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MiraCosta College, OceansideNovember 14 & 15, 2026
Reach athletes sooner by preparing the families who love them earlier.
Attending?
Saturday, November 14, 6-8 PM, Concert Hall: The Parent Tip-Off Experience, ticketed.
Sunday, November 15, 4-6 PM, Basketball Gym: The Athlete Experience, free, registration required.
MiraCosta College, Oceanside Campus, 1 Barnard Dr, Oceanside, CA 92056.
Two events, two registrations. Parents get tickets for Saturday. Register your athlete for Sunday.
One Weekend. Two Rooms. One Athlete.
Saturday
Approximately 400 parents and caregivers inside a documentary-style live experience built around athlete voice, expert perspective and practical tools.
Sunday
The Athlete Experience, a free experience built for young athletes, centered on a 75-minute conversation around mental health, identity, pressure and resilience.
The Premise
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.
The adults closest to young athletes cannot support what they have never been prepared to recognize. The Parent Tip-Off Experience prepares them.
The Gap
Parents send their kids into rooms they will never be allowed to walk into. Closed practices. Locker rooms. Weight rooms. Coaching conversations. Then their kid gets in the car, and a parent has a few minutes to respond to something they never saw happen in a world nobody ever explained to them.
Earlier
Reach families while their athlete is thirteen, fifteen, seventeen. Prepare the support system before the pressure arrives, not after it breaks something.
Together
This work does not replace coaches, schools, physicians, therapists or wellness programs. It helps families recognize what may be happening before, between and around those systems.
The Goal
The larger mission is a generation of kids who can walk out of their athletic careers with their identity, relationships and sense of worth intact.
November 14 & 15
The parent room and the athlete room are intentionally different. Families need preparation for what comes home. Athletes need a space that speaks directly to what they carry.
Saturday · November 14 · 6-8 PM
A professionally produced evening for approximately 400 San Diego parents and caregivers.
Sunday · November 15 · 4-6 PM
FREE · Registration required. Created specifically for young athletes, centered on the conversations they deserve to hear before pressure becomes identity.
Featured Speaker
Former ESPN Top-10 point guard recruit, Division I basketball player and mental-health advocate
Why This Work Belongs to The Heather Experience
The Heather Experience grew from youth-sports photography into storytelling, interviews and advocacy with athletes, families, coaches and schools across San Diego. Years of showing up with a camera built trust inside the environment itself.
The images were never only about documenting performance. They reflected athletes back to themselves, made them visible, and opened the door to honest conversations about what was happening underneath the uniform.
I thought I was creating experiences for athletes. What those experiences really gave me was access to theirs.
Why Now
The downstream data is a warning sign. The opportunity is to reach families earlier, before a young athlete is expected to carry everything alone.
Source framework used in the Parent Tip-Off campaign deck: NCAA Student-Athlete Health and Wellness Study (2023); NCAA Student-Athlete Well-Being Studies (2020 to 2022); National Institute of Mental Health (2019).
What Comes After
The Parent Tip-Off is designed as a first step, and we hope it leads to more. Gifts to this campaign support the Parent Tip-Off project only. Any future programming will be developed and funded separately.
Fund the Mission
Gifts support the approved Parent Tip-Off project: the venue and production, speakers and programming, original film and storytelling, parent resources, and keeping the Nov. 15 Athlete Experience free.
Where Support Goes
Venue and production quality.
Speakers, lived experience and expert perspective.
Parent guides and practical resources that travel home.
Original storytelling at the heart of the experience.
Helps keep The Athlete Experience free for young athletes.
Built-In Community
The Heather Experience has built an organic community of more than 20,000 people around youth sports, athletes and the human side of competition.
Over the last 90 days, that community generated more than 411,000 organic content views, reached more than 32,000 unique viewers and created more than 6,100 interactions. More than half of those views came from people outside the existing follower base.
For founding partners, that means the conversation begins with an existing community rather than an audience being built from zero.
Beyond the Room
The Parent Tip-Off Experience is being built as a professionally produced live storytelling environment, with photography, video and short-form content created throughout the weekend.
Founding partners may be recognized within selected event and social content, extending brand visibility beyond November 14 & 15 and connecting their name to an ongoing conversation reaching parents, athletes and the San Diego sports community.
Ways to Partner
Partnership levels are opportunities to support the project. Sponsors will be announced as they are confirmed.
$50K
Anchors the Parent Tip-Off project: a significant share of the venue, production, program, and film, and helps keep Sunday’s Athlete Experience free.
$25K
Helps bring the inaugural experience to life and puts this conversation in front of a full room of families.
$15K
Brings trusted voices, lived experience and expert perspective onto one stage.
$10K
Puts practical tools and resources into families’ hands.
$5K
Expands parent education beyond the stage.
$2.5K
Elevates athlete voice inside the experience.
$500
Supports the weekend experience and helps keep Sunday’s Athlete Experience free.
Built By
The Parent Tip-Off Experience is created and produced by The Heather Experience in collaboration with Mind Body Athletes.
Founder · The Heather Experience
Founder, The Heather Experience + Creator, The Parent Tip-Off Experience
Heather brings more than 20 years of people-centered experience and has built deep, trusted access inside the San Diego youth-sports community. Through photography, storytelling, interviews and athlete advocacy, she has worked alongside athletes, families, coaches and schools, often gaining access to the moments families never get to see. That proximity revealed patterns around pressure, identity, communication and what athletes carry home from competitive sport. Those relationships and observations became the foundation for The Parent Tip-Off Experience.
Founder · Mind Body Athletes
Founder, Mind Body Athletes + Co-Director, The Parent Tip-Off Experience
Allie Chapman, MSW, is a sport social worker and founder of Mind Body Athletes. She holds a master’s degree in social work from USC and a certificate in sport social work from the University of Michigan. As a mother of six athletes, she brings both professional expertise and firsthand understanding of the challenges families face in competitive sports. Through The Parent Tip-Off Experience, she equips parents with practical tools to strengthen connection, navigate pressure and support the person behind the performance.
The Athlete Is the Reason for Both Rooms.
Help us bring both days to life.