🥎 Club Lacrosse Giant Boosted By Private Equity

This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.

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True Lacrosse’s mantra is that no one trains more — a philosophy it plans to hinge its growth on after securing a strategic partnership with TZP Group to accelerate growth and launch True Sports Group, a new parent company.

“We like to say we are a training organization that meets a travel team experience,” True Sports/True Lacrosse CEO Daniel Forsyth told Buying Sandlot.

“Our path is through our training model and the emphasis on player development. In the club sports world right now, a lot of it has gone to compete, play and win. We want to make sure we are developing complete athletes.”

True Sports’ strategy:

True Lacrosse began working with Champion Volleyball — a 25-team club based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — several years ago to prove its player development model (athletes get 100 skill training hours annually) could be multi-sport.

True Sports will now look to partner with more volleyball clubs — and Forsyth said the company is open to exploring other sports, although that is not an active goal.

“We’d like to stay in [lacrosse and volleyball], but we are willing to expand into other sports as we see opportunity and as our player development model continues to prove out,” he said.

True Sports also operates Championship Events (formerly US Lax Events) and Premier Hospitality.

“We want to be able to leverage our events to service the industry overall, but also service our clubs,” Forsyth said. “We feel like we bring a lot of value with these teams to support future events along with great relationships with external groups.”

The bulk of True Lacrosse’s clubs are located in the Northeast and Midwest, but it also has footprints in the West and pockets of the South. Forsyth said all regions will be a focus.

TZP also has stakes in Soccer Post and Wave Sports + Entertainment, which has involvement with Dude Perfect and the Kelce brothers’ New Heights podcast.

Athletes of all ages and levels — from youth to professionals — receive elite speed and strength training at D1 Training’s over 150 locations nationwide.

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Prep Network has secured a $30 million investment from private equity firm Maple Park Capital Partners.

PN will use the funds — its first outside money — for product development and to expand its events into new regions, according to Bloomberg. Maple Park is also expected to deploy additional capital in the future.

Buying Sandlot has a content sharing partnership with Prep Network.

Also: There is a new sports-focused PE firm. Underdog Global Partners will “focus on investing in sports, real estate and media intellectual property,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Matt Rizzetta, a sports and media investor, is the founder. The report said Underdog may invest in a U.S.-based youth sports academy and an arena.

Add Jurgen Klopp to the list of luminaries who believe the sport is too expensive in the United States.

The former Liverpool manager told The Athletic he believes high participation costs are not conducive to development and providing access to all kids.

"That makes no sense at all to get the best talents,” he said. “We all know that the best players (in the world) are not coming from the richest areas. … So this part of motivation is essential.

“That’s the situation here; so many kids play football. But to get the right training and education at different stages, it makes sense that it’s free. It’s a long-term project issue for me personally and that’s all the things we want to go for.”

Klopp is now the head of Red Bull’s global soccer operations with oversight over its array of clubs, including the New York Red Bulls (and their developmental system) in MLS.

A pair of revamped youth sports complexes near Syracuse will generate over $20M in annual economic impact for central New York State, according to officials.

Elsewhere:

A 22-year-old man with a previous conviction for lewd behavior toward a minor allegedly posed as a 18-year-old Minnesota high school student and played football this fall.

A local lawmaker has demanded the school district superintendent’s resignation, blaming him for the lapse. But the school claims they adhered to all state laws in enrolling the man.

[This is where we would throw a plug to Buying Sandlot sponsor Zorts and their Flash Facial Recognition system, which is designed to stop this exact sort of activity.]

Also: A Texas man is accused of stealing over $300K from people he met while officiating youth sports. Cops said the man "would allegedly scam residents by promising to pay them back lots of money in the future, even though he allegedly did not intend to, or was unable to, pay them back.”

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Good game.