Youth Sports Poll Reiterates Need for Better Coaching

Tomorrow, we will launch our first in a series of surveys targeted at specific segments within youth sports to surface key benchmarking data in the highly-fragmented industry.

First up?

Facility owners and operators

Anyone who selected "facility owner or operator” in our new subscriber survey will receive a link to complete the survey— the results of which will be completely anonymized and presented in a premium report to subscribers.

If you would like to participate in that or future segment-specific surveys, make sure you complete our general subscriber survey so we can know which part or parts of the industry you work in.

My take:

Feel like we harp on this in every email, but this is one of those clear trends. Unlike tech platforms, coaching opportunities won’t scale or consolidate to just 1-2 major players given how many human coaches participate at all levels of the stack.

As such, I see lots of business opportunities around coaching:

1) Certification— As pro leagues double down on Euro- or soccer-style youth development, there will be increased reliance on consistency. That means certification. Apps, programs, classes, local organizations— governing bodies will need boots on the ground and processes that scale.

2) Coach marketplaces— We’ll be doing a deep-dive on these dating-style coaching and training apps, but I think the surface is just being scratched here. If parents value coaching over all else, you better believe facilities, clubs and schools will search for the best available coaches.

3) Payment — As youth sports becomes more commercialized, it will become increasingly untenable for nine-figure facilities and PE-backed event hosts to earn large profits while on-field coaches earn stipends (paid largely by players) or nothing at all. Market forces will dictate the need to turn “amateur” coaching gigs into full-time roles— and with that comes payrolls, certification, rev share, and the need for coaches to market themselves… thus bringing this section full-circle.

My take:

The cleanest way for the NBA to pull this off would be to partner with the national powerhouses like Montverde Academy in Florida. That way the league isn’t getting involved in the actual education business, just playing a role in the basketball aspects of the operation. The league then has to find ways to impact kids before they get to high school while knowing the best of the best will be steered (to some extent) once they get to high school. Waiving the one-and-done rule could be a nice sweetener to get athlete and family buy-in, too.

It will start with pro leagues developing a consistent curriculum that reaches down to the instructional level— hence the NBA’s recent pilot program with the Doncic Foundation. Though that only establishes high-level principles and doesn’t seem to get into the weeds of instruction.

My take:

This is the latest example of a youth hoops tournament becoming a debacle after renting gym space from a school district. It’s hard to know what exactly was the real issue here — poorly-behaved spectators or just too many of them than the fire code and common sense allows — but the end result is likely the same. School officials are less likely to rent the gym out the next time and if they do, the tournament organizers are likely looking at higher rental rates, added expenses hiring security or both.

And while it’s a little bit of a leap … take note of the Gregg Popovich item above. If the NBA ever was to truly get involved with grassroots hoops, it does not help organizations like AAU that many of their events become as messy as this one.