This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
Let’s get to it.
In the email today:
🤝 Scoop: New School Sports Sponsorship Pact
Campus Multimedia has formed a strategic partnership with National Amateur Sports, Buying Sandlot has learned.
CM connects schools with regional and national brand partners; it has over 84K schools in its network across all 50 states. NAS is a marketing and media firm with 18 school districts in four southeastern states under its umbrella, accounting for close to 500 schools and over 200K athletes.
The partnership will include access to CM’s SponsorPlace platform, which connects organizations to brands.
“As district budgets and school budgets get cut, it’s more important than ever that companies like us come together to maximize revenue for everyone,” CM founder and CEO Karl Mawhinney told Buying Sandlot.
“We’re opening up access for local sponsors to support their schools while our sales team comes over the top and brings in regional and national brands district-wide down to the school level.”
The partnership will resemble how a college or professional league would operate, with both district-level and school-level sponsorships. Mawhinney said the “perfect win” is when a brand partner aligns with a district and then activates down the ladder at each school.
CM — which focuses on repeatable brand activations often enacted by the schools themselves — has worked with national brands like DoorDash and Jersey Mike’s. It will be able to optimize each district’s existing commercial sales rights, such as streaming and ticketing ads.
“They have the business relationships at the district level that include vendor relationships,” Mawhinney said. “That’s where we come in; we have the sales expertise and technology to solve that problem and support the districts.”
The partnership is currently focused solely on athletics. But Mawhinney said he expects it will eventually grow to include other student activities. About 50% of deals on SponsorPlace already come outside of sports; some youth sports organizations not tied to schools are also now on the platform.
“I believe (the partnership) can be a game-changer,” Mawhinney said. “It’s almost re-defining the business a little bit, so I’m excited about it.”
🗣️ Brand Velocity Group Is Standing Tall
BVG continues to carry the torch for private equity’s positive involvement in the industry while almost everyone else lays low.
Eli Manning and RCX Sports CEO Izell Reese made more rounds with appearances on Good Morning America and the Youth Inc. podcast with Greg Olsen.
Friendly settings, sure. But Manning, Reese and BVG founding partner partner Austin Ramos has been very available to the media (including the Buying Sandlot podcast) to make their case since the acquisition.
🤺 Fastbreak AI Teams With USA Fencing
The sports operations platform’s acquisition of GroupHousing has paid its first public dividend.
Fastbreak Travel has landed a seven-year deal to be USA Fencing’s official housing provider, maintaining one of GroupHousing’s long-term relationships.
The deal covers all of the NGB’s national events; Fastbreak will also support housing for regional events.
Over 400 events annually; tens of thousands of annual hotel nights
Mobile booking integrated into event registration
Payment flexibility, stay-to-save discounts
Real-time updates on room block availability
Expanded hotel access through Fastbreak Travel’s North American network
Fastbreak previously said it has about 450K room nights on its platform with a goal of reaching 1M by the end of 2027.
🧠 Concussion Care Startup’s Big Raise
Cognify Health announced a seed funding round led by Game Changers Ventures; SBJ pegged the raise in the “multi-million” range.
The platform will initially focus on concussions, but says it plans to provide "fully integrated healthcare for youth athletics, nationwide” as it grows. Cognify serves both individual families and school districts.
Triage intake tool, incident reports
Telehealth appointment within 24 hours of a suspected brain injury
Return-to-learn, return-to-play protocols
Clearance letters for schools
Ongoing chat access, support
Former Harvard basketball player Christian Juzang is the founder and CEO; the company said its medical team includes doctors with ties to the Los Angeles Chargers and Lakers, USA Basketball and UCLA’s BrainSPORT program.
Cognify positions its services as complementary to an athletic trainer, but it will be critical for the industry to avoid using the platform (and others like it) as a replacement for AT coverage while still claiming to be proactive on athlete safety.
Cognify may be solving a real problem with quick turnarounds for specialists and telehealth may be perfectly adequate for garden-variety concussions.
But you still need people with expertise diagnosing them first -- and determining when immediate intervention is needed.
🧑🧑🧒🧒 YEB Launches Mental Health Initiative
Youth Enrichment Brands — the parent company of i9 Sports and US Sports Camps — announced the Generation Real Project.
The initiative is “dedicated to combating the current youth mental health crisis by rebuilding the real-world experiences, environments, and communities that build the essential infrastructure of a healthy childhood full of confidence, resilience, and joy.”
YEB CEO Rob Price published a lengthy essay on childhood in the digital age to kick off the project; YEB is also commissioning educational resources for parents that it says will be available by back-to-school.
Four other organizations — Apex Leadership Co., Avid4 Adventure, KidStrong and Tutu School — are working with YEB on the project. The combined group reaches over 1M kids in the U.S. and worldwide.
🦓 Refr Sports Closes $2M Seed Round
The referee management platform announced that Traction Capital led the raise with a $1M investment.
Minneapolis-based Refr provides unified communication, coordination and scheduling tools for assigners while bringing gig economy dynamics into play for individual officials.
Co-founder and CEO Huck Sorock said over 20K officials are currently on the platform and Refr is aiming to reach 100K by the end of next year.
🤠 Facilities Arms Race: Texas, Again
Copperas Cove is moving forward with plans for an outdoor complex with the goal of establishing a 63-acre regional tournament hub.
The Sports Facilities Companies is involved in the project, which has a projected cost in the $42M to $52M range. A site for the complex has not been determined.
Copperas Cove is about an hour outside of Waco and roughly three-ish hours from Dallas and San Antonio.
SFC’s feasibility study said there are about 25M people within a four-hour driving radius and pegged projected annual economic impact at $38M.
🇺🇸 Russia Return Moves Get European Pushback
Nine European Union nations have called on the European Commission to end funding for any sports organization that allows Russia and client state Belarus to return to global competition.
Both the IOC and FIFA have moved in recent weeks to bring the Kremlin back into the fold, starting with youth competitions.
Russia has effectively been sidelined since invading Ukraine in 2022; Belarus has had a good amount of access reinstated by various organizations with a patchwork of restrictions — i.e. its national men’s soccer team must play World Cup qualifiers in empty neutral site stadiums outside of the country.
🙋♂️Parents Behaving Admirably
The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer profiled the biggest youth soccer organization in Georgia.
What makes the story stand out: The Columbus Youth Soccer Club was rocked by an embezzlement scandal in 2012, losing over $100K. But it managed to survive and now has about 700 more kids under its umbrella then it did then with affordable fees.
🤦♂️ Parents Behaving Badly
A Connecticut man will avoid jail time after hitting a parent with his car after he coached a youth girls basketball game earlier this year.
The man pleaded guilty to simple assault; he received three years of probation after a three-year sentence was suspended. The person who was hit is OK; he was also arrested for standing in the middle of the parking lot’s exit lane.
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