🥎 Girls Sports Boom Still Has Growth Potential

Everyone may have different numbers, and participation among girls at private and for-profit venues may differ greatly than in these two areas.

But it’s data like this that proves the thesis that there is significant opportunity to grow girls sports, through participation, experience, investment.

Our allotment of early bird VIP tickets has sold out, as there’s clearly interest in access to the on-site 4-star hotel and other VIP benefits.

VIP packages still remain, however. Current pricing for VIP tickets is $899 right here. This will increase in January or when we sell-through this availability— whichever comes first.

Regular early bird tickets are $599.

The on-site hotel rooms:

More details and tickets can be found here.

Some sponsor opportunities that are available (for now):

All of these include naming rights and any digital mention between now and the event.

If your organization would like group ticket pricing for 5 or more, or sponsorship information, you can contact [email protected].

8 Basketball Courts, 16 Volleyball Courts could be the name of a biting Green Day song about the proliferation of similarly-sized venues across the country.

I heard an interesting alt take from a respected youth sports thought leader last week. I’m not sure I agree with it, but here it goes: Perhaps the youth sports travel market decreases through some combination of family pushback on travel costs and more venues closer to home (supply matching demand).

The Sports Facilities Companies says “almost everything is a P3 [public-private partnership] in some way, shape or form,” and at the Jefferies event last month, they framed it as roughly half of feasibility studies they do are for private investors, but ~80% of the projects that get greenlit include public funding.

That tells me the math doesn’t work so well without a municipality also benefitting from tourism spend— something that private investors can tap into through incentives and rebates.

Paradoxically, enough of these things get built and you reduce the demand - especially in regions where travel is mandatory to seek competition - because someone now has a tournament option closer to home. At which point: Is there a scalable framework to deploy $60M-$70M in infrastructure improvements to existing fields and facilities, say, across an entire state rather than a single location? It probably would serve parents and athletes more - they spend most of their time at local venues after all - but the ROI is almost certainly less clear without the localized tourism and development elements.

Cracking the business end of that nut would be viewed as a huge win by families, local operators, and tax payers as a whole.

Greg Schiano joked to me during my days covering Rutgers that every American man believes he can do two things at a high level — work a grill and coach football.

I think there is a lot of truth there in all youth sports, especially when dealing with volunteer coaches. Just because Mom or Dad played a sport and/or have great enthusiasm for a sport does not mean they are fully equipped to coach it properly for kids. Especially when dealing with the increased danger of a contact sport like football.

Programs like this one are going to be critical to maintaining participation levels moving forward — safer play, better experiences and the quality instruction parents have made it clear they are seeking.