Recent legislation in multiple states has focused on a growing issue facing high school athletics: ensuring appropriate coach-athlete communications and institutional oversight of those interactions.
In Kentucky, Senate Bill 181 is a data privacy law barring coaches and other school employees and volunteers from following any student on social media and limiting the ability of coaches to contact students on personal cell phones. All communication must be filtered through a parent or guardian. Bills like SB181 aim to protect minors from adults with bad intentions, but the reality of communicating, scheduling and managing a prep team while remaining compliant with the law can be complicated.
These complications were apparent to Noelle Scheper and Jaden Walton when they created Motiv, an app designed to collate high school team communications, scheduling and management for student-athletes, coaches and parents. The pair of University of Cincinnati students — former high school athletes themselves — first developed Motiv while participating in the university’s Innovation Challenge, a program born out of a partnership between UC’s Center for Entrepreneurship and its College of Engineering’s Student Tribunal.
“You spend the whole semester coming up with a problem and then a solution and then pitching it at a pitch competition,” says Scheper. “We ended up winning the pitch competition at the end of the semester, so that was how we knew this idea was a real thing that we could keep working on and not just a class project.”
The pair found further success from there, working at the Venture Lab Next accelerator program and winning pitch competitions across the country.
Now, Motiv is being used by more than 50 high school athletics departments and is onboarding additional programs each week.
“Regulations are only getting harder,” Walton says. “Prices are going up, and if you want to host a team, you have to piecemeal software together. So, we brought it all in one place, completely free. Anything we don’t have, you can plug in. We have free facilities management, free messaging, free calendar, [you can] manage team rosters. Admin can view all the messages between athletes and adults, so it goes beyond compliance and transparency.”
To achieve that next-level transparency, Scheper and Walton looked to the state with the strictest data privacy laws: Kentucky, which enacted SB181 in June 2025.
“We are not only covered for the National Data Privacy Agreement, we are beyond Kentucky, which is the most stringent,” says Walton. “So, if someone else comes up with a radical new compliance concept, we’re ready to adapt. We’re already way ahead on compliance as it is.”
Cases of misconduct by coaching staff are a disheartening reality in the high school sports landscape. In 2025 alone, the AB Today daily newsletter covered nearly three dozen cases of misconduct by high school coaches that could have been prevented or curbed by greater oversight and transparency in communication. From coaches communicating with student-athletes in inappropriate ways to coaches suspended or fired for breaching practice schedule guidelines, streamlined scheduling, management and communication were the common missing thread.
As Scheper, Walton and their team continue to evolve the Motiv platform to serve an even wider network of schools, Walton says the focus moving forward will be to tighten the ecosystem.
“We’re thinking about stakeholders who have been underserved. There are our four current groups of people: athletes, parents, coaches and administrators. Now, we want to add athletic trainers. We want to include referees, groups that no one has taken care of yet,” Walton says.
As state legislation continues to evolve, with more than 20 states currently enforcing data privacy laws and nearly a dozen additional states mulling similar bills, Motiv appears to have a growing audience. “There are 8 million student-athletes at any given time in the U.S,” says Walton, adding that safe, compliant team communication can positively impact each and every one of them.
