Youth Sports NIL Is The Topic Du Jour

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

We have a theme today: It’s the money edition. From The NY Times, to Patrick Mahomes’ mom, to popular YouTubers— everyone has a plan for how to turn youth athletes into pros, for better or worse.

Kaden Coleman-Bennett is 14.

His mom is hopeful he can make $1M as a high school freshman football player.

The New York Times profiled the star middle school running back from the Washington D.C. area over the weekend while taking a look at the burgeoning NIL opportunities for high school athletes and (younger).

ALSO: It was a big youth sports weekend for The Old Gray Lady, as The Athletic asked former pro athletes to weigh in with their philosophies on coaching kids.

Randi Mahomes — you have likely heard of her son — has launched the Sports Parent Academy, which says it is “an expert-led, step-by-step guide to supporting your child’s athletic journey from youth leagues to elite levels.”

There are 3 paid tiers:

The lowest level provides full access to the SPA curriculum — “six stages and 20+ video modules that include topics like parent mindset, communication with kids/coaches, mental health, nutrition basics, goal setting, college recruiting 101.”

The middle tier is marketed as being a fit for "parents who want more direct support and results.”

The priciest is said to be for "parents who are all-in — travel teams, D1 aspirations, maybe already spending $10K+ a year on training."

The grift is strong with this one.

So much attention to professionalizing kids. And yet…

Bryce Harper has said something similar.

There may not be two guys who were more famous as youth athletes, and both agree on this topic.

In April we told you about Pottstown Scout, the creator-led travel baseball team which enters and generally dominates Perfect Game tournaments. You can read that full deep dive here.

It seems fellow YouTuber DSARM is taking a page out of that playbook.

He sponsors a team in his former REC LEAGUE, and this week he showed up to coach a game. He gave away a box of bright pink Bruce Bolt batting gloves (to match his team’s jerseys), Hype Fire and Icon bats, and a custom Rawlings glove— almost assuredly all provided by sponsors.

This is a perfect example of the bottoms-up marketing strategy I outlined in the Pottstown post explaining how brands can more effectively reach customers by working with creators and youth teams rather than the old way of working with MLB players first:

Coralville, Iowa: The city has paused expansion of its youth sports complex after the contractor bids came in over the planned $1.5M budget. Three different companies reportedly submitted bids in the $1.8M range, leading the city council to reject them and likely delay work until at least next year. The city plans to rework its plan and seek bids again later this year.

We wrote back in April about a push to amend New York’s state child labor laws to allow kids under 14 to get paid to officiate youth sports games. The proposal came after some organizations in the town of Clifton Park were fined and forced to provide back pay.

The state’s labor department is now refunding the $7K in penalties it levied against the organizations. But the law has not been changed, so officials are still pushing for a carve-out similar to the ones that youth farm workers can get.

Last week, I (Kyle) wrote about how Dick’s focused heavily on GameChanger in their most recent earnings call.

I included this line: “[The Bat Lab] videos, posted to the GameChanger YouTube channel, garnered millions of views— a huge increase compared to the single-digit thousand view counts the channel typically gets on GameChanger tutorials and the like. This is basically the definition of content + commerce.”

A reader emailed me to point out that these videos may have been boosted to artificially inflate impression numbers: “One thing I figured I'd call out (in a friendly way!) -- all those "millions of views" on the GameChanger youtube channel are paid for / boosted. If you notice, the "successful" Two videos have exactly 1.1m views, and they only have 1 and 4 comments, respectively. The true audience of that youtube channel is the 200 views, 471 views, and the like. Even the "3.4 million" view video only has a few comments on it. I'd venture to say it only got a few dozen legitimate, full-length views that generated any sort of commerce interest. Classic media trick to hit impression targets for partners, or to manufacture vanity metrics to make a press release or say on an earnings call that they've grown XX% year-over-year.”

I can’t be certain as to how many of the views were organic, but it’s something I should have considered before being so effusive in my praise of them.

That said, I was in Dick’s this weekend where my 6-year-old fell in love with these $300 double barrel bats - positioned directly as you walk in the door - which are entirely too heavy for him:

Those QR codes lead to a landing page with Bat Lab video reviews from GameChanger. So I’d still argue this is an excellent example of retail media… inflated organic views or not.

Easton + Dick’s + DSARM + GameChanger + walking right into the bats as you enter the store— an unfair advantage against parents everywhere*

*No, I didn’t buy one… yet

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Good game.