About Coach Appreciation™
People > Performance.
Coach Appreciation™ is a Me 1st Then Sports™ experience and a CAREGD™ Sports Initiative. It exists for one human action: telling a coach what they gave you that stayed.
Organizations invest heavily in performance infrastructure: facilities, equipment, schedules, and analytics. Far less is invested in the human infrastructure that determines whether people stay, grow, and want to keep showing up.
Meet Lisa C. Williams
Founder & CEO, CAREGD™ · Founder, America Checks In™
Lisa C. Williams is the Founder & CEO of CAREGD™, which builds Human Infrastructure™ for the AI Era, and the founder of America Checks In™, CAREGD’s flagship national human-connection movement.
People should not have to fall apart before someone notices.
Lisa understands sports from inside the experience. She played basketball at John F. Kennedy High School in Los Angeles and later earned a Division I basketball scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley. She was a member of Kennedy’s 1982 City Championship team.
The uniform eventually comes off. The relationships, expectations, lessons and experiences can stay with us for decades.
Through Coach Appreciation™, that work begins with one of the people athletes often remember for a lifetime: the coach.
Human Infrastructure™
Human Infrastructure™ is CAREGD’s term for the structures that make people feel seen inside an organization: how recognition happens and how people are valued beyond results.
We build campaigns and tools that make those structures visible and repeatable—without diagnosing, rating, or ranking individual people.
Me 1st Then Sports™
Me 1st Then Sports™ is a CAREGD™ Sports Initiative built on one principle: People > Performance.
Coach Appreciation™ is the recognition experience: what did this coach give you that stayed?
Me 1st Then Sports™ also offers Coach, Are You Good?™, a separate campaign focused on checking in on the person doing the coaching.