Thank you @GovernorShapiro

The “Google Ads” moment for youth sports has arrived 👀 Most youth sports operators don’t speak sales. And that makes sense. Running tournaments, leagues, facilities, and clubs is already hard enough. Selling brand partnerships is an entirely different skill set made for companies like @BaseSportsGroup, @Fastbreakai Connect, and Campus Multimedia. Sponsorship networks that can package inventory together at scale. @KyleScottL believes these are some companies positioned to win in the future, "because they're able to speak that language and they have enough institutional scale that they could speak to a sponsor and say, "Hey, we gave you X number impressions and we can measure it."" Platforms like @GetGameChanger, @Pixellotltd, and the larger tech infrastructure players now become incredibly important. #youthsports

"Tech is a commodity and has no value." Here you have the CEO of a sports tech company that just raised $40M saying he places zero value on the tech he acquires. It's the distribution, flywheels and relationships that matter-- not the code. @Fastbreakai is consolidating the highly-fragmented $60B youth sports industry through acquisition, but they throw out all tech they acquire. This is a canary in the coal mine for valuations. If tech CEOs and strategic acquirers begin to discount tech in acquisitions, this squashes valuations across the board.

. @Fastbreakai is a youth sports tech platform worth watching. Raised $40M Series A and targeting venture scale outcome by integrating registration, travel, ticketing, scheduling and sponsorship. Their CEO sold his last company to Salesforce.

Youth sports isn’t just a local issue anymore. It’s becoming a national one. 🇺🇸 For years, rising costs in youth sports were an industry conversation. Now? They’re entering the national spotlight. As we head into election season, one word is going to dominate: Affordability. #youthsports

Much has been made on here about the massive B2B media opportunity. For good reason. A year ago, I launched @BuyingSandlot, a @beehiiv newsletter covering the business of youth sports-- a $60B market. It now reaches 17,500 subscribers, and last week we hosted a 450-person conference(!) in Philly with leading club operators, tech platform executives, and investors from all over the US and around the world. We had sponsors ranging from publicly-owned brands to sports drink startups. The best part? We spent precisely $0 to market the event. In fact, we only sent two dedicated email blasts to our list. We simply just provided updates on speakers, sponsors and other details in our M-W-F newsletter, and promoted the event on our social accounts. And we sold out a week before the event. With a 6-person team. The power of B2B newsletters is real.

The intersection of education and athletics is a fascinating space right now. Topic covered brilliantly at the @BuyingSandlot Summit last week.

The Buying Sandlot Summit created an investment opportunity before the conference even started 👀 Scott Reid gave us the details after MODE and an investment team, interested in what they're building, found out they'd both be attending in Philly on April 14th & 15th. Now they’re kicking off conversations ahead of time and will continue them when everyone’s in the same room. Still time to get your tix: events.buyingsandlot.com/sum… #seeyouinphilly🤝

Is the media coverage of youth sports shifting? ✍️ @WSJ reporter @bzcohen covered the industry like no one has before...positively. For years the media focused on one story: youth sports is too expensive. Now they're realizing it's also one of the most fascinating topics in America right now. #youthsports

The bull case for youth sports as AI disruption nears 🐂 #youthsports

This is excellent-- and yet another tailwind for the $60B youth sports market we're covering at @BuyingSandlot. Well, mostly. Why? Huge swaths of the industry basically fall on either side of this argument. The Participation Layer: Falls squarely in the assets-with-predictable-cash-flows area. Facilities, registration, travel, equipment, dues, uniforms, compliance, insurance, safety, and more. All of these things get rewarded in a world where AI disrupts everything and capital shifts to short-term, predictable cash flows. It’s the bull case for the industry. The Tech Layer: Many of the scaled companies in youth sports today are, effectively, SaaS businesses— exactly the sort of companies at risk if this scenario were to play out, since AI very easily disrupts deterministic software. But there is some nuance in youth sports, given its highly-fragmented and social nature: The switching costs are painful, and the incentives to do so are different for youth sports operators than large enterprises. And ultimately, tech supports the participation layer, which makes it relatively safer than larger-scale tech investment. The Physical Infrastructure Layer: He’s talking about sovereign wealth funds here, but the theory applies to the public-private partnerships we already see at-scale in large youth sports tournament facilities. --- If this scenario were to play out, in youth sports the market will pay a premium for the participation layer, tolerate the tech layer, and continue to require public subsidy for the physical infrastructure layer. Bonus points if public money begins to subsidize the participation layer, too.

