It is no secret the Dick’s Sporting Goods-owned youth sports platform aims to grow beyond its dominance in baseball and softball — and that basketball is a major focus.
But the latest step toward that goal could prove to be a seismic one.
The GameChanger Challenge presented by Dick's Sporting Goods — a multi-site youth basketball tournament series — launched last weekend in Manalapan, New Jersey. Stops are scheduled in Chicago, Dallas and Miami later this month.
It is GC’s first-ever foray into live basketball events and it comes a few weeks after Brandon Rhodes was tabbed to lead its emerging sports strategy. Over 500 teams are expected to compete across the sites.
The only barrier to entry — participating teams have to be on GameChanger.
Boys and girls divisions from 11U to 14U
32-team single-elimination brackets
$5K prize for champions in each division
Free admission for families and fans
No team entry fees
On-site Players Lounge with creator appearances, sneaker culture activations and recovery products
GC said the national tour format “[positions] the tournament as a scalable platform for future basketball events." President Sameer Ahuja wrote on LinkedIn:
This is youth hoops done differently. High-energy, March Madness–style bracket play, along with everything that surrounds the game and makes it special: culture, community, and connection. The Players Lounge became a gathering spot for players, with creators in the building, conversations happening, and sneaker culture brought to life with DICK'S.
GC previously joined Dick’s as an official WNBA marketing partner and Jr. WNBA partner last summer. Those relationships included “enhanced access to live streaming, scheduling, communications and scorekeeping for youth basketball games.”
GC, which will have an on-stage presence at our Summit in April, also has a partnership with Jr. Nike EYBL and is working with basketball creators, some of whom were on-site in Jersey.
Two things here:
1) GC’s growth strategy seems to be adoption-focused. It has a stranglehold on baseball and softball and now it is aggressively putting itself in front of the basketball community.
The announcement of Rhodes’ hire also mentioned soccer as a sport of emphasis. And — at least from a streaming standpoint — once you are in basketball and soccer spaces, you are also effectively in field hockey, football, lacrosse and volleyball spaces too. That could be a pretty dynamic cycle to get rolling.
A report last year found GC was the top specialized youth sports streamer, but only with a modest 9% market share compared to the roughly 60% combined of Facebook and YouTube. Being a player in all the sports, as opposed to two, could drastically change that.
2) GC is best known as a scorekeeping and streaming platform and it is emphasizing its team and league management tools more and more.
But if it goes all-in on the events and tournaments piece with the operational might of Dick’s … it sort of becomes the everything platform in youth sports, right?
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Good game.