This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
Let’s get to it.
In the email today:
👟 Inside Look At National Junior Pickleball
Courtney Loughridge was playing tennis when her 7-year-old son saw someone receiving a pickleball lesson.
When he asked to try the sport, she thought he meant cornhole.
“I had literally never heard the word before,” she told Buying Sandlot with a laugh.
Loughridge’s son immediately took the sport. Before long he was beating his dad and other adults. He enjoyed that, but what he really wanted to do was play kids his age.
But those opportunities were scarce. Pickleball is seemingly everywhere for adults, but its youth popularlty did not immediately follow. Which is why Loughridge took matters into her own hands and founded National Junior Pickleball, a camps and tournaments platform for players ages 8-18:
NJP started with a local event in the Las Vegas area in 2022 and launched a tour in 2024 with the backing of sponsors like DUPR and Joola Pickleball
NJP now has about 10 four-day regional tournaments a year, plus camps
Just had its first international swing in Malaysia and Vietnam
Each four-day NJP event has clinics and days for singles, doubles and team competitions. There are numerous age- and skill-based groups as well as some parent clinics, which allow all members of a family to participate. There are usually over 100 kids competing at each event.
The platform’s growth has coincided with a pickleball boom:
There were 2.2M kids ages 6-12 who played in 2024, according to SFIA, which was double the 2022 figure.
Participation also increased 157% for ages 13-17 in the same span.
Accessibility is a big reason why. Any hard surface tennis court can be used as a pickleball court and costs are affordable. Families may have to travel for NJP events, but a four-day tournament usually tops out at around $200 per kid (excluding travel).
Some of that can be attributed to sponsorships — NJP’s website lists nine brand partners.
“We’re organizing that developmental pathway and foundation,” said Loughridge, who has a background in community programming and nonprofit development.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to build it from the ground up and take the best practices from everything. Building in the right way for what youth sports should be — enjoyment, camaraderie, growth, leadership, exercise. There’s always going to be competition and pressure, but keeping it in the healthy development phase and keeping that as a positive impact in the kids’ lives and the families’ lives.”
One other nugget I found interesting — and a potential Trend Watch™:
Loughridge told me pickleball — at least at an organized level — cannot be played on a basketball/volleyball court.
Temporary surfaces can be thrown down on hardwood and in convention centers, but it’s an imperfect alternative and can be difficult to pull off.
A lot of NJP’s events happen at pickleball-specific facilities. Loughridge said more are being built nationwide.
It will be interesting to see if the industry shifts toward pickleball-first venues because — as many of you saw at Ballers during the Buying Sandlot Summit — you can pack a lot of courts into one place. The math is often better than one basketball court equaling two volleyball courts. And you can always throw down temporary hardwood.
But on the other hand: Pickleball still has a ways to go before its overall participation approaches hoops and volleyball. So my guess is pickleball-first facilities stay more of a regional move than a national one for now.
The WSJ had a great article last week featuring said pickleball courts at our Summit location— Ballers in Philly.
Separately, the one line that stood out to me here:
“Accessibility is a big reason why. Any hard surface tennis court can be used as a pickleball court and costs are affordable. Families may have to travel for NJP events, but a four-day tournament usually tops out at around $200 per kid (excluding travel).”
Our ongoing research continuously identifies two areas as the primary cost drivers for youth sports: travel and facilities. The need for the former can somewhat be diminished by improved tech tools used in talent identification and better local facilities— but there will always remain some need for elite athletes to travel to find commensurate competition. Never mind there is genuine interest and demand here (see our interview with Perfect Game CEO Rob Ponger).
The local facility problem is two-fold: clubs need more access to facilities and facilities need more capital to operate.
Pickleball-specific venues used for tournaments aside, you see what happens to accessibility when playing surfaces are readily available with generally omnipresent public supply. Compare that to the more expensive volleyball (roughly similar equipment cost but requires a more specialized playing surface, usually in private or school settings).
Local facility access is a solvable problem with capital though, especially if public funding can be directed to quality playing surfaces and facilities that aren’t built around sports tourism economics. They can be used by both non-profit and for-profit organizations.
The STRONG Kids Act, which was proposed last week, allows funding to be directed toward facilities, but I think it’s just scratching the surface since subgrants are capped at $50k. The Youth Sports Facilities Act has been kicking around for a couple of years and proposes to make sports facilities eligible for economic development grants (great!). But while not a requirement, much of that bill is rooted in tourism and economic development, which paradoxically are often the justifications that drive costs up for most families.
