There has been a long history of athletes using their power to create more inclusive, just and sustainable civic futures in our nation. Perhaps the most influential was Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player in Major League Baseball, who used his stature to advance civil rights throughout his career.
And now it’s not just players but leagues that continue the tradition. On Aug. 16, the NBA announced that it would not host games on Election Day to allow time for players, staff and fans to vote. This builds on a long history of athletes using their power to influence more inclusive, just and sustainable civic futures.
And now designer, educator and civic futurist Lisa Kay Solomon is working with a committed group of student athletes, coaches, administrators and civic partners to extend the NBA’s work to colleges across the country. In 2020 Solomon met with long-time basketball coach Eric Reveno, who had embarked on a personal mission to help his players register to vote.
But his efforts didn't end with his own team, Georgia Tech. Coach Rev became the driving force behind All Vote No Play, an initiative that urged athletics to take Election Day off from practice or games so players could vote and volunteer. With support from the National Association of Basketball Coaches and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, the campaign ultimately convinced more than 1,100 coaches to sign the All Vote No Play pledge. The call to action was so meaningful to players that the student-run NCAA Student Athletic Committee leadership team unanimously passed legislation to make All Vote No Play an annual tradition.
Solomon met Coach Rev that year while she was working on her personal mission to change the way we engage young people in the voting process. They instantly bonded in their shared belief that young people need, and deserve, to be not just informed but empowered to participate more fully in shaping the future they're going to inherit.
Two years later, in 2022, All Vote No Play is more than just a day, and it's more than just voting. The campaign makes citizenship for coaches, players, and teams easy, meaningful, and impactful. Their playbook has a wide range of free, nonpartisan "civic drills" to help their team learn, engage, gather and vote. The All Vote No Play initiative is designed to help all athletes build and flex their civic power to shape their futures.
On Sept. 13 there will be an AVNP Engaged Athlete All-Star meeting, featuring the “GREATs and GOATS” who are using their athletic platform, power and purpose to make the world a better place.
Athletes from every sport and college are enthusiastically invited to participate.
Speakers at the event will include NBA champ Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors. Curry not only has four championship rings, but has used his platform to publicly advocate for voting rights, voter mobilization and other causes he cares about.
Curry will be joined by Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer, the winningest NCAA women's basketball coach of all time, former Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice (who recently added a new title as part-owner of the Denver Broncos) and the New Orleans Saints’ Demario Davis. He is not only one of the NFL’s most successful linebackers, but his own story and advocacy for prison reform and efforts to reduce inequality in his hometown of Mississippi and globally have moved his teammates and fans.
Each of these headliners will be interviewed by passionate student athletes, representing just a few of the many extraordinary, engaged athletes across the country who are flexing their own civic muscles within their campuses and communities:
- UCLA quarterback Chase Griffin, the NIL Male Athlete of the Year, helped run the 2020 Bruins Voter drive and donates a percentage of his endorsements to a Los Angeles food bank.
- The Yale Bulldogs’ tight end Ryan Belk, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in 2018, is helping organize a voting registration drive with the athletic department, alongside classmate Sari Kauffman, co-founder of MyVote Project.
- Felicia Renelus, former co-captain of Brown University’s women's track and field team and now competing for the University of California at Berkeley, will be hosting an Engaged Athlete All-Star Event watch party with her fellow athletes, furnished with local pizza delivered by Pizza to the Polls
These are just a few extraordinary leaders of the All Vote No Play Engaged Athlete series who are turning this civic moment into a cultural movement.
With the 2022 midterms less than 70 days away the immediate goal is registering and mobilizing voters. But the broader goals go well beyond voting as All Vote No Play is working hard to illuminate and amplify how athletes can all use their agency, power and courage to shape the kind of futures and communities all Americans dream of.
Sign up here.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.