Character development deserves better than "trust us"
The program that closes the gap between promising character development and proving it.
ERA Skills exists because competitive youth sports organizations promise character development and almost never prove it. We build the program that closes that gap: a coaching curriculum, hands-on coach training, and the software that turns growth into evidence.
Why ERA Skills exists
It started with a question a parent asks after practice: "What exactly is my kid learning here, beyond the sport?" Every competitive club has heard it. Almost none can answer it with anything better than good intentions.
Founder Dane Berman kept running into the same gap. Clubs put "character development" on the website. Directors mean it. Coaches genuinely do it. But when a parent asks for evidence, a board asks for outcomes, or a grant application asks "how will you measure success?" — the answer is usually silence, or an anecdote about teamwork.
He went looking for a system built for competitive youth sports that could measure what good coaches already develop — leadership, resilience, communication, teamwork. Something a coach could run in about 10 minutes per assessment cycle. Something that produced data a director could hand to parents and funders. Everything he found was retrofitted from corporate HR software, or measured nothing at all.
So he built it — with clubs, from day one.
ERA Skills is the result: a character development program in two parts. First, a curriculum coaches are trained on — one skill at a time, inside the practices they already run. Second, the software that measures it: players' self-ratings and peer ratings — reviewed by the coach — combine into skill scores across 5 skills, and roll up into impact reports a club can stand behind.
What ERA stands for
Empowerment · Resilience · Awareness
Empowerment, because young athletes should own their growth, not have it handed to them. Resilience, because sport is where setbacks become practice. Awareness, because you can't develop what you can't see. And yes — the name also means what it sounds like: a new era for youth sports, where "we build character" comes with proof.
The principles behind the program
Three commitments shape every decision, from how assessments work to who can see what.
Reflection, not grading
Players rate how they showed a skill and how each teammate did, with a comment for every rating — then see their own scores and their own growth. No grades, no rankings, no leaderboards. The point is self-awareness, not comparison.
Privacy by design
Parental consent comes before any athlete participates. Players see only their own scores, parents see only their own child, and every peer comment goes through the coach first. Nothing is public, and nothing is sold.
Coach-first
Every ERA Skills team starts with a coach trained on the curriculum — in person or over Zoom — not with a login and a manual. After that, the software asks about 10 minutes per assessment cycle, 3–4 cycles per season.
Founded in Las Vegas, built with clubs
ERA Skills was founded in Las Vegas and piloted with competitive clubs there first — which is why pilot coaches in the Las Vegas area are trained in person, and everywhere else over Zoom. From that beachhead, the program is expanding across the Sun Belt, one club and one season of real data at a time.
Run it with one team this season.
A pilot includes the full program: the curriculum, hands-on training for your coach, and 3–4 assessment cycles — ending with an impact report built from your organization's own data. Because our team trains every pilot coach personally, we take on a limited number of organizations each season.