This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
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In the email today:
🏐 Scoop: More Expansion For Otto Sport AI
GameChanger has established itself as the platform for youth baseball and softball.
Otto Sport AI is now bidding to be the same in volleyball after just over a year in business. The youth sports management startup is continuing its rapid growth with a wave of new additions and expansion for its volleyball-focused SportsWrench events platform.
35 major tournaments will move to SW this coming season, including several USA Volleyball national qualifiers; events welcome hundreds of thousands annually
Veteran operators Ryan Bozell, Kathy Lietzke, Scott McQueen will join Otto as strategic advisors; Advanced Event Systems founder Brad Preston is also now a strategic advisor
That quartet is launching Integrated Tournament Solutions, a new volleyball-focused travel firm; ITS will be integrated into SW
Otto kicked off last July when it acquired SW, Demosphere (management) and University Athlete, its recruiting platform. It then built out an AI team at its Minneapolis headquarters and officially launched in January following a $16.5M seed round backed by Mamba Growth Equity and Rally Ventures.
The new moves follow a slew of other partnerships, including integration with VolleyStation and an events management pact with Junior Volleyball Association.
“It’s been a whirlwind. It's been amazing,” CEO Luke Zaientz told Buying Sandlot. “Our initial thesis when we started this thing was we thought if we just lead with innovation and empathy, meaning that we really care about our customers and are trying to bring them tools to make their lives better, they'll appreciate that and tell their friends. That’s exactly what’s happened.”
Zaientz sees the last eight or so months as a “flippening” in the space.
AES — acquired by SportsEngine in 2015 and then part of the PlayMetrics deal earlier this year — was the dominant volleyball management platform for years.
Zaientz said its market share was likely in the 90% range at one point and SportWrench was only at 20-25% when acquired by Otto. But he expects those numbers will be flipped this fall.
“What’s happened in the last six months is we’ve built a great product, we’ve been bringing it out to everybody and everyone is like, ‘Yeah, we’re on board.’
“I think coming into this tournament season, you’ll see the numbers. AES will be dwindling down to a very small market share and we’re going to be up to 70, 80 percent share just in one season. Which is crazy. You’re going to see the governing bodies rolling to SportWrench. You’re going to see most of the major tournaments groups rolling to SportWrench.
“For volleyball tournament tech, there’s maybe half a dozen to 10 people in the country or the world that know how to create these systems, operate these systems, do scheduling for volleyball tournaments. They’ve basically all signed on to our mission.
“The big volleyball tournament operators are signing on, the schedulers that work with them are signing on. The founders of AES, the operators of AES have joined forces with us. All the people that know how to build tournament tech and operate it have kind of moved onto our platform to work with us as advisors or teammates. So it’s on. It’s going great.”
Otto offers club management tools for lacrosse and soccer, and Zaientz said that business is important. But the strategy is to go as deep as possible in volleyball and leverage innovation and AI to establish a flywheel that covers all needs for operators, coaches, athletes, families and everyone else in the ecosystem, using tournaments as the foundation. It’s at that point that Otto will consider further expansion into other sports.
“Doing fewer things really, really well is always a better strategy,” Zaientz said. “And wth AI here now, it's much more interesting to go into a sport and to bring together different pieces that you can get more interesting insights from data.
“So rather than trying to be the club platform for 50 different sports, we said, ‘Why don't we try to be recruiting an athlete support, plus tournament operations, plus a club platform, just in volleyball?’ Because if we do that, we can bring all the data together in one place and just do insane things with AI.”
💰 Youth Athletes United Secures Growth Investment From PE Firm
The youth sports franchise company announced it has secured a growth investment from Falfurrias Capital Partners.
YAU co-founders CEO Adam Geisler and president John Erlandson will continue to lead the company, which launched in 2021 with the backing of Reynolds Channel.
YAU has programming for kids as young as 1 through high school ages across its three brands — Amazing Athletes, Soccer Stars and TGA.
"We believe we can change kids' lives through sports," Geisler told Buying Sandlot. "We've been looking for a new partner to really help us continue to reinvest in what we're doing well. We've probably impacted about 400,000 kids a year; we want to impact a million kids through sports."
Geisler said the capital will go toward myriad efforts to scale the business, including:
Adding new franchisees
New content, expanded offerings
Front-facing technology investments
Marketing support
Reducing administrative work through AI initiatives on backside
“We always love to say more green time, less screen time,” Geisler said.
Boxwood Partners acted as the exclusive financial advisor to YAU. Einbinder, Dunn, Dimitri & Bayer LLP served as franchise and mergers and acquisitions counsel to YAU.
