Launched in August 2025, Strib Varsity is the Minnesota Star Tribune’s new home for prep sports — essentially, ESPN for Minnesota high schools. For the Star Tribune, it’s a digital growth product designed to strengthen its presence in prep sports, deepen community engagement, and create new advertising and subscription opportunities. With high school sports reaching communities across Minnesota and rosters turning over every season, each new class of athletes brings a fresh network of family, friends, and fans — and an opportunity to grow the audience.

Coach’s Portal is the content management system that Strib Varsity administrators and high school coaches use to create and manage team schedules, rosters, game scores, and stats for hundreds of games each season.

As the primary designer, I partnered with Star Tribune stakeholders, a project manager, developers, and the internal UX team to design and build this complex platform. I started with mid-fidelity wireframes, then translated them into refined, high-fidelity designs using the Star Tribune’s existing cross-platform components and Varsity-specific visual styles. I used AI to create a realistic, interactive prototype for usability testing, then applied those findings to improve the experience before handing the designs off to development.