High School football recruiting just changed forever 🏈 Prospects are using AI to manipulate their highlight tapes and most coaches won't know the difference. This is why verifiable data collection is more important than ever. Trusted data companies like @PlayerData, @Go_Rout, and Catapult are going to become even more important to coaches and scouts as AI gets better. Film you can edit. You can't fake wearable data. But here's an even bigger problem in youth sports: fragmentation. @KyleScottL spoke with @GetGameChanger’s President Sameer Ahuja about interoperability last month. Every company in the space has spoken to one another about sharing data and video to the athlete profile, but someone will have to blink first. For example, if Team X uses Catapult's wearables, @Hudl's video, and GameChanger's stats, but they don't talk to each other. How do coaches at the next level confirm the data collected is verifiable, accurate, and even real? In the Age of AI trust becomes valuable. Fragmentation makes trust harder. So, who blinks first?

I know everyone has AI fatigue but I thought this was a really cool insight into the future of school (and elite sports academies). @bndowell is also a commodities trader, mom of 4 boys and self funding @tbsbsbl. Bad ass stuff. Check the interview out: linktr.ee/buyingsandlot

Youth sports tech is going through a massive boom. I had the opportunity to talk to @GetGameChanger President and @DICKS SVP Sameer Ahuja about GameChanger’s major product update today— which includes full 1080p live streaming for 8U baseball.

Good article on @KylePagan_: "Earlier this month, alumnus Kyle Pagan jumped from sports blog @CrossingBroad to youth sports newsletter @BuyingSandlot." temple-news.com/alum-braces-…

🥎 So this is potentially huge. 🍌 @YellowTuxJesse has a habit of calling his shot. When he says “1M kids playing Banana Ball,” it’s worth paying attention to. [Little League International has around 2M]. ⚾️ Some - especially hardened baseball people - will probably roll their eyes at this. But if Quick Ball - which isn’t really quick, or baseball - and other stripped down or modified versions of other sports can catch on, surely Banana Ball would be able to. 🪧 We are headed for an MLB strike next year, and that will likely impact rec participation, at least initially. The Bananas have an opportunity to steal outsized mindshare if they’re the only game in town, and you bet kids will want to ape what they see at those games. 😄 There are no pre-made rosters at Banana tournaments. Kids sign up, get placed on a team, and have fun. This is a take on what I’ve been calling “professionalized rec” or the pick-up, sandlot-style of sport parents are increasingly seeking out. I think there will be a general trend of casual players and parents wanting to opt out of the high-pressure competitive nature of travel programs, and it will play right into the Banana’s hands (peels?). 💸 Their last tournament was $595 per player. $595 × 1M kids is, well, I’m not good at math, but probably something like 595 million banana peels.

This was exactly the goal and why I hired @KylePagan_ . Yesterday, a new youth sports tech platform launches with a war chest in funding. Today, @BuyingSandlot is on the ground at a soccer conference in Philly interviewing their CEO in a casual setting. First-party business news in a modern format.

Is youth golf growing faster than flag football? ⛳️🏈 Youth golf participation has grown 39% since 2019, according to Project Play's State of Play 2025 report, an initiative of @AspenInstitute. It is one of three sports that has enjoyed an uptick in that span along with tennis (a whopping 51.2%) and flag (13.6%). These are shocking numbers given the youth sports industry's abundant growth opportunities through @NFLFLAG, @USAFootball, and more. BUT these numbers might not tell the whole story... @KyleScottL has a couple of thoughts: 1. "Obviously in 2020 and 2021, you had the pandemic, lots of people weren't participating (in sports). There were three sports that they list out of like 15 or 18 or so that do not have a decline. And those are golf, tennis, and flag football. Golf and tennis are sports you do play outside largely. So they are social distancing proof." "Flag football is the opposite, right? You're colliding into people, you're grabbing at them, you're swapping spit, you're often grabbing handfuls of underwear in some cases, right? So like pretty intimate in terms of sports. That actually stayed level and then grew very quickly from 22, 23 and onwards. So I would say flag was fighting a headwind, it was already growing, then it was fighting a headwind of the pandemic and it just plowed right through that. Golf and tennis were actually aided by the pandemic." 2. "The other part of that is, the golf participation rate, something like nearly half of golf today is played off of a course, right? Be it a Top Golf, an indoor simulator, an outdoor simulator, whatever it is. So I don't know how generous the golf participation rates coming from the golf industry are, right? Am I, and we can look into this further, but am I considered a golfer because I played two rounds of Top Golf or because I did a four week night golf sim indoor league? Maybe it counts, but you know, being on a flag football team's like a different level of involvement and participation. So I wouldn't just assume that the golf growth rate is because, you know, kids are joining and playing 18 holes 3x a week."

Welcome to @BuyingSandlot @CBKylePagan. A full circle moment.