This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
Will run this poll one more time: We will soon be locking in dates for our 2-day youth sports business conference in Philly next spring— which week would you prefer? It’s worth noting that the PGA Championship is in the area and starts competition on May 14 next year.
Which dates would work better for you?
In the email today:
🤳 The AI-Powered App For Parents
Full disclosure: I (Kyle) am an advisor for Onsides— a company I chose to work with because of the problem they are aiming to solve and the founding team.
Onsides launched in beta this week. The parent-first youth sports companion app aims to simplify the chaos of managing kids’ sports logistics. Rather than replace existing platforms, it integrates with them to automatically pull in events and sync calendars.
What It Does
By acting as a kind of middleware, Onsides reduces friction and makes it easy for parents to keep everything organized in one place without juggling multiple logins or apps.
“There’s a phrase that I’ve been using internally here,” Onsides founder Dave Yoo told me. “I’m really leaning hard into this invisible magic.”
What is that magic?
It includes phone calendar syncing pulling together all of your kids’ schedules across different platforms, along with a unified contact list and player cards, which over time will include team history, nicknames, stats and (Trend Watch™) highlights.
But the standout feature is Onsides’ AI-driven assistant, which takes the form of the now all-too-familiar chatbot and acts as a game day concierge of sorts.
“The magic will happen over time,” Yoo said. “[A parent] gets the notification, they open up the app, see the game day concierge, sees that we have weather reports and driving time. And it’s all in their calendar… so it’s like we’re the middleware that talks to the apps that you already use. And over time, it’s going to get smarter and more powerful to give you proactive insights. So in a good way, it’s kind of a passive companion.”
The AI offers up reminders to set availability, nudges about hydration on hot days, or the ability to request a ride from another parent to an upcoming game. It will even let you know about potential conflicts and drive times to the next event.
How It Does It
Onsides uses a homegrown platform that intelligently uses a combination of APIs and scraping to pull in the data.
Current integrations are limited to TeamSnap and SportsEngine, but Yoo is in active discussions with the major platforms.
He says Onsides doesn’t seek to replace these platforms, but rather complement them.
“We’re taking a very different approach where you log in once to TeamSnap, we import your stuff, you enable auto-sync, and your calendar is automatically updated as you just manage from one.” Yoo said. “We’re trying to merge into the freeway to help you as a companion versus force you to use our app all the time.”
The app is positioned as parent-first, and isn’t trying to address all of the league and team needs that are the primary focus for existing platforms.
Yoo compared it to the initial use cases for the business messaging app Slack, which integrated with many leading SaaS tools but didn’t seek to replace them. Slack served as a central hub that, in many cases, expanded and compelled additional use of existing software platforms.
It’s important to note that Onsides doesn’t have a chat function— rather, it leverages existing contact lists to facilitate text messages and emails between parents.
TeamSnap co-founder Dave DuPont also serves as an advisor to the company.
Business Model
Onsides plans to monetize through a combination of paid subscriptions (for power users) and advertising.
They are thinking much differently about the latter though: Given that Onsides sees the whole field, so to speak, users can request and receive context-aware products (cleats for upcoming soccer season, for example)— all in a familiar chat interface.
Like any consumer app, adoption will be a challenge. Onsides is designed to be useful to the individual (aggregating calendars, smart suggestions) first and foremost, but its benefits will increase with team-level adoption, as it can automate practice reminders for coaches and allow parents to request rides.
You can request early access to Onsides right here— beta users will get lifetime premium subscriptions.
Onsides is part of two major trends right now:
1) Parent-First Tech
We profiled AI highlight app Rematch on Monday. Though they recently struck a partnership with PSG’s youth academy, their main feature is to allow parents to retroactively record highlights without having to take up reams of storage space on their phones.
It solves a direct pain point for parents.
Onsides aims to do the same for app fatigue.
2) AI-First Everything
This obviously extends well outside of youth sports. But I’ll point to TeamLinkt, which we also featured recently, as they are leaning heavily into AI for scheduling and team management.
Like I said at the top, Onsides aims to solve a genuine problem for parents: too many apps. It’s a common complaint. Even in a TeamSnap-only town, like I am, we still struggle to get all parents to consistently update availability or communicate through the platform.
