🥎 RAF Wrestling Joins Youth-To-Pro Pipeline Trend

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There have been many attempts to launch professional wrestling leagues.

Real American Freestyle appears to have finally cracked the code, meshing unscripted, Olympic-style competition with the entertainment, production and spectacle of UFC and WWE and a streaming deal with Fox Nation.

The promotion will now add youth wrestling to its ecosystem, launching the RAF Next Gen tournament series.

The first event will be Sunday, July 19 in Milwaukee, a day after the RAF 11 card. RAF CEO Chad Bronstein told Buying Sandlot the plan is to run a tournament alongside a pro card each month.

Athletes will be encouraged to enter multiple events, Bronstein said. A ranking system spanning all events will determine the top-2 wrestlers in each weight class to compete at a showcase tournament later this year that will be presented on the same main stage as RAF’s professional events.

RAF will also look to address the general pain points of youth wrestling, including long breaks between bouts at tournaments.

“I love going to youth tournaments, and I think as a parent you see what’s good and bad about those tournaments,” Bronstein said. “How can you make it more efficient, how can you make it more fun? We don’t want kids waiting three hours before they wrestle next. Those are things we’re going to try to fix.”

Trend Watch™: We continue to see leagues establish pipelines that flow from youth competition up to the professional level.

RAF Next Gen caps at 15U for now, so it is not a direct pipeline.

But RAF is pairing the tournaments with the rest of its business and aims to give them the same feel as the professional cards to help spur interest and participation. Bronstein indicated there will be both a NIL/prize component and a streaming deal in place.

RAF is similar to PCL in that it also seeks to create a new post-college pathway.

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The youth sports facilities software maker has launched a strategic partnership with Toca, a soccer entertainment and experiences company.

Toca has several dozen tech-powered indoor training centers across 13 states, Canada and Mexico. It also operates Toca Social, a TopGolf-like venue for soccer; the first U.S. location recently opened in the Dallas area alongside three United Kingdom locations.

All of Toca's North American operations will be unified on Bond's platform:

"There is such an important benefit of platform unification for facilities," Bond CEO Marc Rothschild told Buying Sandlot. "The ability to provide a unified customer experience, the ability to not have tons of staff running five different platforms, the ability to pull data and normalize data from just one place so I can have a daily understanding of what's happening in my business and where I need to pop in before the end of the month or the end of a quarter."

Key points of the pact include streamlined registration across all Toca offerings and unified data reporting that Rothschild said is a "step change" for the industry.

Both Bond and Toca operate on the Snowflake data infrastructure.

"Normally you're pulling stuff out of five different places, pulling it over into a spreadsheet, trying to normalize all of it," he said. "We have both data exchange and real-time visualization and reporting against that data. That enables action that hadn't happened before."

BBSG is proactively trying to counter the narrative of last week’s USA Today report — and an ongoing antitrust probe by the Michigan attorney general’s office.

The youth hockey platform put out a press release touting expanded access nationwide and at its Michigan facilities through free and low-cost programming for entry-level athletes.

The release even cites Project Play’s data about high entry barriers in youth hockey.

There was only one small hint it’s not business as usual: The listed press contact is a crisis communications firm contracted by BBSG.

The Wall Street Journal headline — The Future of Elite Youth Sports Is Here — and It’s a Mess — is a bit of an oversell for an otherwise good report.

The piece focuses on how athletes and families are harnessing Florida’s school choice laws to regularly transfer high schools in search of winning teams, college scholarships and NIL opportunities.

State legislators have passed a bill that would limit midseason transfers and prohibit athletes from playing different sports at different schools in the same academic year, but Gov. Ron DeSantis has not yet signed it.

Educators are also understandably concerned about the academic component, although the report said there is no data that quantifies negative effects yet.

The bigger picture is that state governing bodies nationwide are beginning to try to craft transfer rules that given families agency and accommodate the current landscape, but also keep things in check.

But even those regulations will only do so much because there is always a loophole — or a lawyer — that provides a work-around.

We've previously written about how Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen was effectively blocking several facilities projects in the state.

He may have now effectively canceled them.

A refresher: Pillen leads a state board that controls access to a special tax incentive program designed to support sports complexes. State law requires he sign off on all approvals. He slow-played a slew of applications for months -- to the point state legislators began introducing bipartisan bills to put the governor on a 30-day shot clock or remove him from the process entirely.

The update: Pillen signed off on a new $140M pro soccer stadium in Omaha and a $17M volleyball complex in Lincoln that will be run by the city and a nonprofit organization. But he rejected nine other proposals, including a $63M volleyball complex and a $28.5M cheer and dance complex. It's not clear if these projects can continue without access to the program.

Quick Take: Nebraska is a pretty sports-crazed state, but it continues to lag when it comes to big youth sports facilities. There is an argument to be made -- and some have made it -- it is missing out on sports tourism revenues that instead flow to the Kansas City metropolitan area (about three hours from Lincoln and Omaha) and cities in Iowa.

The AI-powered highlights platform with rewind capabilities has partnered with the women’s three-on-three hoops platform.

3XBA has a dedicated youth-to-pro pipeline alongside its professional tour model as it ramps up ahead of the 2028 Olympics.

The partnership will launch next month at Spokane Hoopfest, which is billed as the world’s largest 3×3 outdoor tournament.

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Good game.