Former UNC women’s soccer star Lotte Wubben-Moy, two current UNC athletes and a couple of key mentors, had a spark of inspiration: They wanted to create a platform targeted toward young athletes.
In early 2020, they took this spark and created SunBite, a startup aimed at creating a community of positive thinkers and mentors. SunBite is centered around an app they utilize to send out short daily video messages encouraging their users to “Stay The Course.”
While the app is free for all who are interested to download, SunBite also offers a paid program that gives groups access to videos providing more context. The private program also allows members access to weekly Zoom meetings where they can interact with the founders and each other.
Scott Sievering, head coach of The Summit Country Day School’s boy’s soccer team, subscribes to SunBite’s private service. Sievering, who has guided his Cincinnati-based team to four state championships, got involved with the app through two of his former players. Both are now influential members of the SunBite team but could not speak to The Daily Tar Heel about the company due to NCAA regulations and the paid element of the service.
“It’s been great for our players in terms of providing them with motivation and really a number of different mental health areas,” Sievering said. “We do a thing once a week where we talk after training, and guys share motivational stuff. A lot of SunBite stuff comes up in that, so we’ve used it a lot.”
Sievering believes the SunBite team’s experiences as athletes have been part of what makes the platform so easy for his team to pick up.
“They’re very familiar with the struggles that go into playing sports,” he said. “The fact that their team has been through that, it’s very easy for the players to relate. It’s not like it’s a company that seems to be in the distance or too big. It’s a company that you can feel connected to and that they care about you individually.”
Developing positive relationships and trusting their timing are recurring themes throughout the SunBite story. Not a minute passes by without one of the team members mentioning someone who has helped them greatly, and how appreciative the team is for having that interaction.
"You hear it thrown around, 'It's not what you know, it's who you know,’” Wubben-Moy said. “I think SunBite is a perfect mixture of both. I think that the synergy between that has been what's accelerated us so much. It's the people that we've had around us, but also the 20 years of knowledge that we've actually built up.”
