The Center of Gravity Is at the Kitchen Table

Every couple of years the Pentagon asks military spouses a simple question: do you want your service member to stay in? In 2024, 49% said yes (link). That's the lowest number the survey has ever recorded, down from 61% in 2006. Another 32% would rather their spouse get out, the highest ever.

Anyone responsible for readiness should sit with that for a minute, because spouses tend to be right about what happens next. When DoD's Office of People Analytics modeled who stays and who leaves, spouse and family support ranked among the three strongest predictors, right alongside commitment to the military itself (link). It predicts actual reenlistment, not just intentions.

The Army's H2F program invests in five readiness domains: physical, nutritional, mental, spiritual and sleep (link). Family isn't one of them, and neither is the social world around it. I'm not here to lobby for a sixth domain. I'm here to say that H2F results will be decided partly at home whether the doctrine mentions it or not, and that starting this fiscal year, Teamworks is going to act like it.

All the value is in the asset

Real estate teaches you one fast lesson: all the value is in the asset. Financing and property managers only matter for what they do to the building—nobody buys a property because they love their mortgage broker.

Sport and the military work the same way. Every win, every medal and every mission traces back to human beings, and how they work together as part of a team towards a common goal. At Teamworks we describe a person's sporting career within any given organization as a four-stage lifecycle, where the organization seeks to acquire, develop, manage, and monetize the valuable athlete asset. Scouts find the talent. Coaches, strength staff, dietitians, athletic trainers, and team doctors develop it. Operations, academics and compliance keep the day-to-day running. Then the value gets realized when the fans show up to watch a game, buy season tickets, or buy merchandise. The better the athletes, the better the return.  The military runs the same loop under different names: recruitment, training, active duty, retirement. Get selected, graduate, become battlefield capable, then live well on the other side.

Every stage has its own specialists, and most of what we build at Teamworks sits between those specialists and the human being at the center of it all. Operations is the coordination layer: the schedules, messages, travel and handoffs that keep a dozen departments pointed at the same person. Draw it on a whiteboard and you get a solar system, the athlete in the middle and everyone else in orbit. Every pitch deck we’ve presented in the last half decade has some version of that drawing, but I think it's missing something obvious.

Where the center actually sits

In physics, two orbiting bodies circle a shared center of mass called the barycenter. When one mass dwarfs the other, that point sits deep inside the larger body. This is why the Sun gets away with acting like everything in the inner solar system revolves around it. Jupiter is a different story. It carries 318 times Earth's mass, which is enough to drag the Sun-Jupiter barycenter just outside the Sun's surface (link). The biggest thing in the solar system spends its time circling a point in empty space.

Sirius is perhaps the more illustrative example for the point I’m trying to make. It's the brightest star in the night sky, and in 1844 Friedrich Bessel noticed it wasn't moving the way a lone star should. It wobbled. Bessel concluded that something dark and heavy was tugging on it, and he said so, years before anyone could see it. In 1862 a telescope maker named Alvan Clark, testing a new lens, found the culprit: Sirius B, a white dwarf with about half the mass of its bright partner and almost none of the light (link). Astronomers at the time were struck by how faint it was for the pull it exerted. The two circle a point between them every fifty years.

That method - watch a bright object and look for motion that can't be explained on its own - is how astronomers find planets around other stars today (link).

In our business, the athlete and the service member are Sirius A. Everyone in the building is watching. The family is Sirius B: dim from the outside, hard to pick out of the glare, and exerting an enormous amount of pull on everything. You can put every resource an organization has into orbit around the athlete, and the athlete will still be circling a point that includes a spouse, their kids, and a mother who calls on Sundays. Leave them out of the model and you'll spend your career explaining wobbles.

Ask the players

Jean Côté's 1999 study of elite athletes and their families found that a parent's role changes as a career progresses: they lead in the early years, write the checks and drive the car during specialization, and advise once the athlete is all in (link). The role shrinks. It never goes away. Mental health tells the same story. A recent meta-analysis covering 40 studies and more than 14,000 athletes found that social support tracks with better well-being and fewer depressive symptoms, and that support from family and friends did more against depression than support from the team (link). Teams spend a fortune on staff. The athlete's own people still carry more of the load.

Players vote with their signatures. Carmelo Anthony said people forget the family side of free agency, like whether you want your kids growing up in that city (link). LeBron James, weighing his 2026 decision, called himself a big family guy and said it was about more than the team (link). When Jason Kelce retired, he gave his wife the credit for his best seasons: "Every accolade I have ever received has come with her in my life." (link)

The NFL Players Association now grades every team on how it treats families, using the players' own survey answers. In the 2024 report cards, 12 teams had no family room at the stadium and 7 offered no game-day daycare (link). Nothing motivates a billion-dollar franchise like a bad grade posted where the other 31 can see it. Within a year, clubs were pointing to new family rooms, family dinners and family days at OTAs (link).

