This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
We’ll be at LeagueApps’ NextUp event in NY this week. If you’re planning on attending and would like to meet up with me (Kyle), James, or Paul (partnerships and sponsorships), reply to this email and we’ll find some time to connect.
Let’s get to it.
In the email today:
🏒 Hockey Is Surging In The Southeast (And Utah Is Taking Notes)
Axios’ local website in Raleigh, North Carolina, published a report on youth hockey’s rise in the state’s Research Triangle region.
This stat popped off the screen: Hockey participation in the Southeast has grown 7X compared to the rest of the country since 1990, according to USA Hockey.
The Axios report credits population shifts from northern states into southern states as well as the Carolina Hurricanes and the wave of NHL expansion and relocation teams that arrived in the region over the last 30ish years — and have won Stanley Cups once they settled in.
Putting the 7X figure into context:
USA Hockey had a record 578K registered players in 2024-25
Youth hockey registrations increased 10% from 2014-15 to 2024-25
Girls/women’s hockey grew about 40% in that time span
A roughly 20% increase in entry age registrations (and greater retention)
Which brings us to one of Buying Sandlot’s favorite topics: Utah.
(We’re going to be as big as the Osmonds in the Beehive State by the 2034 Winter Games)
The Utah Mammoth are going all-out to grow hockey in the nation’s fastest-growing state.
Owner Ryan Smith has pledged up to $10M to build 20 rinks in the state
The Mammoth’s new practice facility will be open to youth hockey
A significant number of heavily-discounted home game tickets for youth hockey
4-5 youth hockey events each week during the NHL season
A push to have 70K participants in the Junior Mammoth program within five years
The team and Salt Lake City officials reportedly studied hockey-arrival cases like Nashville and Raleigh … and are throwing jet fuel on proven practices that sparked participation surges.
Throw in the aforementioned Winter Olympics and the fact Utah is arguably the winter sports capital of the country and it is not hard to envision a scenario where the Mammoth spark a even greater hockey gold rush.
🏟️ The Shopify of Youth Sports Tournaments*
There are only a handful of companies that deserve the moniker: The Shopify of [X].
That’s because it’s rare when one platform can cover all of a business’ needs in a single interface.
EventConnect is the Shopify of sports tournaments.
It’s the leading no-cost platform built specifically for organizers who juggle schedules and hotel blocks in the same breath.
registration
rostering
payments
real-time performance reports
lodging and more
Their proprietary HousingConnect tech bolts room blocking and booking straight onto checkout, delivering the best online group rates while parents still have their credit cards out.
This means up to:
30% more room night reservations
24% savings on team hotel costs
EventConnect already powers 9,000 events, taps 30,000 hotels across 800 destinations, and backs it all with class-leading customer support.
Want to join them?
*Sponsor
🐝 Speaking Of Utah …
Some interesting comments and figures from a recent sports tourism summit in the state:
There were 314M sports travelers in the U.S. between 2023 and ‘24, according to Sports Salt Lake official Clay Partain.
About 65% of them — roughly 205M — were for amateur and youth sports.
But the economic impact divide between college/pro sports and amateur/youth is roughly 50-50.
Sports tourism was responsible for about 33% of Salt Lake City’s 1.1M hotel night stays last year and drove about $195M in economic impact. And that is with the Mammoth being a new option and SLC now in the hunt for an MLB expansion team.
One way to view much of youth sports is as a giant arbitrage opportunity.
What do I mean by that?
As outlined here, it takes up a disproportionately large volume of sports engagement, but accounts for less of the economic output. In terms of both sponsorship and commerce.
Take this Saturday for example: I spent 1.5 hours at my son’s tournament soccer game, and would have spent 2.5 hours at my other son’s fall baseball game if we didn’t have to make a detour and leave early to get x-rays on his finger because he swung right into a fastball (not broken, thankfully). That’s 4 hours at youth sporting events— and a typical weekend day in the fall and spring. I saw maybe a smattering of merchants or sponsors vying for my attention while there: a Carvana ad on opposing Rush jerseys, and a banner for probably some local insurance guy. All this despite the fact that I was rarely looking down at my phone during this time, and only took it out of my pocket to take video. A captive audience, I was. But the effort to get my attention was laughably inefficient.
Meanwhile, I watched maybe 1.5 hours of the Cubs-Brewers game that night. How much more focused was the effort to get my attention during that time? National commercials, countless in-stadium sponsors, organic ad reads, and hyper-targeted YouTube TV commercials. I probably spent half the time on my phone not paying attention anyway.
If we take commerce as the key metric, things are even more extreme. I spent nothing at either game I attended, despite being hungry, thirsty, and very much interested in a warmer sweatshirt.
These aren’t perfect comparisons. Pro and college sports command a premium event charge. And it is significantly harder to structure youth sports given its built-in fragmentation.
But the pro and college ecosystems have historically thought much, much more deeply about how to monetize time spent at events or watching them.
And therein lies the opportunity in youth sports and a reason why private equity is so interested in the space. As we discussed in the most recent Buying Sandlot podcast, sponsors can capitalize on underpriced attention, and food, beverage and service providers can sell to underserved customers. Never mind the fact that all that stuff could theoretically subsidize participation costs, helping to alleviate a major pain point with youth sports.
⛹ Latino Community’s Youth Sports Participation Rise
A report by McKinsey and Telemundo examining the economic impact of Latino sports fans in the U.S. included these youth sports-related figures:
Latino youth participation grew at a compound 3.9% rate from 2019-24
That is almost double the rate of non-Latino youth
53.7% of Latino youth participated in sports in 2024 compared to 56.5% of non-Latino youth — a 2.8% gap
But that participation gap was 6.3% in 2019
Quick Take: Greater outreach to Latino youth sports families — and efforts to remove access barriers — are no-brainer moves for the industry. Especially when the report found Latino fans are 27% more likely to attend sporting events than non-Latino fans in large part because they provide family outings.
🏈 Fathead Sponsors Flag Football Team
The New York Jets have announced the Jets Flag Elite rosters for the 2025-26 season and the start of the first ever Jets Flag Elite 14U travel team, which will begin play this fall. Additionally, both teams welcome a presenting partner – Fathead – for the first time.
As part of the partnership, Fathead will cover travel expenses to tournaments for Jets Flag Elite, including flights and hotels. The goal of the partnership is to significantly reduce or eliminate travel expenses for Jets Flag Elite players and their families. The Jets will continue to cover the cost of coaches, equipment, training facility space, tryouts, and tournament fees, eliminating nearly all costs for the girls to play. Additionally, Fathead will make Big Heads of all players on the team to help fans cheer on the squad at all the tournaments throughout the country.
“What’s to stop brands from stealing [the Pottstown Scout] model and forming their own travel clubs with the best and most influential athletes in a 60-90 minute radius? Team Dunkin Donuts™ in Mass, as an example. I think the next step here is a white label club operator that works on behalf of brands, or a reverse-licensing company that facilitates these relationships with existing clubs. Like RCX does with NFL Flag for league operators. Only in this case, club operators are provided branded jerseys and other branded equipment.”
Not exactly the same, and an extreme example given the Jets’ involvement with the team. But you can see where this is headed: team and club naming rights deals.
🏟️ U.S. Soccer At Home In Kansas
The National Presidents Cup was awarded to Wichita’s Scheels Stryker Sports Complex for 2026-28.
The annual U13-U19 boys and girls competition was held in Tampa this summer, but was in Wichita in 2023 and ‘24.
The event is projected to generate $12M in local economic impact and bring over 6K families to town over the three years.
🔗 Youth Sports Links
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Good game.