⚾️ Well, That Was Wild
Sanity prevailed yesterday when a Texas judge reversed himself and upheld the decision to ban an Oklahoma team that was one win away from the Little League World Series.
The crazy series of events:
Tulsa National beat Louisiana on Sunday to clinch Southwest Regional final berth
Three protests — two from Texas, one from Louisiana — allege Tulsa had ineligible player
Little League International rules player ineligible, boots Tulsa
Texas-Louisiana semifinal on Monday becomes regional final, Texas wins
Tulsa parents file lawsuit
State judge grants temporary restraining order, says Tulsa and Texas must replay regional final on Tuesday
LLI files emergency motion to dissolve TRO; says it followed policy and game is impossible to replay
Judge agrees, dissolves TRO; Texas team remains regional champion
Remember: Tulsa National’s softball team was also kicked out of regional play for an ineligible player.
The details of the new eligibility issue make the saga even murkier.
The ineligible player’s ability to play for Tulsa was based on the fact his sibling was enrolled in Tulsa’s Challenger Division, which is an adaptive platform kids with intellectual and physical challenges.
But the sibling was registered under an incorrect age and never actually participated in Challenger Division practices and games, which negated the sibling open enrollment provision that was making the ineligible player eligible.
The ineligible player competed in the Oklahoma state tournament, but did not play in the regional tournament — a point the Tulsa parents hung their hat on in a statement blasting LLI, Tulsa National and others.
The parents also claimed LLI cleared the player’s eligibility, but LLI submitted a document to the court where it made it clear eligibility was contingent on the sibling being an active, eligible Challenger Division member.
The person who should be catching the most heat today — even more than the knuckleheads who run Tulsa National Little League — is Judge Ryan Luna of the 414th Judicial District Court.
He made the right call in the end, but only after wasting everyone’s time by turning a straightforward matter into a complete circus — the latest in a mini-trend of judges throwing youth sports into unnecessary chaos with knee-jerk rulings that are not based in the reality of the situation.
You don’t need to be Alan Dershowitz to know a) LLI clearly followed its policies and had every right to make the decision it did and b) a bunch of angry parents almost assuredly lacked legal standing here.
But Luna had to wing it. That meant LLI had to deploy its lawyers and drop a 331-page response that aired all the dirty laundry it was politely trying to keep out of the public eye.
The Boerne, Texas, team that won the regional had to show up and state its case (it was out of pitchers and most of the team had already left town). The Tulsa kids likely had their hopes unfairly raised. And on and on.
LLI is lucky this didn’t drag on for days — and that Tulsa didn’t somehow end up getting a replay and winning a LLWS bid. Now that would have been a mess.
This won’t threaten the credibility of the LLWS because, based on available reporting, it seems LL just strictly followed the letter of its law (a good thing for credibility).
But, the story will, and is, absolutely fueling a horrible perception of youth sports in America. To wit:
Ironically, the clip also provided a soundbite that is useful for the commercial side of youth sports:
“Little League exists, it’s propped up by the idea of who tf would cheat at this?”
As readers of this newsletter know, the answer is: lots of people.
Much of the public pushback on the for-profit and private capital side of youth sports misses the point that the non-profit, ostensibly quaint Little League-like experiences can be problematic too— potentially more so since volunteers are in charge.
Savannah Bananas Chief of Staff and former Little League International executive Nina Johnson explained it on our podcast recently:
“[Little League] had this great framework for programming, but the experience that each child had was dependent upon the volunteers locally running that program. It was different from community to community. Even though we had this framework, there still needed to be some flexibility. The quality of the coaches in each league was directly related to the experience the kid had. The amount of organization, the structure, the concessions, everything from start to finish really impacted that experience.”
Points like this are missed when the media and policymakers decry professionalization of youth sports while longing for the days of good ol’ Little League.
🤝 Ankored Partners With Sprocket Sports
The compliance automation firm — a Buying Sandlot sponsor — will be integrated into Sprocket’s club management platform.
Background checks
Abuse prevention training
Compliance tracking
The offerings will be centralized for operators and designed to meet federal, state and/or governing body standards.
🐐 Perfect Game Teams With Goat’d
The baseball and softball development giant’s latest drip partnership is with the trendy protective gear maker.
PG’s online store will become the primary Goat’d e-commerce channel as part of the deal; the partnership will debut at PG’s top events including this weekend’s All-American Classic in Philadelphia.
🤦♂️ Parents Behaving Badly
We have another alleged “My Blue Heaven” situation.
A New York man is accused of defrauding families by collecting money for a fake youth hoops team. He faces eight charges in total and stole at least $2K, according tp police.
ICMYI: A man in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty last month to stealing over $60K in donations to a fake baseball league.
🔗 Youth Sports Links
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