This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
As we’ve officially reached 250 registered attendees for the Buying Sandlot Summit, today we unveil the full agenda, along with the addition of several new speakers, including Bloomberg Sports Business Reporter Ira Boudway, who will moderate our From Local To Global: The New Playbook for Youth Sports Growth panel, which features Erin Clift (CMO, Unrivaled Sports), Ashley Whittaker (Partner, The Sports Facilities Companies), and Justin Miller (CEO, Rush Soccer).
Let’s get to it.
In the email today:
📱 How Scorability Is Reinventing College Recruiting
Like most youth sports entrepreneurs, Brian Cruver’s big idea came from personal experience.
The tech entrepreneur does not have a sports industry background, but found himself thrust into the ecosystem’s deep end when his daughter and son began being recruited to play in college.
“Nobody was really clear on how the process worked because, really, there is no process,” he said on the Buying Sandlot podcast. “It was obvious there was something broken here, and we were going to try to fix it.”
Enter Scorability, which Cruver said aims to be LinkedIn for college recruiting. The concept is straightforward — a platform for college coaches to discover and evaluate talent using verified data and AI-driven insights, which in turn makes recruiting more equitable and transparent for athletes and their families.
They’ve raised $51M so far(!), including a $40M round led by Bluestone Equity Partners, making this one of the largest early-round raises in youth sports, and one that has largely flown under-the-radar to-date.
Some details on the platform:
Over 4K college programs across all levels
1.5M athletes on platform
Over 25K events each year
Cruver said his biggest realization was “the math doesn’t work for anybody.”
There are about 4.5M high school athletes each year who aspire to play in college compared to about 28K college sports teams, leaving hundreds of thousands of coaches relying on data that is often unreliable.
“Some of it real, some of it not,” Cruver said. “There is an incredible demand for verification, incredible demand for visual content. Profiles that people are just putting on websites isn’t cutting it, and that’s a lot of what’s out there. I think we realized we could reinvent how this data is collected and presented to coaches. We could become the marketplace.”
Scorability does not allow athletes and families to build their own profiles on the platform. It only accepts data from third parties, leaning on dozens of sources to compile accurate and verified data that college coaches can trust.
The company acquired Ryzer — an event registration firm that powers over 25K sports camps nationwide with a big market share in college camps — last year. That has allowed Scorability to directly obtain data from camps through its app, including video footage of athletes testing.
Scorability launched in football — Cruver’s son is a quarterback at Kentucky — but the Ryzer acquisition has allowed it to expand into girls volleyball, boys and girls basketball and soccer, baseball and softball.
Cruver said he views college recruiting as a 10-year process — from age 13 to age 23 in an era of NIL and the transfer portal. He believes Scorability will grow into a “multi-billion dollar” business.
📆 EventConnect Exists To End Tournament Chaos— For Organizers And Families*
Tournament weekends have become mini supply chains: teams register, rosters change, schedules shift, hotels fill, and parents scramble.
Too many events still run things on spreadsheets, portals, and last-minute calls.
What we do (and why it’s different):
Centralize the weekend workflow: registration, rostering, payments, lodging, and real-time reporting.
Organizers can run end-to-end on EventConnect or integrate the systems they already use— no rip-and-replace required.
Either way, the data lands in one place so operators aren’t stitching together reports from multiple tools.
The “moment that changes outcomes”:
HousingConnect embeds hotel booking directly into checkout— capturing rooms at peak intent instead of sending families to a separate portal later.
Results can be up to 30% more room-night reservations and 24% savings on team hotel costs.
Proof of scale:
EventConnect powers 5,000 events and connects 30,000 hotels across 800 destinations.
Learn more about how EventConnect can help power your tournament right here.
*Sponsor
🏟️ Buying Sandlot Summit Full Agenda Unveil
I’m very excited to unveil the FULL AGENDA for the Buying Sandlot Summit.
It’s available on the event website. There are still 1-2 panels and some moderators we are working through, so please be mindful that times are subject to change slightly.
We’re also happy to announce the addition of:
John D’Orsay (CEO, EventConnect)
Tony Zasowski (Co-President of Hockey Operations, Black Bear Sports Group)
B.J. Pilling (President, PlayOn Sports)
Brian Beacham (Deputy AD and Chief Athletics Operating Officer, Villanova University)
Ticket prices increase at the end of the month.
⚾️ GameChanger Rolls Out Multi-Camera Stream
via GameChanger CEO Sameer Ahuja on LinkedIn
It’s been a little under a year since Dick’s Sporting Goods made a strategic investment in Unrivaled Sports as part of the youth sports platform’s $120M funding round.
We caught a glimpse of the partnership in action yesterday when GameChanger CEO Sameer Ahuja unveiled the multi-angle broadcast capabilities for youth baseball games at Unrivaled’s Rocker B Ranch in Graford, Texas.
