This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
The next few days are going to be quite busy.
Let’s get to it.
In the email today:
🧢 Previewing LeagueApps’ NextUp Conference
The youth sports management platform’s annual event is Wednesday in Manhattan.
The entire Buying Sandlot team — Kyle, Kyle P., James and Sales Guy Paul — is planning to be in attendance, so please say hello. You can still register for the event here.
LeagueApps President Jeremy Goldberg and CEO Brian Litvack have assembled an impressive roster of speakers (full list here). Among the scheduled topics:
Showcase of LeagueApps products
The forces reshaping the industry
Sponsorships, what investors are looking for
Scaling events, facilities
Mitigating risk, youth sports P&L, operations
Athlete development, what NIL means for youth sports
It’s always a great event. See you there.
🤝 Built For The Business Behind Youth Sports*
Youth sports doesn’t need another company trying to own everything. It needs great companies that work together.
For more than a decade, EventConnect has powered the group travel, housing and data behind some of the largest events in youth sports.
But our vision is bigger than another all-in-one platform.
We’re leading the way in open integrations, technology built around your brand, better data, stronger partnerships, and the flexibility to work within the systems you already use.
You shouldn’t have to move your business into our ecosystem to work with us. We’ll meet you in yours.
Sometimes that looks like EventConnect. Sometimes it doesn’t look like us at all.
The future of youth sports won’t be built by one company. It will be built by an industry that works better together.
*Sponsor
🇮🇹 Perfect Game Gets Into Overseas Experiences
The baseball and softball developmental giant will team with MintPros, a fan experience and hospitality company, and longtime MLB executive Omar Minaya on adult and youth sports camps packages in Italy.
PG President and Chairman Rick Thurman is part of the Italian Baseball Experience executive board, and PG has previously had trips to Italy. Minaya is now a senior advisor with the Yankees, so there is a lot of firepower here.
MintPros President Joe Quagliano explained things in an interview with Sportico last week:
“We have a model based on a company called MVP (International Athletics) and Perfect Game, and we're partnering with them. They're helping us with our trips and we're ready to roll out this company in a few days where we're going to have youth teams and adult teams playing in Parma, in Bologna probably, Milano, and our big location is Castiglione della Pescaia also known as the Francisco Cervelli Academy so we're very excited about these locations. And it's not just baseball. It's for the family, it's culture, visit the Coliseum, visit the leaning tower of Pisa, Florence, the museums.”
The main location is Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany, with connections to the Francisco Cervelli Academy. Quagliano co-founded the Italian American Baseball Foundation, and a July 2025 development trip brought more than 100 players to clinics across Bologna, Parma and Tuscany.
MintPros is the premium experience provider for the Yankees Legends Suite Games where fans can get autographs, pose for photos and interact with former Yankees. The shared-suite experience also comes with premium F&B and on this night tickets retailed for $300.
One note: Minaya mentions the Yankees involvement is still evolving, but pointed to the club’s 10% stake in AC Milan, new strategic investor Apollo Global Management —which has a majority stake in Atletico Madrid — and interest from leadership as signs they’re looking to globalize their brand.
🧪 Go Deeper: We talked about the increased experiential opportunity for pro teams to leverage their IP, and sports travel, on the podcast back in June:
In addition to the clip included here, this is what I wrote on August 17:
We’ve talked about this on the podcast a lot, but I see the collision of pro, youth and general sports tourism and hospitality as the next sports super cycle. Towns love it because it drives tourism $. Pro leagues and teams can capitalize on the trend to produce big-time one-off events or open up new revenue lines. And youth events can take place at somewhere other than a random box in Indiana.
With all due respect to random boxes in Middle America - sarcasm aside, they serve a critical function in youth sports - that experiences bucket I outlined last week is very undertapped. The convergence of desirable destination travel with sports fandom and participation (canonically, sports tourism) is happening in a much bigger way than most fans, families, and athletes can comprehend.
These trends are what we’re covering at the newly-formed Buying Media Group.
👥 Buying Sandlot Premium: Youth Sports Scheduling Remains Unsolved
We surveyed 49 readers on how they use and interact with schedules. More than 70% have 3 or more team schedules during an active season. How they view, interact and share those schedules varies greatly… and still requires manual work.
Premium members get access to all of this data and to a community where they can network with other members. Upgrade to premium for full access.
Already a member? Log in to read premium reports and access the premium community.
⛑️ Go4 Expands With New Division
The in-person safety and risk platform has acquired Hawk SportsMed Consulting and named Dr. Mark Sakr, the University of Arizona’s Sports Medicine Director, as its new medical director leading Go4 Medical.
The acquisition gives Go4 the first vertically-connected safety platform from medical governance to sideline coverage. The physician setting the protocol and the athletic trainer carrying it out in the field typically come from different vendors, but Go4 Medical will have medical oversight, policy, sideline staffing and injury documentation on one platform.
