🥎 Youth Sports Facilities Arms Race Updates

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

We’re still working on an in-depth article tackling interoperability in the world of youth sports, under the backdrop of the AI bot wars playing out in the tech space. It’s coming this week.

In the meantime, we’d love to know how you personally handle one of the more popular use-cases of youth sports tech— managing the family calendar.

Take our Great Youth Sports Calendar Survey right here.

All respondents will get access to high-level results, and there are some interesting early takeaways.

Let’s get to it.

A youth sports platform will helm a new mixed-use development in an Austin suburb.

CenTex Sports — which operates leagues in several Texas cities and has a big flag football presence — has entered a 40-acre land purchase agreement in Leander, about 30 minutes north of the state capital.

Plans also call for a slew of community and entertainment offerings, including an arcade, cafe, educational and developmental centers and event/conference space. CenTex says the development will attract about 800K people annually.

The project will be done in phases. Leander officials said CenTex has ballparked the initial phase at $55M; that will include the indoor venue, the volleyball courts and track and two soccer fields. The remaining pitch and diamonds will be in the second phase.

CenTex has to break ground by the end of 2027 and wrap up the entire build by the end of 2030 with various commitments and “performance projections” built into the deal; Leander said it also has clawback provisions.

A controversial project in the Midwest has secured over $1M in branding fees.

Altra Federal Credit Union has secured naming rights for Altra Sportsplex in Rochester, Minnesota.

It’s a five-year deal worth about $1.1M; the bank will have an option to extend for another five years for about the same rate.

A contractor with a local presence — Knutson Construction — has also secured naming rights on one of the complex’s eight baseball diamonds. That deal is much more modest — $84K over 10 years.

Complex operator Sports Academy gets a 20% commission on both deals, according to The Rochester Post Bulletin.

A refresher: Rochester voters approved a local sales tax extension to build a soccer-focused indoor-outdoor complex for a projected $65M price tag. The city then pivoted to a baseball/softball strategy as the project cost doubled to about $120M. That understandably upset the soccer folks, even if the business logic was sound. The mayor tried to veto construction, but the city council overrode the veto as state lawmakers threatened to nullify the tax (but have not). The plan now is to build the outdoor phase at the original price.

Philadelphia Youth Basketball announced plans to build The Generator — a 40K-square-foot center that “will connect thousands of young adults to careers in skilled trades, healthcare, and technology through hands-on training, industry credentials, supportive services, and direct job placement.”

The hoops non-profit has launched a $50M capital drive for the facility, which will be built next door to its 100K-square-foot Alan Horwitz “Sixth Man” Center, which holds six regulation courts.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) has pledged $1.5M in state funds toward the facility.

Quick Take: Worth noting the further confluence of athletics and education with this project and the Texas complex noted above. The CenTex project site also notes it will offer homeschool support. These are not new ideas — community platforms like Boys and Girls Clubs and YMCAs have been combining sports with education and life skills for decades — but they are definitely becoming more prominent with public-private builds.

The Boston Globe has published a report on the push to require Massachusetts high schools to have full-time athletic trainers.

[We previously wrote about the state’s deficiencies and lax rules regarding ATs in connection to the cigar brouhaha that short-circuited a lacrosse team’s state tournament run.]

Of note: No members of a 17-person MIAA subcommittee recently supported a rule change proposal.

One athletic director claimed the idea won’t work because “there’s a lack of trainers.” But advocates for the change argue that is not the case — there are close to 1.6K active AT licenses in a state with about 700 high schools — and it comes down to money. Some schools say they can’t swing it; others may not want to compensate full-time ATs, many of whom have graduate degrees.

Quick Take: Having a debate over full-time ATs feels like a distraction from the real issue — the MIAA willfully allows there to be games and practices with no AT present. Which is unacceptable in 2026. Also, this would seem like something the lawmakers pushing to regulate youth sports in the state should get involved with, no?

Good time to plug sponsor Go4, which provides a solution for hiring athletic trainers.

The newly-formed American Cricket Council has launched an initiative to build infrastructure for the sport that models — and, presumably, could be absorbed into — NFHS and the NCAA.

The organization will be based in New Jersey’s Middlesex County — which has the largest Indian-American community in the country and where the sport has significant traction. There will also be secondary operations in Orlando.

Cricket legend Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who previously coached the U.S. women’s national team, will lead the initiative.

Last week on LinkedIn, I (Kyle) explained the thinking behind launching our second vertical: Buying Sideline.

In short, the sports hospitality, premium experience, and tourism business is booming and growing in a manner similar to youth sports (sports hospitality alone is ~$60B today and projected to grow to close to $170B by 2034).

The new publication has been live for nearly two months in soft-launch and already has almost 1,000 subscribers, including executives from On Location, Legends Global, Monumental Sports, F1, Boston Red Sox, Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Rays, Boston Bruins, and, my favorite, the Tulsa Drillers.

Our team is expanding to accommodate this new vertical and others under the Buying Media Group umbrella.

The goal? Build a modern sports business publication from the ground up, with genuine expertise, depth, and relationships in each vertical.

We’re fully self-funded and not formally raising capital. But we think the opportunity for running the Buying Sandlot playbook across multiple sports themes and topics is substantial, and know the right strategic investor can help us accelerate things. If you’re interested, drop me a line (just reply to this email).

Otherwise, subscribe to Buying Sideline here:

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Good game.