working parents on shift work, or a program that sits half an hour to an hour across town, or 45 minutes of traffic between the last bell and the first drill. That is the barricade. Worth remembering the next time your own program’s intake numbers look like apathy — you may be reading a map problem as a motivation problem.

Why Leveling the Fields Hires the School’s Own Teachers as Coaches

This is the single most portable idea in the episode, and you could copy it this season. Leveling the Fields does not recruit outside coaches. It hires teachers from the school as the paid coaches for that school’s program.

Three things happen at once. Money goes back into a teacher’s pocket, which matters on its own. The kids already know the hierarchy and who is in charge, so the transition from the school day into sports takes no runway. And the classroom management skill you would otherwise have to train for, or lose a season learning, arrives with the hire. Kids will still step outside the boundaries. Teachers already know exactly how to handle that, because it is what they do all day, every day.

Melyssa calls it a saving grace. If you deliver programming for eight to eleven year olds on somebody else’s campus, that is a staffing model worth stealing outright.

ADD, Dyslexia, and the Case Against Cutting PE

Melyssa was diagnosed dyslexic and ADD in the 1980s, which she is quick to point out was a long time ago and a very different diagnosis. It makes this part of the conversation personal, and it makes her blunt. The biggest disservice we have done to ADD and ADHD kids, she says, is limiting physical activity. We should be having PE every day, and we are not.

“You can’t take those kids with a lot of energy and very fast brains and then expect them to sit still for eight hours. That’s just not how it works.”

Melyssa Jaskiewicz

She was not a great student. She struggled in school and excelled at certain sports, and the phrase she uses about that space is that everyone was more equal there. That is not a small thing to hand a kid who spends the other seven hours of the day feeling behind.

She has the before-and-after to go with the argument. One girl was in trouble constantly, could not sit still, pushed every button available. Four weeks into the program at her school, the coach came back with an update: the girl had started using the program as leverage on herself. Be really on today so we can get to Leveling the Fields quicker. On program days, the coach saw far less disruption in the classroom. Melyssa is careful here, and you should be too. They do not want the program used as a thing that gets taken away, and they tell schools not to do that. But when the reward is something a kid genuinely wants to earn, the behavior moves on its own.

Nonprofit Fundraising Is the Sales Skill That Doesn’t Transfer

Twenty years of selling, and the ask is still the hard part. She says so out loud instead of pretending otherwise, which is the most useful thing a nonprofit leader can do for anyone earlier in the job than they are.

“We have a school on a wait list and we need $14,000 to be able to pull that school off of a wait list. Can you give me $100? And it’s just awkward.”

Melyssa Jaskiewicz

In B2B she always had something in her hand. Do you want this? Fundraising has no object to point at, and the person across the table is frequently a friend. She describes herself as more business development than sales, so the relationship is where she thrives, and the thing she guards hardest is that nobody in her orbit should ever feel like the relationship exists to fund the nonprofit. Her fix is not a better script. It is treating donors the way she treated clients: find out who they are, why they gave, and what actually makes them feel appreciated. She is also clear-eyed about the stakes. If you do not get good at fundraising in nonprofit, you will drown.

Behind the ask sits a real organization. About thirty people, nearly all of them volunteers, split across six committees: marketing, programs, development, grants, events and operations. Each committee has a chair, each chair has two or three members, and Melyssa meets every chair one-on-one weekly and all of them as a group monthly. Slack runs all day. Twice a year everyone gets in one room for an all-hands, which is the only time some of these teams meet in person.

Volunteer Response Time Is a Nonprofit’s Speed to Lead

In home services, the metric is speed to lead, and the published numbers are worse than most owners believe. Ignitvio’s research on response time puts the average wait for a B2C lead at 47 hours, and finds that 73% of leads are never contacted at all. Not slow. Never.

Nonprofits have the exact same leak, except the inbound is a volunteer or a donor instead of a buyer. Melyssa knows there is a stat about how long nonprofits take to respond to volunteer inquiries and how tightly that correlates with whether the person ever comes back. She does not need the number, because she interviewed a candidate who had reached out to a local shelter and heard nothing for almost a year. That is the extreme case. Waiting a couple of weeks is ordinary. So Leveling the Fields put a volunteer manager in place, and they get back to people within a couple of hours.

The other half of that is telling people the truth before they raise their hand. This is not a show up, pack a bag and leave organization. Coaches are paid, hired, put through a four-hour training before the season, and SLED-checked, because you do not put a stranger on an elementary school campus. When someone says they want to volunteer with the girls during the school year, the answer is no. But the no comes with somewhere to go — help with the summer camp, join the mailing list, or donate. Being that clear up front costs one uncomfortable sentence and saves both sides a season of mismatch.

On the tooling side, she is not using AI to make graphics. She runs paid Claude and ChatGPT as collaborators, having trained ChatGPT for two and a half years and Claude for about six months. She uses them to draft and sharpen donor emails, to write grants, and to think out loud, which matters when you work from home and every other person in the org is a volunteer in a revolving door. Claude is connected to her Gmail to clear bounce-backs into a spreadsheet she uploads into HubSpot. She pasted all thousand of the organization’s Instagram followers into Claude and asked which of them would be the best collaboration targets to expand reach, and it told her.

My friend Matt Brooks at SEOteric puts it as well as anyone: AI is the worst customer support rep you will ever hire if you do not educate it, and the best one you will ever hire if you feed it. Melyssa has been feeding hers for two and a half years. That is the entire difference between her answer and everyone else’s.

How to Get Involved with Leveling the Fields

Leveling the Fields operates out of Charleston, South Carolina today, with a plan to expand across the Southeast and then nationally. Her stated target is all fifty states by 2044. The handle is @LevelingTheFields on every platform, so the organization is genuinely easy to find.

Hear the whole conversation on Unscripted Non-Profit, hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

One last thing worth stealing, even if you do not run a nonprofit. The teachers-as-coaches decision is a staffing play any business that works inside somebody else’s building can run — contractors, agencies, caterers, managed IT. We wrote it up as a step-by-step operating procedure for small business owners, with a free printable worksheet and no email gate: Insider Hire SOP: Staff Your Service From Inside the Building You Already Serve.