This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
Coming soon: Premium members will get access to our MCP which includes more than 700 newsletters and posts, 138 podcast episodes, 1.7M words of first-party reporting, and about 90 hours of conversations with the people running youth sports. Updated daily and fed into your AI of choice.
Let’s get to it.
In the email today:
⛳️ David Blitzer Is All-In On Youth Golf
The Unrivaled Sports co-founder is launching the Arnold Palmer Junior Golf Tour through Bolt Ventures, his family office. He is partnering with the late golf legend’s brand management and charitable organizations.
Scheduled to begin in January
About 400 annual events nationwide
Boys, girls competitions for ages 8-18
$199 player registration for season
Bolt acquired the Hurricane Junior Golf Tour in April and then quietly added the Texas Junior Golf Tour in June; the latter has a partnership with the Rocky Mountain Junior Golf Tour, which was not acquired. Bolt also has several other golf industry holdings.
The Associated Press — which first reported the news — said the APJGT is designed to complement the American Junior Golf Association, which runs about 150 events each year, as well as other PGA of America events.
The circuit said it emphasize character development and prioritize accessibility; Palmer’s foundation will provide awards to families facing financial obstacles to golf participation both on and outside the tour.
"Good business doing excellent things for kids is a wonderful combination," Blitzer told the AP.
Weatherford Capital is among the investors in the tour; it is joined by Blair Mill Capital, Blumenfeld Development, Heights LLC and The Team.
The bulk of the headlines surrounding the announcement so far have focused on a) accessibility and b) participation.
But the real story here is something we have written about previously — creating competitive and developmental infrastructure for kids who project as future collegiate and professional players.
The sport’s youth participation boom generated renewed attention last week when Project Play highlighted the National Golf Foundation figures via SFIA — up 55% among ages 6-12 and 73% among ages 13-17 since 2019.
Those numbers are driven in large part by base-of-the-pyramid entry points — Topgolf, simulators, venues projects, low-cost or free rounds through myriad corporate-backed initiatives and sponsorships, etc. But not much has changed to improve opportunities for top-level youth players — the inverse of pretty much every other modern youth sport.
This seems like an effort to change that. Arnold Palmer Junior Golf Tour’s listed membership and event registration fees appear to be pretty comparable — and perhaps a bit lower — than AJGA. But the key is it will run over double the events and have them all over the country — yet another example of the regionalization trend we are seeing everywhere.
🤝 Built For The Business Behind Youth Sports*
Youth sports doesn’t need another company trying to own everything. It needs great companies that work together.
For more than a decade, EventConnect has powered the group travel, housing and data behind some of the largest events in youth sports.
But our vision is bigger than another all-in-one platform.
We’re leading the way in open integrations, technology built around your brand, better data, stronger partnerships, and the flexibility to work within the systems you already use.
You shouldn’t have to move your business into our ecosystem to work with us. We’ll meet you in yours.
Sometimes that looks like EventConnect. Sometimes it doesn’t look like us at all.
The future of youth sports won’t be built by one company. It will be built by an industry that works better together.
*Sponsor
👥 Buying Sandlot Premium: MCP Coming Soon
2 of the 5 trends in youth golf our MCP pulled from 1.5 years of coverage and interviews
For a year now, we have thought about how to make our coverage and data more accessible to premium subscribers.
The answer has become clear: MCP access.
Sure, your chatbot can search for youth sports news and trends, and often it will pull in content from Buying Sandlot. But any given query, even with the most powerful models, only searches a thin slice of publicly available content— often leaving holes in the results. And especially leaving holes when relevant data exists in proprietary datasets, polling, and long-form interview transcripts like the ones we churn out every day.
Enter the Buying Media Group MCP.
Premium members will soon get direct access to our entire corpus of data:
714 newsletters and posts, totaling nearly 600k words
138 podcast transcripts, including all Summit panels, totaling 1.22M words, pulled from 90 hours of audio
A database of 2,807 known companies in youth sports and 259 facilities under development
520 acquisitions, deals, and partnerships
It will also include all content from our other brands: Buying Sideline, which covers the business of sports hospitality, and our upcoming vertical covering the business of sports academies. One subscription to unlock what will become the deepest pool of sports business intelligence around.
Why? For media companies, input is becoming more important than output. AI does a really good job on the latter. And yet, most operators in media are simply applying AI to inputs that already publicly exist. That adds little value.
But Buying Sandlot provides inputs that no one else covering youth sports does - or comes even close to doing - and we understand that some people may eventually prefer to have their agent of choice curate their own personal daily newsletter on a range of topics they find interesting. An MCP allows our paying subscribers to use our data in whatever way they see fit.
Oh, and it’s a must-have for anyone investing in youth sports.
Premium members will get access to all of this data soon. Upgrade to premium for full access.
Already a member? Log in to read premium reports and access the premium community.
🏛️ Midterms’ Youth Sports Impacts
The STRONG Kids Act got caught up in the blue tsunami.
Rep. Mike Carey (R-OH), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, was ousted from his Columbus-area House seat in a pretty big upset. The other co-sponsor — Rep. Nanette Díaz Barragán (D-CA) — was comfortably re-elected in her Los Angeles-area district.
Díaz Barragán could re-introduce the bill herself next year. But STRONG Kids’ backers placed an emphasis on its bipartisan nature when it was introduced, so it would not be a surprise if it gets put on hold until another Republican signs on.
(A member who would have made sense — Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) — was also defeated; he had introduced smaller youth sports-related bills in the past.)
As for the Let Kids Play Act: The question now is not whether it gets a renewed push — it almost certainly will — but how Democrats play it.
The bill’s flaws are well-documented. The legislation targets the private equity capital structure as a monolith and does virtually nothing to curb the so-called “vulture practices” it decries.
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) told us in June that the bill needed to be marked up. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Semafor in August he wanted to "do a version of that bill that has Republican support" after the midterms. There have been messaging shifts among advocates. And we have heard that many on Capitol Hill privately concede the bill as currently written does not work.
But this was all before Democrats secured massive majorities in both chambers of Congress. The heavily-involved American Economic Liberties Project has made it clear it is still taking aim at PE. And as we’ve written before, the bill’s prominent co-sponsors are all expected to be seeking higher offices very soon.
So it’s fair to wonder if this historic landslide and all the other factors will temper any thought to overhaul the bill.
Elsewhere on Election Day …
A proposed $17M volleyball complex in Lincoln, Nebraska, had its state funding package approved by voters
Voters in Louisiana’s Caddo Parish rejected a $60M bond proposition that would have provided the bulk of funding for a $70M indoor complex in the Shreveport area
🧢 On The Dick’s Sporting Goods Beat
If you are going to do something for the first time, you might as well do it big.
Caitlin Clark is DSG’s first-ever athlete brand partner. The WNBA star has signed a multi-year deal that also covers Foot Locker and “will work with both brands on custom promotions to support her signature footwear, apparel and product lines," according to CNBC. The partnership will also include activations and community events.
Quick Take: This is obviously a colossal boost for Dick’s and Foot Locker on the sneaker front ahead of Q3 earnings later the month following a disappointing Q2. But regarding our neck of the woods — GameChanger would be putting figurative-but-also-maybe-literal rocket fuel onto its fire if it was paired up with Clark amid its hoops push. The release makes no mention of GameChanger and DSG has been slow to fully draw the “GameChanger is Dick’s” line, but this would be a good time to do so.
🔗 Youth Sports Links
🤳 Follow Buying Sandlot on Social
Follow, connect, and partner with Buying Media Group — going deep on the business of sports.
Buying Sandlot on social:
Our team on LinkedIn:
Sponsorship inquiries:
Good game.