The new division brings about 130 physicians to Go4’s network; the platform also has over 26K athletic trainers available for hire nationwide and provides staffing, emergency action plans and HIPAA-compliant injury documentation for 12K youth sports organizations, schools, tournament operators, clubs, colleges and facilities.
Sakr has operated Hawk SportsMed for the last few years, including in his role as USA Rugby’s medical director. Go4 Medical will now handle the NGB’s safety and wellness needs, including administrative tasks, oversight, policies and protocol, staffing and U.S. SafeSport compliance. Sakr is also the CrossFit Games’ medical director.
Go4 Medical recently handled medical services and operations for the New Zealand-South Africa rugby test match at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium as part of its partnership with TEG Live, an events company that also handles European soccer exhibition tours. Talks are ongoing with other platforms across all events as well.
“The need (for the services) became more evident on the club sports level, the collegiate level and in youth sports,” Sakr told Buying Sandlot. “More and more questions kept popping up: ‘Can we do this? Could you do this? Could you do that?’
“We developed a team of doctors and ATs all over the country that were great. People who wanted to help and be involved in sports, be on the sidelines engaged and doing things the right way. The conversation started with Go4 around how we could utilize the work I was doing, plus their infrastructure and network to deliver high-level sports and event medicine across the board and across the country. … There should be a policy. There should be an approach. There should be people thinking through, ‘How do we take care of these kids while they're out there?’”
Sakr expects the physician network will grow quickly as he transitions into a full-time role at Go4. The initial focus will be bringing physician-led governance to the organizations, events and facilities Go4 already partners, but it may pursue other avenues similar to its wide-ranging AT offerings as the division evolves.
“I think if we have the right process and system in place, we can plug and play different wants and needs,” he said. “How do we help solve problems and make things safer? That's the goal of what we're trying to do.”
🥍 More On TeamSnap/USA Lacrosse Partnership
The NGB believes the new preferred mobile-first engagement solution relationship with the management platform not only simplifies administrative work, but will help keep families in the game.
"What I often say inside the walls at USA Lacrosse is 'I'm the audience,'" USA Lacrosse VP and Head of Commercial Revenues Will Blake told Buying Sandlot. "I didn't play, but my kids are. Help me understand it on behalf of my children so that I can be helpful to them as they as they decide whether or not they like it."
Blake said he believes attrition in lacrosse often comes down to two factors -- cost and friction.
"If registration is confusing, if communication is spotty, if a parent can't find the schedule, that family has a bad first season. And a bad first season is really tough to bounce back from. Same thing with coaching. If a coach gets out there and gives it the old college try, but doesn't have any resources to do it.
"It all comes down to how each program is empowering its parent volunteers on the coaching side to help them create a more unified approach to coaching that involves curriculum, involves skills and drills, involves player development so that the kids have a better experience, but the parents don't feel like they're lost out there too."
TeamSnap CEO Peter Frintzilas said the platform is looking to harness educational content similar to what it does with its MLSGo partnership and in other sports. The partnership also includes preferred access to TeamSnap ONE, which opens the door to TeamSnap's live streaming infrastructure in partnership with XbotGo.
"It's kind of a season in a box,” he said. “How do you give a volunteer that's never coached lacrosse eight practices for a 10U fall season and help eliminate the barrier to entry. In some cases people are scared to coach a sport they never had before. We want to be able to help bridge that gap."
🗞️ Youth Sports News Clips
Axios tossed a breaking ball yesterday with "How youth sports are squeezing Sunday worship,” an attempt to draw a (very tenuous) line between the industry’s boom and a decline in Americans attending church.
The argument: Sunday religious participation among parents of kids ages 5-17 fell about 10 percentage points between 2003 and 2024, according to American Time Use Survey data, while youth sports participation has risen and more events/tournaments play on Sundays.
Also worth reading: This Bloomberg deep dive on flag football’s rapid rise.
Three quick things:
1) Axios compares church participation figures from 2003-07 to 2021-24. The NFL played one Sunday morning game in Europe during the initial timeframe. It played 15 in the second. Why not also cite The Shield’s international expansion for the drop in churchgoing? There’s just as much evidence (which is not much).
2) Back in May we sat down with Travis Vaughn of Upward Sports, a Christian non-profit organization that helps churches set up and operate their own professionalized rec leagues. So the idea youth sports and religion are at odds would be disputed by some.
3) The Bloomberg piece included this quote from NFL executive Brian Flinn:
“All of the altruistic reasons that we’re involved are real. This is also a good, smart, long-term business decision for us. Both things can be true.”
He was talking about the NFL’s motivations to invest heavily in flag. But he could have been summing up the entire youth sports industry.
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Good game.