This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
Today, we launched our new podcast with Dave Yoo, the founder of parent-focused app Onsides.
Listen to the Podcast
You can listen and subscribe to the Buying Sandlot podcast with the following links:
I’m aware that only a small percentage of our 9,261 subscribers will watch or listen in-full.
So we bring to you, the reader, 5 BIG IDEAS from my conversation with Dave.
A New Standard For Youth Sports Photography*
Picture Pros Photography is one of the nation’s largest youth sports photography operators, capturing more than 1,000 tournaments and 1 million athletes each year,
It has recently completed its first season running a new on-site Photostore at Grand Park Sports Campus.
Unlike the temporary tents that have long defined youth sports weekends, the Photostore is:
semi-permanent
a professional storefront that is open every tournament
families can walk in, view their images, and leave with framed team photos, action shots, or custom posters the same day.
“Anyone who’s run a major weekend knows the headaches — tents blowing over, equipment moved in and out, long waits for delivery,” said Coleman Faucheaux, CEO of Picture Pros. “With the Photostore, we’re on site every weekend. It’s reliable, it looks better, and the venue itself shares in the success. Traditionally, vendors pay the host for space and the complex sees no upside — we’re changing that.”
Faucheaux sees the model as part of a broader shift.
“Photography shouldn’t be an afterthought,” he said. “It should be treated like concessions or ticketing — core infrastructure that elevates the athlete and family experience. The Photostore is also a content house, built for the future where players and parents want professional photos and highlight reels they can share instantly.”
After a strong summer at Grand Park, the Photostore is preparing for fall.
Faucheaux says other complexes already have their eye on the concept as a way to raise the standard from pop-up tents to permanent photo stores.
*Sponsor
What and Who
What: Onsides, which we first told you about last week, is a parent-first youth sports companion app that aims to simplify the chaos of managing kids’ sports logistics. Rather than replace existing platforms, it integrates with them to automatically pull in events and sync calendars. By acting as a kind of middleware, Onsides reduces friction and makes it easy for parents to keep everything organized in one place without juggling multiple logins or apps.
Who: Dave Yoo (yes, that rhymed, and I’m delighted about that) is a Silcon Valley-based startup founder who’s built and worked on multiple consumer apps. He saw a clear need for a parent-focused app in youth sports.
Here are 5 big ideas from him. His quotes are in blue.
Full disclosure: I am an advisor for Onsides.
1) Solutions, Not Conflicts
“And what was interesting is that when we showed that very early proof of concept to a buddy of mine's wife, who they have four kids ages 7 to 13, all doing sports. I showed it to her and she said, “I wouldn't use this.” And I thought immediately, “Oh, why?”
And she said, “I have four kids, each doing two sports. My life is one big conflict and I don't need another app to regurgitate that into my face, right? I'm just trying to stay afloat and manage with what I'm able to manage, to just get them all to where they need to be.”
And I thought that is the best blunt thing that anyone could have told me. I mean, I have one kid with three sports and I'm thinking, that's already complicated.
Why would I want to see the conflicts there?”
Early iterations of Onsides and other calendar apps are designed to surface conflicts. But life as a youth sports parent is one big conflict. So he retooled Onsides to help offer solutions - such as ride shares, drive times, and just the ability to update your attendance status - from a simple user interface.
This touches on something deeper: We can all hand-wring about the youth sports ecosystem not putting kids first, but I do think some of that is overblown— increased investment has lots of benefits, and let’s be honest, the alternative for many kids is social media, video games, or worse.
But we can all agree that parents have come last in this world. And Onsides is capitalizing on a trend of recent products that aim to make their lives easier.
2) Fragmentation in Youth Sports Tech Overwhelms Parents
The youth sports ecosystem is plagued by multiple disjointed apps - all of which are useful in their own right - forcing parents to juggle logins, notifications, and data across platforms.
This increases cognitive load and may actually reduce engagement with any given app.
So now we get parent-centric solutions (see: 1).
3) A Collaborative Layer, Not a Replacement For Existing Platforms
“And once the conversation [with existing platforms] started getting into that sort of mission statement of what we're all trying to do here, it really opened things up. And conversations became “oh, is there a way that we could actually promote certain features on our website?”
I said, absolutely. And you know what? A partnership is the best way to get the best of both worlds.”
In other words, adoption remains a challenge.
Even in a TeamSnap-only town, like I am, we still struggle to get all parents to consistently update availability or communicate through the platform.
Just last week, my son’s team passed around a paper contact list which parents had to fill out despite all of this information already existing in TeamSnap.
4) Plaid, For Sports
“So at some point there was like a tipping point, right, where suddenly their consumer demand was so high that these other institutions and smaller financial services were like, hey, we need to be on Plaid.”
In fragmented markets, starting scrappy with consumer pain points can create tipping points where user adoption pressures established players to open up access.
Right now, Onsides will have to get access to platforms any way it can (they say they use a combination of data scraping and APIs). But if it gets enough adoption, it may become table-stakes for platforms to integrate with it, much the same way many bank customers now demand Plaid integration so they can connect to their accounts securely.
5) Targeted Advertising Is a Big Deal
“So for us, we'll know location, weather.
We can appropriately upsell hotels, cleats, a tent because we'll know the weather, right? It's like do you need sunscreen? And I think the promotional opportunities there get me really excited.
I think the conversion rates on that would be amazing because it's so targeted and relevant to the parent at that time.”
Not just Onsides, but so many youth sports tech platforms are sitting on such rich data— player ages, sports, seasons, equipment needed.
This is, of course, why Dick’s is going so big on GameChanger and their retail media network.
This is perhaps the future of affiliate marketing. An industry that used to be dominated by partners ranking highly in Google (I know, because I spent years in affiliate marketing), has moved toward favoring marketing partners with rich, first-party data and the ability to drive additional sales.
My thanks to Dave for doing the podcast.
You can check out Onsides right here.
Listen to the Podcast
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Good game.