Its name is Sam. It’s here to support the well-being of student-athletes across the country. 

And it’s Temple proud.

Sam is a virtual mentor and the face of an artificial intelligence-powered mentorship app being developed by researchers at Temple University’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management.

The app, JournAI, was co-developed by STHM associate professor Elizabeth Taylor, with Jeff Nyquist, former Owls men’s soccer player Robin Goetz and former volleyball player Taylor Davenport. They received around one-third of the $100,000 awarded for the 2025 NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant. 

It was the third time Taylor applied for the grant, and the first that she incorporated AI in the proposal.

“I thought it had a really great chance because it’s incredibly innovative, it’s very unique,” she said. “Not a lot of folks are using AI in this way.” 

The grant funds studies that are “designed to enhance student-athletes’ psychosocial well-being and mental health.” From the over 100 submissions, the other two winning studies were a Bowling Green State University group studying interventions for online abuse related to sports betting and an Emory University team looking at the effects of mindfulness training on injury recovery.

JournAI allows student-athletes to text with Sam, and chat about career planning, mental health support and other off-the-field resources that they need as college students, with an eye to life after school. 

If you’ve watched any college sports, you’ve no doubt also seen the ads pointing out that a minuscule percentage of college athletes go on to play professional sports, and that the NCAA primarily offers a “path to go pro in something other than sports.”

JournAI seeks to help bridge that gap and direct athletes to the on-campus resources they may miss when their focus is on the field. Use of the app can be as confidential as the user wants it to be.

The pilot testing for the proposal occurred this Spring, with around 30 current and former student-athletes from various Division I, II and III schools participating. Taylor said the they were from a variety of sports, and pursuing a variety of majors 

“We’re trying to be really purposeful in getting a diverse sample so that we can understand,” she said. “Are there nuances for men versus women, or football players versus soccer players, or that sort of thing?”

Taylor said the study found “significant difference in behavioral change,” through the surveys that student-athletes took before and after interacting with Sam.

“We see a lot of promise in the project, but we understand that the first pilot study was a pretty small sample. So we’re really excited to collect more data, to engage in more conversations, and really start to understand how impactful this tool can be,” Taylor said.

What started as an app to help people transition from college sports to post-college grew into one that caters to the individual’s holistic development during their time as an athlete and afterwards. Sam (non-gendered) is meant to be an “unbiased, empathetic friend,” there to support the student-athlete, Taylor said.

“They are there to talk through your feelings in an unbiased way and offer the support that you need to understand, ‘OK, is this a conversation that I need to take to someone else? Or did I just have a bad day today and I’m going to wake up tomorrow and I’m going to feel a lot better because I got it off my chest and I had someone who was listening and unbiased in their reply to me,’ ” she said.

A chat with Sam is not meant to be a final resolution. Instead, it’s a bridge to the on-campus resources that are available to the individual, should they be needed.

“It’s not meant to replace a person, but it’s meant to supplement conversations,” Taylor said. “If you have a conversation with Sam … you can then be better prepared for conversations with someone in, say, career services, or someone in your academic department when you’re talking about what sort of career you think you might want to pursue.”

Taylor was a two-sport Division III student-athlete in track and volleyball at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she got her bachelor’s degree in business administration. With her personal experience, along with her former Temple athlete co-developers and the participants in the study, she said that JournAI is being built to support all levels of college athletes and athletic programs.

“This is something that can really support athletic departments that don’t have a lot of funds or don’t have a lot of person power in terms of being able to support student-athletes with those conversations,” Taylor said. “But it’s [also] a really great tool for Division I athletic departments like Temple, who do have people working in the athlete development space, in the leadership development space, because it’s kind of a pre-conversation to meeting with those individuals, so you can have more productive conversation.”

College athletic departments have to allocate their funds to coaching staff, equipment and travel, scholarships and recruiting, and — fairly recently — direct compensation to the student-athlete. Taylor worries that this can leave resources for an individual’s holistic development short-changed.

“A lot of times, academic departments have a career center, the university has a career center or there are opportunities for leadership development within their major,” she said. “So my fear is that an athletic department will start to cut back on the athlete-specific services, with the hopes that athletes are getting that support elsewhere.”

The rise of artificial intelligence and large language models has come with many concerns, including some around academic integrity and mental health. Taylor said that guardrails are being put in place to address those potential problems. Students looking for Sam to write them a last-minute term paper will be pretty disappointed, since the AI’s conversations are specifically guided towards holistic development.

As for mental health, Taylor said that campus health and counseling resources are being embedded into JournAI, to be shared with the athletes as they engage with it. 

“Sam isn’t meant to replace any of those humans,” she said. “The conversations are just meant to help folks understand what their passions are, where they’re at with some of their personal questions, and that sort of thing.” 

Another hurdle Taylor said they ran into during the pilot testing for some participants was the “uncanny valley” — that discomfort or revulsion people can get when something not human seems pretty darn close to human, but not quite. For some, the chats with Sam seemed a little “too real.”

“Sam remembers your conversations and gets to know you pretty well pretty fast, and I think that kind of freaks some people out,” Taylor said. “So just understanding that this isn’t going to work for everyone, not everyone wants to engage with an AI app, and that’s OK. It’s an optional tool that can support development, but not something anyone has to use, by any means.”

Taylor said the research team will spend the next two years of the grant period making the app “bigger and better,” enrolling 75 to 100 participants for the second phase of the pilot testing in Spring 2026, and will compile qualitative research and interviews that will help them refine the app. The goal is to make Sam a resource that student-athletes will want to reach out to.

“I think we’re always trying to understand just what [student-athletes] want to know.” Taylor said. “What are topics of interest to them? What is missing from traditional programming? So, we’re constantly in conversation with not just employees within athletic departments, but also student-athletes as well.”

The ultimate goal? To make the app available for all NCAA student-athletes, and maybe even all college students.