🥎 NFL Legend Joins Unrivaled Sports' Flag Football Push

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

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The future Hall of Famer has struck a “long-term partnership” with the youth sports giant after Unrivaled acquired Football N’ America — the flag football organization co-founded by the 13-time Pro Bowler.

Brees will focus on growing and expanding flag football participation and leagues, but also "bring [his] leadership and vision to other sports across the Unrivaled portfolio."

FNA is the fourth flag brand to join the Unrivaled Flag vertical as the sport booms both nationally and inside the Unrivaled portfolio.

FNA offers coed K-10 competitions and currently has 24 leagues in eight states. The bulk of the leagues are in Louisiana, California and Texas with a handful elsewhere in the Midwest and South.

FNA leagues will now be connected to Unrivaled’s marquee flag football events — High School Girls Nationals, the Gold Jacket Classic and the Youth Flag World Championships.

Unrivaled released these stats in July:

The other Unrivaled flag properties: All-American Flag, New England Flag Football League and Under the Lights Flag Football.

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The baseball and softball developmental platform released its schedule for next year.

The highlights:

PG said it will focus on expanding operations in Illinois and Texas this year, including five new PG host venues:

BASE Sports Group has brokered a partnership between Starter and the Governors Challenge.

The annual event is one of the nation’s biggest high school holiday basketball tournaments with dozens of boys and girls team playing across several venues in Maryland. Most of the teams are from the Northeast, but there is national representation.

It is one of Starter’s biggest youth sports initiatives yet — the brand has enjoyed a recent renaissance led by former NFL star Carl Banks, who is the brand president and has significant experience in the sportswear space.

Starter will also sponsor the D3 version of the tournament.

Jacobs Entertainment said it plans to create the Downtown Reno Amateur Sports Association in order to draw more sports tourism to the Biggest Little City in the World.

Jacobs — which operates the J Resort casino property in town — has also pledged to build 12 new fields in the downtown area.

Plans call for the first four fields to open next year. A local media report said the region has not had a new youth sports field constructed in over a decade despite a 150K population spike in the same period.

Jacobs CEO Jeff Jacobs said he believes Reno can handle 25-30 weekend youth sports events each year and those events will generate over 1K hotel room stays per night.

We typically stay away from the various hot topic cultural and political debates involving youth sports — but this is worth an exception.

An eighth-grade boy in Arizona was told he has to play girls basketball because his original birth certificate erroneously listed him as a female.

The boy’s mother alleges her son was “physically removed” from tryouts at Eastmark High in Mesa. She obtained a corrected birth certificate and a doctor’s note attesting her son is a male — which was never in question! — but the school still will not budge.

The school has said a chromosomal analysis “could be considered” to verify eligibility — those can costs hundreds to thousands of dollars — and officials “remain open and committed to ongoing dialogue.”

Just wild.

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