The cameras at the venue are fixed. Users begin the stream by scanning a QR code by home plate. The cameras’ tech automatically changes angles and the streams come with GameChanger’s other features, including a score bug, stats and play-by-play.
💨 Facilities Arms Race Update: Dome Drama
The greater Kansas City region is, for our money, the Youth Sports Facility Capital of the World™.
But an upcoming addition has run into a bit of local pushback.
Lee’s Summit in Missouri, approved a $48M, 180K-square-foot indoor complex last year.
Project plans for View High Sports & Entertainment have since been updated to include a roughly four-story-high inflatable dome over an outdoor soccer field from about Thanksgiving to mid-March.
Some nearby homeowners are not thrilled about the aesthetics; others have expressed concerns about the noise generated by blower fans that keep the dome inflated.
There will be a public hearing later this month to determine whether the complex receivers a five-year special use permit for the dome.
This is a microcosm of an interesting dynamic in the Youth Sports Facilities Arms Race™. These venues support the local economy and serve local athletes— in this case, an indoor venue for soccer practice! But they often include undesirable externalities, with a side of NIMBY-ism, to be sure. This shows the limits of the model as residents push back on things like noise, parking, unsightliness, and more.
And I continue to wonder what happens when supply of large facilities outpaces tourism demand, especially in an area that has 6+ large facilities like Kansas City does. Never mind a general trend of pushback on travel (especially in a world of skyrocketing flight prices). If things don’t work out, they can zombie along on public subsidy for a while, persisting longer than the market would allow in a purely private model, but inevitably some will fail.
That’s why I continue to be bullish on the opportunity around improving infrastructure for smaller, club-based facilities that serve the local community (vs. larger scale tournament venues). The economics are harder as they can’t lean on tourism $, but done right and scaled through consolidation, these local hubs can benefit from the nascent trend of athletics becoming more tightly-intertwined with education, and they improve the experience where parents and athletes spend 5 days per week vs. where they spend 2 days per week.
🧱 More Youth Sports Facilities News
Big Bend, Wisconsin: A vote to approve the first phase of the Breck Athletic Center was tabled at a packed public meeting. Residents of the small village outside of Milwaukee have strongly opposed plans for a sprawling complex; the village planning commission is still considering the project.
Chesterfield, Missouri: The St. Louis suburb is generating $25M annually from youth sports tourism. Plans to expand a 73K-square-foot basketball/volleyball complex are underway; the city is also looking to add more outdoor fields.
El Paso, Texas: Work has begun on a $15M expansion of the Beast Urban Park. The second phase will add 650K-square-feet to the outdoor complex, including courts and fields, in an effort to attract more sports tourism.
Kirkwood, Missouri: A youth soccer organization bought vacant baseball and softball fields from the city for $175K. The site could be transformed into a soccer complex for the St. Louis suburb.
Milton, Delaware: Hudson Fields has partnered with Delaware FC, a youth soccer organization. The complex will receive new artificial and natural grass fields with designs on being able to host tournaments year-round; some state tourism grant funds will go toward the project.
New Oxford, Pennsylvania: A new nonprofit organization has proposed a multi-sport outdoor complex. Early plans had called for 8-12 baseball/softball fields. The facility would sit about 20 minutes from Gettysburg National Military Park.
New York City: MADE Hoops and HMBL Development have opened a 15K-square-foot basketball training facility in Brooklyn. The programming will model European academy training.
📝 Youth Sports News + Notes
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry endorsed implementing Alabama’s CoachSafely program in his state. The initiative requires requires coaches who work with athletes 14 and younger to complete specialized training on injury prevention and recognition; it is mandated by law in Alabama and conducted in partnership with municipalities and organizations. Officials say about 60K coaches in Alabama have been trained in the last year. Quick Take: Expect this to become a trend. Governments - local, state, and federal - will begin to further regulate compliance, background checks, and safety as the industry becomes more professionalized.
Orgo announced a partnership with Signature Athletics. Orgo is a shared calendar app that streamlines logistics for youth sports families— CEO Zoya Lehrer will speak at next month's Buying Sandlot Summit. Signature is a youth sports platform with divisions for camps, equipment and uniform and more.
An interesting take on specialization: A pair of researchers argue that combined event training could help prevent burnout and overuse injuries in youth sports athletes. They point to how athletes competing in the decathlon and heptathlon prepare for a slew of events, but believe the concept could be applied to other sports.
TeamSnap announced MLS GO’s digital at-home training will soon be available exclusively on its app. The programming is for ages 4-14.
🔗 Youth Sports Links
🤳 Follow Buying Sandlot on Social
We’re new— help us build up our social media accounts by following along:
Good game.