🥎 Youth Sports Tournaments Built For Athlete Growth

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

Let’s get to it.

John Verduin had just moved back home to the Seattle area after playing D3 basketball at Willamette University when he landed a side hustle with his high school coach’s new AAU program.

It was a good gig for a graduate student, but not always a smooth one.

“We were a level, at most, above the Bad News Bears,” Verduin told Buying Sandlot. “We would just get annihilated at tournaments. There is losing and then there is you can't even get the ball across half-court.

“The kids were defeated. The parents were pissed because they were paying for it. It was a nightmare for the guy trying to put a program together. So I was like, ‘What if we just ran a tournament for lower-level, developing teams?’

That idea has become DY Sports, a platform that specializes in operating competitive tournaments designed for developmental teams.

DY Sports held its first tournament in 2019 with about a dozen teams. The business then took off coming out of the pandemic, becoming Verduin’s full-time job after working in the supply chain industry. The platform caters to AAU teams outside of the top travel levels, school feeder programs and “advanced” rec league squads with a heavy emphasis on local play; only about 10% of teams at any event travel in.

Events are frequently praised for their organization — on-time starts, clear communications, quality officials and on-site staffers. DY Sports also has media operations alongside events. "They get all the same experiences in our events that the elite teams get out of another tournament around the corner," Verduin said.

The bulk of DY Sports’ footprint is on the West Coast — Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, plus Illinois and Wisconsin. All events are corporately-owned with DY Sports employees in each market. Most markets will run about one event a month with 50-100 teams participating; others will host a 200-team event every few months. DY Sports also partners with organizations to help them run their own events.

Verduin said the company is looking to expand into more markets imminently. He wants to eventually grow into other sports as well, but that will be a cautious process after a previous move into the pickleball space was unsuccessful.

"It's a forgotten level,” Verduin said. “It's not very flashy. But there are so many kids at that level. We take pride in hosting events where you know what you are going to get."

Athletic trainers are as integral to youth sports as coaches and referees, but hiring one is often overlooked by many operators.

Go4 was founded to change this, connecting companies, schools and organizations to ATs for per diem, long-term and contract positions. All ATs hired through Go4 are certified and insured.

What exactly does an AT do?

ATs are a critical part of event management, responsible for keeping athletes, participants and the environment safe from well before the opening whistle until after the final buzzer. Response time and coordination can make a major difference in a true emergency. An AT makes sure the reaction is prepared, not chaotic.

Get one for your next event with Go4 right here.

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The Boston Globe published a report today that is bound to garner social media attention — “The travel sports rat race pulls more and more kids out of class.”

The report is part of a series on kids skipping school being done by an investigative team focused on educational inequities in the city and state.

The report also honed in on another popular narrative — that kids who cannot afford travel sports are increasingly being squeezed out of roster spots on school teams.

And, to its credit, it acknowledged that some data shows school sports often lead to better attendance among students.

Quick Take: Another reason to be bullish about sports academies, whether they are elite prep schools like IMG and SPIRE Academies or club agnostic programs like TPH Hockey and Pathways Schools. Families do not have to worry about missing school for sports when the schools are built around the sports.

Speaking of sports academies … IMG will launch Sports Biz Boot Camp at IMG Academy in 2027.

The five-day program on the Bradenton campus will introduce students in grades 9-12 to "to the business of sports through college-level curriculum, real-world case studies, projects, guest speakers and experiential learning."

There will be five sessions offered — one in the spring and four in the summer. It is $2,999 for boarding attendees and $1,999 for non-boarding.

IMG is partnering with longtime NYU adjunct professor Stephen Master, the founder of Sports Biz Boot Camp, on the program. The curriculum will be modeled on his NYU course on sports marketing and media. Master has previous stops at the NBA, NFL, Nielsen and Octagon.

Also: IMG will also host the inaugural Youth Character in Sport Global Conference next year in Bradenton on June 8-10. The event will bring athletics directors, coaches, educators and leaders together to “focus on how character development and athletic performance reinforce each other.”

IMG's Character and Leadership team will host the event in partnership with Elevate by IMG Academy, the B2B platform aimed at organizations and schools. Early bird pricing of $1,499 is now available.

ECNL will hold three championship events at the new U.S. Soccer National Training Center next summer.

The trio of events -- the ECNL National Finals, ECNL Regional League Finals and ECNL Conference League Finals -- will run July 12-18.

ECNL said 200 teams and about 3K athletes will compete across the three events; the 2026-27 postseason will be its biggest in history.

Capacity Sports Group’s baseball and softball events and scouting platform released a slew of stats on its All-American Game alumni and the 2026 MLB Draft.

The 2025 graduating class racked up $57.6M in bonus money, so the two-year haul is $120.3M.

Prep Baseball also said content surrounding its 2026 All-American Game, played in September, generated 8.34M social media impressions — up 97.4% YoY. Social engagements were up 105.1%

Quick Take: We continue to see Capacity becoming a major player in youth sports.

Tina Robinson has been named executive director of Sina Sports Complex, a $180M project planned in the Richmond, Virginia, area. She was most recently at HR software firm Paylocity.

The complex — which will have at least six turf fields, a hotel and a restaurant — will operate under the Sina Experiences umbrella. CEO Ravi Patel also operates both a multi-state hospitality company and a youth sports travel agency.

A Maryland woman pleaded guilty to embezzling over $238K from a youth sports organization.

The theft occurred over a five-year period when she was the org’s treasurer; she also pleaded guilty to filing a false tax report (which makes sense).

Sentencing is scheduled for next month.

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Good game.