The Dick’s Sporting Goods-owned youth sports platform has fortified its roster as it pushes to expand beyond its baseball/softball stranglehold.
Brandon Rhodes has been tabbed as General Manager, Emerging Sports. He will be tasked with accelerating the growth of GameChanger’s basketball and soccer businesses. Rhodes was most recently GM of Overtime’s OTX boxing promotion; he also previously worked in brand management and digital strategy for Gatorade.
Remember: GameChanger joined Dick’s as an official WNBA marketing partner and Jr. WNBA partner in the summer. Those deals included “enhanced access to live streaming, scheduling, communications and scorekeeping for youth basketball games.”
Cynthia Kleinbaum Milner is also officially GameChanger's Chief Commercial Officer. She had announced her hire on her LinkedIn page last month after previous stops at Bonobos, Walmart and MoneyLion. She will lead GameChanger’s commercial strategy “with a focus on expanding our reach and deepening engagement with the families, coaches, and athletes who rely on GameChanger every day."
Someone - outside the target demo of this audience - asked me the other day how GameChanger compared to platforms like TeamSnap, LeagueApps and SportsEngine et al.
I found it weirdly hard to answer for 2 reasons: 1) GameChanger goes extremely deep in baseball-softball, whereas the others are aggressively cross-sport. And perhaps more notably, 2) while GameChanger has an appetite to expand team and club management features, it’s more well-known for its live streaming and class-leading scorekeeping features.
So the mandate is clear for them: increase adoption in other sports, and expand registration and particularly payment features for league, team and club admins. This could solve scenarios where leagues use another platform for registration and payments, while coaches and parents live in GameChanger on game day.
On the other hand, if you listen to my podcast with TeamSnap CTO Reed Shaffner about the rollout of TeamSnap ONE, it’s clear those more consumer-level gameday features are a focus for at least TeamSnap. It’s literally right there in the first line of their feature page: “Go live from the TeamSnap ONE mobile app—no extra tools or logins”.
LeagueApps, meanwhile, goes deeper on the operational and enterprise side of things. And newer entrants like Fastbreak are leading with scheduling for facilities and events and trying to consume all from there.
Different strategies, perhaps defined by how the platforms got their start.
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