🥎 Youth Sports' Next Hot Tech Trend

“We find that parents, families and friends, if they can attend the game, yeah, they’re going to be there on the sideline rooting their kid on. But if they can’t be there, they don’t have time to watch 90-plus minutes of a game.

“What they really want to do is hit a button and see every time that their grandchild touches the ball. And if their grandchild is a midfielder and doesn’t get to touch the ball as much as others, they want to be able to go automatically to that play where their granddaughter threw the ball in and was the key to a goal.”

“The personalization of highlights, clips and moments, as we define them, is something that is becoming an expectation of parents and kids to have. The more we can do that automatically for them so they don’t have to go back and watch the whole game and segment out their clips themselves, the better their experience is going to be at the end of the day. And to combine that with the scale that we have now with PlayOn, with 15,000, 16,000 systems out there over 9,000 high schools, we’re the ones that have the amount of content to be able to do this for them in that way.”

“We strive to create an experience of whether you’re at the game, you’re watching a live stream or maybe you are stuck in traffic coming home, you have the highlights from the person you care about the most delivered directly to your phone in real-time. Are we there yet? No. But when you think about personalization and content in youth sports, while we live for the long-form and live stream, personal highlights are kind of the currency. That’s where we’re going.”

“Our goal is to deliver content as it happens, completely automatically. The end result is you as a parent or as an athlete are getting that content pushed to you right when you need it, completely using AI. We don’t want anybody to be scrubbing through long games or going through VCR tapes. The idea is we do all the work for you and we try to make it easy through our partners to deliver.”

“Back to who's our core audience, the parents. It's nice for you to send me a summary of the game. I appreciate it. That's great. You want me to pay more? Send me highlights of my kid. That's a killer product. Send me the stats of my kid. Send me all that timestamped together. Package it all up. Make it easy for me to store it and save it. Make it where I don't have to worry about pulling out my phone and trying to film stuff at the game. Make it easy for me to share through social media. That's what I want. That's where AI is super valuable.”

Reminds me of Valhalla FC Arena.

Lots of interesting concepts in the “sportstainment” category— from TopGolf, to Batbox, to Footlab, to Shoot360, to the F1 Arcade. Some franchises, some not.

I could absolutely see these venues as an amazing place to have kids birthday parties. My kids have had their last 3 combined birthdays at a sports facility with turf and basketball courts. An instructor organizes pickup games of the kids’ choosing - usually wiffleball or soccer - and then leads everyone in to a room that smells like the inside of an industrial-strength carpet cleaner for pizza and to blow out candles.

Everyone loves it. But the experience is no frills. The “professionalized” experiences for birthday parties are generally reserved for more harrowing trampoline parks and the like. So count me in on higher-end sportstainment facilities for this use.

But I do think that for every successful sportstainment concept, there will be 4 that go belly-up for various reasons. As an example, TopGolf has gotten itself into trouble largely because of the real estate costs involved in each facility, never mind the insane decision to allow kids birthday parties to be on the third deck of their venues.

The bigger opportunity seems to be for existing sports facilities and tournament locations to add the tech, systems, and food and beverage offerings that many of these newer venues include. This is why I’m bullish on the asset-light platform model like Batbox (licensed simulator) and scaled hospitality plays that can elevate things at the places where athletes and parents are already spending time. Those businesses come without the fixed costs and operational headaches of running a whole facility.

Still, Footlab looks cool and I want one.