We have written a lot about two major industry trends — club consolidation/growth and facilities.
Baseline brings them together. The management platform is introducing a new AI-first operating system designed for club organizations with multiple locations, Buying Sandlot has learned.
USA Prime — which has over 1K club baseball and softball teams across 48 states — has tabbed Baseline as its preferred operating system in conjunction with the launch.
Facility management
Drag-and-drop tryouts, rostering
Parents can register over text, no login needed
Payment reminder texts, payment builders
AI-created full season structures, custom payment plans
Multi-bank routing
Admin access across different teams, venues
Webpage, marketing resources
Baseline said it processes tens of millions of transactions each month across over 700 facilities; 86% of them also operate their own club teams.
“You either have a facility and then you figure out, ‘I can have my own teams and have better margins because I already have the location,’” Founder and CEO Eli Herrick said. “Or you have hundreds of teams and wonder why you are paying so much to train somewhere, I should choose to open my own facility.”
Herrick, who pitched at Duke, originally launched StatStak — an athlete analytics platform. The company struggled to gain traction, but it identified a small group of subscribers that never churned and were not among its most frequent users.
Herrick said they learned many of those users worked with coaches who leveraged it for development and training purposes — and used it to generate recurring business.
A deeper dive revealed the coaches — and facilities operators — had their own pain points.
“We started spending more time with these coaches and they wanted to use the app we were building for data tracking, but they were so annoyed that they had a separate app for scheduling, for payments, for messaging,” Herrick said. “We said, ‘Oh, we should just go build that. That’s the real problem.’”
Baseline also has a relationship with Showcase Baseball Academy. While baseball and softball are its core sports, about half of Baseline’s net new inbound business is coming from outside that vertical.
Baseline’s first two tiers are completely free; Herrick said 90% of facilities do not pay the company directly. The platform’s scale allows this, allowing it to access more favorable rates on transaction fees. Baseline also benefits from the year-round nature of facilities, which require recurring revenues to remain open.
"Every other platform is acquiring point solutions and bolting them on,” Herrick said. "Those systems were never designed to work together, leaving operators to reconcile databases that do not know about each other. We built one operating system from Day 1. Competitors will need years to ship what we’ve released.”
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