This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
IMG-heavy send today as the school has news about distributing its curriculum and our own Kyle Pagan recently took a visit to see their campus.
Let’s get to it.
In the email today:
🗺️ IMG Academy’s Manifest Destiny
The elite sports powerhouse has formally launched Elevate by IMG Academy.
IMG is billing it as an education and performance platform that exports its “proven methodology for developing mindset, leadership, wellness and life skills that drive excellence in sport and in life” to K-12 schools, colleges and organizations worldwide.
Unlimited access to digital education units
Customized monthly virtual workshops for athletes, coaches, staff
On-campus experiences at IMG Academy
Certification programs for coaches, educators
Co-branding and licensing opportunities
Revenue share modes, dedicated account management for operators
IMG had teased Elevate last year when it acquired SportsRecruits to pair with its NCSA College Recruiting platform. There is also IMG Academy Essentials, a digital-only subscription service that delivers educational and training courses and workshop curriculum.
IMG also announced that Nord Anglia Education is the first institution to implement Elevate. The UK-based private school operator has over 100K students in 89 schools across 37 countries, including the U.S.
Now why is that?
Let’s go deeper: IMG Academy was acquired by Swedish private equity firm EQT for $1.25B 2023.
The PE firm also jointly owned Nord Anglia at the time, and Nord Anglia and IMG Academy announced a collaboration after the IMG Academy acquisition.
EQT then helmed a consortium that bought all of Nord Anglia for $14.5B in 2025.
IMG Chairman Andrew Fitzmaurice is the CEO of Nord Anglia, and oversees IMG’s global collaboration with Nord Anglia. We call this synergy:
But there’s a larger Trend Watch™ here: We recently told you about Curve Sports and its plan to form youth baseball super clubs. Curve’s founder is Sandy Ogg, the Chairman of Nord Anglia’s board. Curve is backed by Weatherford Capital. Drew Weatherford is a founding partner of Weatherford Capital and also serves on the IMG Academy board.
Curve is unrelated to IMG, of course. But Ogg told us last month that Curve would eventually like to establish academies that pair academics with its clubs. And now you have an IMG branded product that brings the holistic aspects of an elite sports institution’s curriculum to other schools. You can increasingly see how the worlds of academics and athletics are blending, and perhaps more importantly, who the biggest players in the space are.
Or, in video game form:
In the newsletter and on the podcast recently we’ve spoken at length about this topic.
Whether that’s the Bennett School - Alpha School AI-powered learning for 2.5 hours + 4 hours of baseball - or Pathway Schools - structured soccer training for players on other clubs - you are seeing professionalization and business opportunities open around private education and youth sports.
IMG Elevate looks to sit somewhere in the middle with curriculum around mindset, leadership, and wellness, which are athletic in nature but not exclusive to sports.
As schools begin to think about adding more sports to the day, and as clubs think about academics, large brands with proven systems - i.e. IMG - that can productize their offerings and distribute through partnerships can build robust educational networks.
📆 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
🎥 Buying Sandlot Visits IMG Academy
Talk about good timing. Our Kyle Pagan recently visited IMG’s Bradenton, Florida, campus for an in-depth look.
An inside look at IMG Academy:
0:00 - The Unique IMG Academy School Day
1:34 - The Importance of Brand Partners
2:23 - Using Data and Disrupting the College Transfer Portal
3:27 - Performance, Recovery, and the "Mind Gym"
4:30 - Pushing Performance Without Breaking the Athlete
6:15 - The Class of the Future
7:57 - What's the Future of IMG look like?
🤝 Another Big-Name Brand Deal
Chase will be Hudl’s official financial education partner.
Chase Money Skills — an interactive program that connects “money lessons to the teamwork, discipline, and goal-setting learned on the field," will be at the heart of the partnership. The tool will be available to athletes and families across through both Chase and Hudl channels and platforms.
Hudl has previously said it is present in 99% of U.S. high schools, so it’s a big market for Chase to put itself in front of.
🏢 SFC Keeps Rolling In Texas
The Sports Facilities Companies has added two more venues in the Lone Star State to its network.
SFC will manage Chisholm Aquatics Center and Central Aquatics Center in Hurst, a suburb of Fort Worth. Both are municipal facilities.
SFC also recently reached management deals with the upcoming $140M Odessa Sports Complex and Chisenholm Fields, a baseball/softball complex in Burleson, another Metroplex town.
SFC previously absorbed the Amarillo Netplex and Bryan’s Travis Fields at Midtown Park when it acquired RCI Sports Management.
🧱 More Youth Sports Facilities News
Homestead, Florida: Ground has broken on the $275M Sports Performance Hub of Miami-Dade mega complex. Developers have said project will create over 4K construction jobs and over 600 new permanent jobs without any taxpayer burden (some land was leased from the city, though).
Salinas, California: Produce giant Taylor Farms has pledged $1.5M (with a $1.5M match program) toward the expansion of the Salinas Regional Soccer Complex. The facility is in a $45M fundraising drive with the goal of building the biggest youth sports venue between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Saraland, Alabama: The $72M Land Sports & Recreation Center has been completed near Mobile. The 100-acre complex has eight baseball diamonds; it also has basketball/volleyball and tennis/pickleball courts. Kemper Sports is the management partner.
Westfield, Indiana: Nicholas Family of Companies was tabbed to build an ice hockey arena in the Grand Park District, pending a final contract agreement. The venue will have three ice sheets with the bailout to add a fourth in the future. A city-commissioned study projected $500M in "new spending" in the facility's first 30 years.
🧠 New Youth Sports Concussion Study
Football accounts for about 20% of all traumatic brain injuries among youth athletes, according to a preliminary study that will be presented at next month’s American Academy of Neurology annual meeting.
There are some big grains of salt to take with this study though.
"A limitation of the study is that clinical data was used, making it difficult to figure out the cause of a TBI since the majority of TBIs are recorded without a cause," a press release concedes.
In other words: Researchers don’t actually know what caused some (or most, or all) of the concussions.
The data used to compile the study came from a database of patients up to age 25 with no information on how many college football players could be included.
Soccer and basketball were Nos. 2 and 3 in TBI rate at 11% and 10%, respectively. Cycling was fourth at 7%.
There may be more meat on the bone with some of the deep-dive stats:
Average age of first-time TBI is 14
Girls only suffered 1 out of every 3 TBIs
Repeat TBIs were found in 37% of football cases
32% of overall TBI patients experienced repeat injuries
Football players were 23% more likely to have headaches caused by TBI
Visual impairment and anxiety risks are 5% higher for football players
🤦♂️ Parents Behaving Badly
It’s always something with Staten Island CYO hoops.
A coach recently punted a basketball into the air in anger during a third-grade girls championship game, according to The Staten Island Advance.
Even more curious: The game was being televised live on public access TV and the incident was scrubbed from the web replay. The newspaper found out because someone sent it the unedited footage.
The coach appeared to receive a technical foul for kicking the ball, but it is unclear if he was disciplined under strict new policies enacted by CYO officials after parents brawled at a boys basketball game late last year.
🔗 Youth Sports Links
Mississippi high school hoops coach pulls double duty
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Good game.