Most of what Teamworks does in this space is unglamorous: family ticket requests, parents and partners on the guest list, who's riding on the team plane, a schedule that reaches the people who need to know about the 6 a.m. bus. It's the same coordination we do for staff, pointed at the other half of the system.

The Army used to say it out loud

The military got here first. The old line is that you recruit the soldier and retain the family, and like most old lines it survived because it kept turning out to be true.

For years the Army's resilience program carried the idea in its name. Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness had five dimensions, and family was one of them (link). In 2019 the Army renamed Family Readiness Groups to Soldier and Family Readiness Groups, tying the two words together on purpose (link). As Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley put it plainly: a soldier can't focus on the job "if they are worried that their child doesn't have adequate medical care or if their house has mold." (link)

SOCOM went even further. Preservation of the Force and Family (POTFF), its human performance program, has a social and family domain right next to physical, psychological, cognitive and spiritual, and the FY2022 budget request put $8.7 million behind it (link).

H2F has five domains, and there isn’t a standalone family/social domain among them but there are reasonable explanations for this. H2F is a performance program. Family support has its own money, its own professionals and its own org chart. The fact remains though that the soldier doesn't experience readiness as separate budget lines, and the data on what happens at home keeps saying the same thing…

In the 2024 spouse survey, 64% of spouses who were dissatisfied with military life wanted their service member out, compared with only 15% of satisfied spouses who said the same (link). The Army's own family readiness office has reported that 93% of married soldiers stay when their spouse favors it, while only 44% stay when the spouse strongly favors leaving (link). And one has to imagine that amongst that latter 44%, the decision to stay when a spouse is opposed almost certainly creates tension at home.

A RAND study of 7,510 Army spouses found that spouse stress and unmet needs predicted soldier turnover almost two years later (link). Nearly a decade earlier, RAND's Deployment Life Study found that families who communicated with other military families during a deployment had service members more inclined to stay (link).

Family, and the block it lives on

SOCOM files family and social together, and that's the right call. Back to real estate for a second: a building's value depends heavily on the block. The social world is the neighborhood the family lives in. The other families in the unit, the friend with a truck on moving day, the people who show up when the deployment order lands. Building that network is the whole job of a Soldier and Family Readiness Group, and it's the part a family readiness lead most needs help with. It's hard to run a network on a shared spreadsheet and a group text or Facebook group.

For some soldiers, that network is most of what they've got. Nearly half of the Army's soldiers are single with no children (link). For a 19-year-old private whose parents are three states away, the people around him on post are the ones who'll notice when he goes quiet.

What it looks like when it works

The 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) uses Teamworks Hub for its soldiers and their families. Programs funded under 10 U.S.C. § 1788a go out through the app straight to spouses and family members, with access checked against assignment rosters (link). Larry White, the group's community resource coordinator: "The ability to reach the entire formation and their families at the touch of a button is incredibly powerful."

That's one of our strongest use cases in the military today, and it exposes a gap. The family side usually runs on different money than H2F. There’s no question that units can benefit from paying attention to the family and social dimension of a soldier’s life, but they’re paying for it out of a separate budget, if they can find one. Some can't.

Our commitment

For every H2F agreement in effect during fiscal year 2027, Teamworks will extend Hub to the unit's social and family readiness staff and the families they support, at no additional cost, for as long as that unit runs H2F on Teamworks. SFRG leaders and family readiness staff become Hub users alongside the performance team, with the same tools to schedule events, run communications and keep families connected to the unit and to each other. H2F's five domains stay exactly as they are. We're not proposing a sixth. We're handing the people already responsible for social and family readiness the same tools the strength coach has.

Our reasoning: nobody wants to pay for (and we don’t want to sell) half a bridge. When a unit buys H2F software from us, we're signing up for that unit's results, and two brigades can get the same coaches, the same dietitians and the same software and still land in different places because of what's going on at home. Leave social and family out and that difference shows up as noise in every H2F evaluation, including the ones that grade us. We've seen what Hub does for family programs. We'd rather put it to work now than explain the gap later. And we intend to bring the same approach to any force-wide agreement.

We can measure it, too. RAND has already tied families staying connected during deployment to soldiers wanting to stay. With each unit's permission, we can put social and family engagement next to the readiness and retention data H2F already tracks, so the next evaluation can tell what happened at home apart from what happened in the gym.

Bessel never saw Sirius B. He found it anyway, by looking harder at the star everyone was already watching. The Army watches its soldiers as closely as anyone on Earth watches anything. The wobble is already in the numbers, you just need to have the tools and desire to look for it.