Just last night, my son’s team passed around a paper contact list which parents had to fill out despite all of this information already existing in TeamSnap.
Therein lies both the opportunity and challenge for Onsides.
Ironically, the more platforms a parent needs to use, the more useful Onsides will become, since it will give them a centralized hub to see everything. And in serving this role, Onsides could actually compel more interaction with the existing platforms.
For example, I was able to update my son’s availability for practice on Thursday just by typing it into Onsides’ chatbot.
This probably could have been accomplished in the same amount of time by going directly to TeamSnap, but that’s only because, right now, I have one kid playing one sport. That will change in a couple of weeks, with two kids playing in 3-4 leagues. It’s that ability to interact with multiple teams and platforms in a single interface that will make Onsides… please excuse the pun here… a real game-changer.
Keep Kids Safe with Less Risk and Less Paperwork*
Keeping kids safe and mitigating risk should not be at odds.
And Ankored is here to help.
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Safe coaches means safe kids.
Come join the Ankored movement just like Ashley:
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🧱 Youth Sports Facilities Arms Race: Lubbock, Texas
Texas Tech football is not the only big-money sports endeavor that has people talking in West Texas.
Lubbock Game Changers — a non-profit founded by Rhett Butler, a physician and professional guitarist — has proposed The Hub, a $51M, 137K-square-foot indoor complex in the college town.
12 volleyball courts/6 basketball courts
1.8K-seat championship arena
Second-level stadium seating
Dining area and concessions
Parents and players lounges
Video game room
Sports medicine space
700+ parking spots
The facility will immediately address a glaring local issue — a shortage of volleyball courts as girls participation continues to rise and amid rumblings boys volleyball could soon become a varsity sport in the state.
“There is a desperate need for this,” Butler told Buying Sandlot. “You don’t have enough courts to serve the players in Lubbock. We need courts in the worst way.”
But the headline feature: The arena will have an ASB LumiFLEX Court — the all-glass digital floor that debuted during NBA All-Star Weekend in 2024.
The Slam Dunk Contest winner that year was Mac McClung, who played at Texas Tech.
“I thought to myself, ‘Every kid in America is going to want to play on that court,’” Butler said. “It’s something special, it’s something unique.”
LGC believes it could become the first facility in the nation to have the technology permanently installed.
The court will cost $2.5M to $3M, but the non-profit believes the investment will pay significant dividends in terms of sponsorship opportunities and other assets.
It will make the facility attractive for major regional and national tournaments, and could also eventually host smaller college and professional sports events — think NBA G-League or LOVB — and non-sports events.
The facility will be a public-private partnership.
The city of Lubbock approved a two-year lease on 20 acres inside Bill McAlister Park while the non-profit works to raise 85% of the project’s funding through private donations (there is some flexibility on the timeline, Butler said).
Plans then call for a 100-year land lease at a below market rate — Butler said the lot may be the most valuable real estate in the city — once the non-profit hits the fundraising goal.
Butler believes the facility could bring upward of 3K people to Lubbock each weekend, and also attract professionals with families to move to town. But no specific sports tourism revenue or economic impact targets have been set. The facility would be located close to a cluster of hotels and dining venues.
🧢 Pixellot CEO: Youth Sports Is Big-Time
Doron Gerstel — the CEO streaming tech provider Pixellot — penned an op-ed column for Sports Video Group making the case for investment in and focus on youth sports, arguing "every sport deserves to be seen, and every young athlete deserves a spotlight."
Gerstel also made it very clear he believes youth sports streaming has the potential to be a billion-with-a-b industry — if it is not already there.
"This is not charity," Gerstel wrote to close the piece. "It is a smart investment in future fans, talent, and platforms. Youth sports is not a niche. It is where the game begins — and where the world is already watching."
Gerstel points to AI and lowered barriers to entry for the youth sports streaming boom and its continued potential. About 85% of youth sports games were not archived, broadcast or captured as recently as 2023, according to the column.
📋 Job Alert: Event Marketing Manager, Prep Network
Prep Network is looking for someone with at least three years of event or live event marketing management; the position is fully remote.
In this role, you will lead marketing for more than 240 showcases and 100 tournaments each year while helping athletes connect with college coaches through our network of nine sports brands.
The full job listing can be found on LinkedIn.
🔗 Youth Sports Links
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Good game.