LakePoint Sports hosted the National Youth Sports Summit on Tuesday in Emerson, Georgia.
Here is a rundown of our big takeaways after streaming the entire event via SportsEngine.
🎥 Interesting Streaming Takes
1) Personal Clips Are The Future
SportsEngine video operations VP Nick Busto believes personalization is the future of youth sports streaming with a focus on personal clips and reels for each kid at scale.
“We strive to create an experience of whether you’re at the game, you’re watching a live stream or maybe you are stuck in traffic coming home, you have the highlights from the person you care about the most delivered directly to your phone in real-time. Are we there yet? No. But when you think about personalization and content in youth sports, while we live for the long-form and live stream, personal highlights are kind of the currency. That’s where we’re going.”
2) Media Hype Is Overblown
PlayOn streaming and coaching tools president David Rudolph - the company’s former CEO - doubts youth sports, which is “fundamentally a local, hyper-personalized product,” will ever break through and become mainstream media properties beyond exceptions like the Little League World Series and uniquely captivating stories.
“It’s really difficult to build a business — and a scaled business — on these one-off moments because they are so unpredictable. I think you have to build your foundation of the business on the long tail, on the hyper-personalized and then try to take advantage when you have things and storylines that break through.”
3) Live Streaming Remains Difficult
We have written much about youth sports streaming's growth potential and why that upside is not being maximized.
We may be overlooking a simple reason -- the pairing of two complicated and often chaotic things.
“I think with all the discussion around the youth sports industry, one thing that gets left out is really how messy it is,” Busto said. “Youth sports are messy. Taking a couple hundred games in a weekend for one event, doing that dozens of times over thousands of games over the course of a weekend is hard. And live sports are hard. Putting live sports and youth sports together is really challenging.”
🗂️ The Next Big Thing?
Ex-ESPN sports business reporter Darren Rovell made the case for youth sports collectibles being the next hot trend during one of the panel discussions at NYSS.
His take: They have wide appeal — kids, parents, family and friends, collectors — and consumer habits show people will pay significant money for quality products that are meaningful to them and tell a story.
But, Rovell joked, the collectibles that already exist have not evolved much from his own little league trading cards made with a dot matrix printer and rubber cement decades ago.
“There is an opportunity now to bring the quality of youth sports collectibles to what we see now reflected in the regular market,” said Rovell, who founded Cllct -- a collectibles- and memorabilia-focused media company last year.
"You could actually have game-used patch cards, things from the tournament that if they’re not in the kids’ room, it’s in the parents’ room.”
🤔 A Consolidation Wake-Up Call
Rudolph brought the heat, as you would expect from a guy who stopped being a CEO a few days ago.
On the push to address industry fragmentation and roll-up the cornucopia of different platforms and tools youth sports families must use: “I think it’s a great thesis posed by investors who have little experience operating.”
This is something he echoed in our podcast interview with him this summer.
Rudolph expects some consolidation and integration, most likely within sports. But he does not envision a magic app that replaces a dozen others.
“It’s a lot easier to put (it) on a spreadsheet or a piece of paper than it is to execute it. Just putting companies together doesn’t do very much. You have to integrate the technology, integrate the consumer experience. Otherwise you make it a clunky experience for fans and that’s not going to work well.”
Three stats mentioned during the conference:
Industry deal volume is up 68% through Q2 of 2025
M&A activity is up almost 48%
An estimated 670+ startups currently operate in the youth sports ecosystem
💰 Private Equity’s Positive Impacts
Almost all media attention paid to private equity’s involvement in youth sports dwells not even on actual negative impacts, but potential ones.
Very little credence is given to the good PE capital can accomplish. Case in point: Dave Smith, the executive director of the Atlanta-based NASA Tophat soccer club, said they have to turn away over 1K athletes each year due to limits on fields and practice spaces.
But that is an issue PE can help fix if management and oversight responsibilities are handled properly.
“If it’s handled the right way, it’s going to be fantastic,” Smith said. “More money, more kids can play, more fields.”
Also: If you ever wondered about PE’s interest being overblown … Smith said NASA Tophat fields about a half-dozen calls from PE each week.
🧢 Worth Noting Re: Specialization
The average youth sports participant plays at least 2 sports, according to data presented by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association at the summit.
SFIA found participants ages 6-12 play 1.9 sports on average, and kids 13-17 play 2.0. And both figures have increased since 2019.
Overall youth sports participation has grown 12% since the pandemic, according to SFIA.
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