🥎 New 'Pay-For-Evaluation' Recruiting Service Draws Outrage

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

We’re still working on an in-depth article tackling interoperability in the world of youth sports, under the backdrop of the AI bot wars playing out in the tech space. Expect it next week.

In the meantime, we’d love to know how you personally handle one of the more popular use-cases of youth sports tech— managing the family calendar.

Take our Great Youth Sports Calendar Survey right here.

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We hosted our first live webinar yesterday for premium subscribers in partnership with Ankored, focusing on compliance and safety. Joining us on the virtual roundtable:

The full webinar will be available for all subscribers next week. But here are some key takeaways from the conversation:

Perfection is not attainable. An operator may have to juggle federal, state and local standards -- both actual laws and policies -- plus whatever their overarching organization or governing body requires. And all of these needs may contradict or overlap each other. Even major organizations will never achieve 100% compliance. And no policy will stop all negative outcomes, from abuse to injuries. The goal is create a culture that uses every tool at its disposal to prevent them and acts responsibly when they do happen.

Teamwork helps. Operators will encounter many "gray areas" when it comes to compliance and safety. Being able to consult internal peers or tap into a larger network makes it easier to navigate these situations when they are presented. Wally offered a particularly insightful story about how his organization dealt with a volunteer candidate who had a non-violent, but recent, criminal record.

An easy place to start. Compliance does not guarantee safety— the former accounts for liability while the latter is more science than art. Thompson suggests "The Rule of Three," which means there are at least three people and two adults involved in any interaction like applying ice, putting on the catcher's gear, stretching, etc. That way each moment is observable and, if necessary, interruptible to maintain safety.

Thanks again to our participants. Stay tuned for the full release.

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.

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The high school recruiting media company was the internet’s main character yesterday after launching Rivals Recruit — a service where high school football players and their families can pay $500 to be evaluated by Rivals scouts, but with no guarantee of being ranked or, really, anything beyond going through the process:

Rivals says the platform is "designed to expand the recruiting radar” and give players who are fits to play at the FCS, Division-2 and -3 and junior college levels “the opportunity to be seen, professionally evaluated and discovered.” The company added that “ratings, rankings and stars are earned, never bought."

The announcement was widely panned on social media as many accused Rivals of exploiting athletes and families. The reactions — albeit anonymous ones — reported from college coaches and personnel officials were indifferent at best with some calling it a cash grab and others claiming they are less likely to recruit athletes who pay Rivals.

Rivals/On3 founder and CEO Shannon Terry initially defended the move with some painful AI slop. He then followed up with a more substantial, seemingly human-produced response that touted Rivals’ scouting and said the platform will “address an underserved area of the market."

The Lone Star State is Sportball country.

The Canadian multi-sport developmental platform announced it will launch a franchise in Frisco next year. The news comes a few weeks ahead from the opening of its first U.S. corporate location in Plano — which we reported in June.

That makes six current or planned Sportball locations in Texas along with Austin, Houston, Katy and San Antonio. There are also franchises in Boston, Brooklyn. Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Sportball — which has programming starting at 16 months — has over 900 locations worldwide across Canada, the U.S., India and Singapore.

All is quiet on the STRONG Kids Act front with the midterms fast approaching. But a private organization has demonstrated the bill’s impacts if passed.

Susan Crown Exchange — the grantmaker behind the Million Coaches Challenge — recently launched its new Empower Every Coach initiative to “dismantle systemic barriers to quality coaching across the United States.”

Chicago-based SCE operates similar to the system STRONG Kids would implement, primarily making grants to national- and state-level organizations that have the scale and strategy to assist its bottom-up approach and create impact at local levels — the same proposed strategy as the SKA leveraging about $200M in annual federal sports betting excise tax revenues.

“There are lots of opportunities and a need to create a more consistently quality experience for parents and kids. We drew a pretty sharp line around coaches,” SCE managing director Kevin Connors told Buying Sandlot. “There was this enormous opportunity around coaches, supporting them and meeting the needs they were expressing with that tangible goal of a million.

“We very intentionally selected a group of organizations who were representing kind of each corner of the youth sports experience. The recreational, the school, the elite and travel, the Olympic movement. Partly because kids show up in each of those, partly because coaches sometimes show up in each of those. And also, as our cohort taught us by the end — no matter what age or what environment, the fundamentals of coaching and the fundamentals of a quality experience are pretty common.”

SCE places heavy emphasis on athlete- and youth-centered approaches and development. But its grants can also support Xs and Os training for coaches and safety issues. SCE has announced 10 partnerships and partnerships so far through Empower Every Coach, including Positive Coaching Alliance, the U.S. Soccer Federation and FundPlay Foundation.

FundPlay was integral in the introduction of the STRONG Kids Act — which, like SCE, seeks to step into the vacuum left by the lack of national oversight in the industry.

“It makes scale and sustainability harder,” said Connors of the fact there is no central body for sports like in other countries.

“It makes the floor harder in so many ways. And at the same time, it's created is this environment where you have so many trailblazing leaders who said, ‘We can still think big and boldly.’ We’re just trying to find those organizations.”

The Sports Facilities Companies has been tabbed to manage the Nicholasville/Jessamine County Community Center in Nicholasville, Kentucky.

The venue is set to open early next year. Former Kentucky men’s basketball player Shagari Alleyne has been named its GM.

SFC is also in talks with the city of McCook, Nebraska, to manage the new $17M PFC Gerald D. Walters Youth Sports Complex.

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