This Father’s Day, The Dad Games is launching The Dad 100: one hundred fathers and father figures, from every kind of family and every corner of the country, who show up for their kids every day. A few of them you’ll recognize — there are coaches and pastors, a governor, a former president — but many of them you won’t. They are the neighborhood dads everyone calls when help is needed, the grandfathers who stepped in to raise children long after raising their own, the stepfathers who chose to fully embrace the responsibility of fatherhood, and the single, married, and co-parenting dads who show up every day for their families and communities.
What unites them is not their circumstances, but their commitment. Each member of The Dad 100 was nominated by someone who has witnessed that commitment firsthand: a partner, a child, a mentee, a friend, or a neighbor whose life has been impacted by their presence and example.
Great dads are everywhere. The Dad 100 is our way of making sure more people see them.
Related: Lessons Black Men Need to Unlearn About Fatherhood
Especially if you are a Black dad. For as long as I can remember, the loudest story about Black fathers has been one of absence — the missing man, the cautionary tale, the one who is not there.
But that is not the story I see.This morning, before work, I lost a one-on-one garage soccer game to my ten-year-old, helped my eight-year-old locate ramen noodles because that is apparently breakfast now, and got out-negotiated by my six-year-old over how many more minutes he could stay in bed. My wife, Michelle, and I filled water bottles and put Vaseline on ashy knees (a major priority in my house). It’s a good life, and most mornings, total chaos. I own more deflated balls and orange cones than any human being should. Nobody warned me fatherhood would be this joyful, this absurd, and almost nothing like the version you see on TV.
This is the fatherhood story that we don’t tell enough.
And the numbers are finally catching up to what so many of us already knew. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 Current Population Survey, analyzed by the National Fatherhood Initiative, for the first time since 1976, more than half of Black children are growing up with a resident father. That doesn’t mean every family looks the same, and home was never the only place to be present — plenty of dads show up powerfully across households, through co-parenting and extended kin. But it puts the old myth to rest.
And before I go, one more sentence about dads, let me say the obvious: none of us pulls this off alone. Michelle holds together about forty things in our house that I don’t even have names for. Every parent doing this deserves their flowers — mom or dad, partnered or solo, in the home or across town, working doubles and somehow always knowing where the other shoe is. Celebrating fathers takes nothing away from mothers. Many of us learned some of life’s most important lessons from the women who raised us and stood beside us. Honoring dads simply acknowledges that children benefit when fathers are present, engaged, and supported.
So why don’t we celebrate this more? Because the everyday kind of showing up doesn’t make headlines. A father who quietly nails the ordinary stuff doesn’t trend. He just gets up and does it again the next day.
That is why we built The Dad Games: for dads of every background and zip code, because fatherhood is serious work that does not have to be serious all the time. We host events where dads and kids compete, laugh, and goof off together. We hold monthly “Calling All Dads” conversations about the good, the hard, the practical, and the emotional. We’ve thrown fishing derbies and a genuine dad joke championship. The point was never to lecture anybody into being a better dad — it was to celebrate the ones already doing it, and to recognize them.
The Dad 100 is our way of making that recognition a reality.
When I look at this list, I think about my own three children and the world I want them to grow up in—one where fathers are present, compassionate, and celebrated for the ordinary, unglamorous, and extraordinary work of showing up.
And I want every dad reading this to see a piece of himself in these honorees. Maybe no one is filming you packing lunches, coaching a team, helping with a late-night science project, or finding the energy to read one more bedtime story. The work may not make headlines, but it matters. In many ways, it’s the work that matters most.
So this Father’s Day, meet The Dad 100. Hug the dads in your life, hug the moms, and help us tell the better story — the true one.
The dads are not missing. The dads are right here. And we brought snacks.
Joshua DuBois is the founder of The Dad Games.
