🥎 Rush Soccer Partners With Nike

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

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The youth soccer platform is going back to its roots with the Swoosh.

Rush has secured a global partnership with Nike that will start in 2027, its 30th anniversary year. The apparel giant was previously Rush’s first major footwear partnership in its early years; the sides now come back together as Nike begins to push for a greater presence in the youth soccer ecosystem.

Rush, which has over 60K athletes in 50 countries, has been partnered with Capelli Sports since 2019.

“Nike is getting back in the space and getting closer to the grassroots, like so many organizations and people are talking about,” Rush CEO Justin Miller told Buying Sandlot. “It’s a reunion instead of just a switch. Nike is probably the best sports brand ever created. And I think Rush is the best youth soccer brand created, so it’s nice to be back together.”

The partnership includes:

"We believe that the future of soccer truly lives with the next generation of athletes," Nike Soccer North America VP/GM Nuno Silva said in a release. “This new partnership gives us then opportunity to match the best of Nike Soccer innovation with Rush Soccer's commitment to player development, coaching and growth of the sport -- all in service of our shared vision to support youth athletes across every dimension of play.”

Miller said Nike will partner with Rush on the majority of its national events, putting the might of its marketing and storytelling machines behind the platform. Rush will also have a custom Nike uniform and early access to apparel, equipment and new products.

“They’re excited to come enhance experiences for athletes at the youth level the way that they do at the pro level,” Miller said. “They’re really helping with our brand positioning in the market, so we can tell the Rush story and the Nike story better.”

Rush is currently hosting their annual Summit at Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon.

The latest youth sports bill on Capitol Hill will start in a familiar place.

The STRONG Kids Act has been formally introduced and referred to the Committee on Education and Workforce. Those involved in the bill had believed the Energy and Commerce Committee would lead the way on the legislation, but it got a secondary referral instead.

Education and Workforce has been more involved in youth sports discussions in recent months. The Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education has held two hearings since last December, largely focusing on costs and private equity’s industry involvement.

(The Let Kids Play Act was referred to the House Judiciary Committee with secondary references to Education and Energy.)

FundPlay Executive Director Jared Cooper said the group — instrumental in shepherding the bill — is eager to get it into markup. It is also working to get companion legislation introduced in the Senate.

“We’d like to get on that calendar and have this bill talked about within the committee and have members of both parties improving it and and finding ways to make it stronger,” he said on the Buying Sandlot podcast. “We want to move quickly and we're going to do our best to get on the radar right away so that we can do so.”

Cooper acknowledged the timing is tough — Congress is in recess currently with the midterm elections fast approaching. But the bill is bipartisan and co-sponsors Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-CA) and Rep. Mike Carey (R-OH) are heavily favored to win re-election — two things working in its favor both in the lame duck period and when the new Congress forms next year.

The SKA would benchmark 50% of national sports betting excise tax revenues — projected to be about $200M in 2025 — to fund a grant program administered by the Health and Human Services Department.

National, regional and state-level nonprofit organizations would receive grants from HHS and then be tasked with delivering subgrants to grassroots organizations. The grants would be intended to improve access and experiences with a focus on underserved and under-resourced communities.

That design was intentional, according to Cooper and PLAY Sports Coalition members LeagueApps president Jeremy Goldberg and TeamSnap CEO Pete Frintzilas. It mirrors how established youth sports grant makers like Lareus USA and YMCA operate to allow for funds to reach the grassroots effectively.

The three went in-depth on the bill, its mechanisms and why two of the industry’s big rivals have been able to work together in the full podcast.

The Sports Facilities Companies said it will support 10 venue openings, re-openings and new community partnerships across eight states in the second half of the year.

The lineup:

SFC said the 200-acre Ontario Sports Empire will be the largest mixed-use sports complex west of the Rocky Mountains. It will have 20 multipurpose fields, 14 youth diamond fields, eight full-size baseball diamonds, two championship diamond fields and four football and rugby fields.

Socceroof, one of the larger indoor soccer operators in the Northeast, has moved its entire business onto Bond Sports. The company had been running a proprietary in-house platform stitched together with point solutions to handle registration, scheduling, payments and reporting — a setup that got harder to manage with every new building. Since consolidating on Bond last year, Socceroof has gone from six facilities to ten across New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Montreal, with revenue up 73% and total customers up 83%.

Socceroof is also the first soccer operator on Bond's new online booking module, which opens up 24/7 self-serve reservations for field rentals, lessons and parties while letting staff control who sees what — membership gating, VIP early-access windows, approval workflows, deposits.

"Our customers can now book 24/7, exactly according to the rules we set up," said Clément Bourret, Socceroof's Northeast regional director, adding that it freed staff from phone calls and manual scheduling and "opened up revenue we weren't capturing before."

Bond has been narrowing its, um, pitch to soccer recently— they also partnered with Toca Soccer in May.

We plan to be on-the-ground at this event.

We all know how much the youth sports industry loves AI-engineered copy.

A new platform wants to take things well beyond LinkedIn posts and over-the-top press release rewrites.

DistrictWon will make uReport — an AI-powered content management system that turns inputted data into news stories — available to all high schools for free during the upcoming academic year, according to SBJ.

The offering is part of a $20M rollout initiative that will feature a handful of major sports; future academic years will bring more sports and tiered pricing that will go up to close to $2K annually.

The platform is “designed to help high school and college administrators scale coverage of their sports programs and other extracurriculars amid a decline in local news bandwidth,” according to the report. Colleges can also utilize the tech for close to $3K a year. Users can edit the copy before it publishes and add quotes, photos, etc.

CEO Peter Fitzpatrick told SBJ that uReport may be able to help schools generate sufficient web traffic to create sponsorship assets.

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