Podcast Highlight: Coaches Don’t Play
The hosts offer sensational takes to listeners’ problems
The podcast Coaches Don't Play is rated 4.9 stars on Spotify with over 2000 ratings. (Submitted)
Pammy Bhatti was inspired to start her own podcast after listening to and enjoying casual banter podcasts in 2019.
Her podcast, Coaches Don’t Play, ranks in the top five per cent of trending podcasts worldwide, with 60 per cent of its Canadian audience from the Lower Mainland.
“I enjoy having funny conversations with my friends and family and sitting down and just shooting the shit,” Pammy says.
She hosts the show every Thursday and talks about life, relationships, and pop culture with her two co-hosts Karan Bhatti and Gurveen Biring. In the beginning, Pammy would often have a friend or guest on the podcast until she brought Karan and Biring on an episode together, which she says worked really well.
“There was no grand plan or anything like that. It was kind of just on a whim,” Pammy says.
After a friend of Pammy’s cousin was going through issues with boys, she started recording voice notes to give advice to the friend. Her cousin then started calling her coach, which led to the name of the podcast, Coaches Don’t Play.
The name worked out perfectly, especially since it describes her personality and how she enjoyed giving people advice even before the show started, she says.
She originally started the podcast talking about personal stories and eventually shifted to news and pop culture as the show developed. Pammy also started the ‘Coaches Huddle’ segment on the podcast while it was in its early stages.
The segment involves anonymous questions from various listeners seeking relationship, family, or financial advice.
Pammy says there is no “real plan” about what she discusses each episode. She simply observes her day-to-day surroundings and makes note of anything interesting or funny to talk about on the podcast.
Although they usually steer clear of discussing political issues, Pammy and her co-hosts recently talked about the war in Palestine on the podcast. Her background in political science is what inspired her to shed light on the issue. Pammy has made this exception two other times including an episode on Black Lives Matter and the farmer’s protest in India.
“When I start having these types of political conversations in my everyday life with people … that’s when I’m like, ‘Okay, this is something we need to talk about.’”
Pammy and her co-hosts record for about two and a half hours every week which is later edited into an hour for each episode.
Whether it’s woke conversations or controversial opinions, she is well aware of the power of cancel culture and is very careful of what she puts out into the show. However, Pammy says some of that content does find space on their subscription-based platform, Patreon.
While the majority of her audience is South Asian, she says the podcast has universal appeal, and her listeners are located in the United States, United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, and many more countries in addition to Canada.
“It’s super crazy to see how South Asians and Punjabi people specifically are everywhere.”
Getting the podcast into the mainstream is one of her main goals for the new year, she says.
“I love that its niche and the South Asian people rep it so hard, … but I just feel in order for the show to keep growing and keep going, it has to reach a wider audience.”
Her hope for each episode is for the audience to feel better after a stressful week.
“When someone’s like, ‘I just had the worst week and then you guys said this on the podcast and I just lost it laughing for two minutes,’ like perfect, that was the goal of that episode.”
The podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