Ergo, I’d argue that the single biggest impact government could have on improving participation and reducing costs on youth sports in America would be wide-scale funding of sports facilities without requiring tourism impact to justify the costs. Pickleball’s relatively lower costs and overall accessibility show what happens when you can commoditize the playing surface.*
*This is also the counter to the claim that padel will follow pickleball’s trajectory— it requires expensive, purpose-built courts and, thus, will always cost more. Still bullish on padel, but it has more constraints than pickleball does.
📆 EventConnect Exists To End Tournament Chaos— For Organizers And Families*
Tournament weekends have become mini supply chains: teams register, rosters change, schedules shift, hotels fill, and parents scramble.
Too many events still run things on spreadsheets, portals, and last-minute calls.
What we do (and why it’s different):
Centralize the weekend workflow: registration, rostering, payments, lodging, and real-time reporting.
Organizers can run end-to-end on EventConnect or integrate the systems they already use— no rip-and-replace required.
Either way, the data lands in one place so operators aren’t stitching together reports from multiple tools.
The “moment that changes outcomes”:
HousingConnect embeds hotel booking directly into checkout— capturing rooms at peak intent instead of sending families to a separate portal later.
Results can be up to 30% more room-night reservations and 24% savings on team hotel costs.
Proof of scale:
EventConnect powers 5,000 events and connects 30,000 hotels across 800 destinations.
Learn more about how EventConnect can help power your tournament right here.
*Sponsor
🤝 TPH Academy Partners With USHL
TPH — which uses the Subject education tech platform — will be the league’s primary high school academic provider. The deal is for multiple years.
The USHL is USA Hockey’s top sanctioned juniors league with 16 teams in the Midwest and Great Plains regions. It said TPH’s model "addresses operational challenges stemming from frequent player movement and ensures a seamless academic transition between local youth clubs and league teams."
TPH -- which is tied to Total Package Hockey -- currently has 22 locations across the U.S., Canada and Spain. Chief Growth Officer Steve Sanders previously told Buying Sandlot there are plans to grow to 27-30 over the next year.
BUYING SANDLOT: THE BUSINESS OF YOUTH SPORTS
A Deep Dive into TPH Academy's Model with Steve Sanders
TPH is club agnostic and typically operates locations out of existing facilities, renting space for academics and training. It does not provide boarding and has begun to move into soccer with the intention of adding additional sports.
🏈 Indiana Takes A Big Flag Football Step
The Indianapolis Colts and the IHSAA announced the state has broken 100 varsity high school girls teams during last weekend’s NFL Flag Championships at Grand Park Sports Campus.
That means the sport is now eligible to be sanctioned in the state; a vote could come as soon as next May.
Remember: We have a state-by-state flag sanctioning tracker with the official status of all 50 states via NFHS.
🏔️ Facilities Arms Race: Rocky Mountain Addition
Officials in Castle Rock, Colorado, signed off on construction contracts for a new $35M indoor complex.
The facility is a joint venture between the Denver suburb, Douglas County and the nonprofit Gold Crown Foundation.
68K-square-feet
6 basketball courts, 9 volleyball courts
Future phases could include more courts, outdoor turf fields
Planned groundbreaking in 2027, opening in 2028
15K youth athletes served annually
Projected 500K-600K annual visitors
The town also transferred 22 acres of land to Gold Crown for the site and agreed to waive up to $1M in costs and fees related to the project.
The complex will sit about a half-hour from the sprawling, $100M Zebulon Regional Sports Complex — also expected to open in 2028.
📰 Examining The Rise Of ‘Sporting Superkids’
The Athletic published a fascinating report on how many teenagers have recently emerged as elite international athletes, led by 19-year-old Spanish soccer star Lamine Yamal.
Some of it could be cognitive bias and the world becoming more interconnected, one expert said. But the growth and professionalization of the youth sports industry is also cited.
The piece also touches on early-age talent identification, physical development, specialization and more.
🤦♂️ Parents Behaving Badly
A youth softball coach in New Jersey faces assault charges after an altercation with an opposing coach.
The incident occurred in the handshake line of a 12U PAL game; other coaches and the umpire were eventually able to separate the men.
📊 Poll: Youth Sports Investment Activity
Based on your role in youth sports, how would you best describe the state of investment activity or interest compared to this time last year?
🔗 Youth Sports Links
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Good game.