🥎 Youth Sports Tech Platforms Are Missing a Big Piece of the Puzzle

Our deep dive into the back-end operations of youth sports has been produced in partnership with Tourney Direct.

It is a scene many youth sports organizers can vividly picture, and empathize with.

The event is underway. But instead of ensuring everything is running smoothly from the sideline, the operator is sitting in their car for hours on end, frantically firing out texts as they guzzle coffee and write checks.

How many games did this ref work?

Did this person show up?

Do we have these W-9s yet?

There are more youth athletes and teams playing than ever before as the industry booms. Athletes, their families and the actual competitions are all well-served by management platforms like LeagueApps, SportsEngine and TeamSnap.

Those platforms build schedules and brackets, register teams, collect fees, and run communications and websites. But they can be less impactful when it comes to running the show behind-the-scenes. That forces operators to rely on a patchwork of tactics and tools to address critical needs, including identifying, hiring, compensating and retaining the coaches, officials, trainers and staffers that an event’s credibility, success and potential scalability hinge on.

"Youth sports are growing faster than the infrastructure supporting them,” said Kate Wellner, the founder and CEO of Tourney Direct, an Uber-like platform matching events and operations with qualified coaches, officials, trainers and staffers in a two-way marketplace.

“Organizers are drowning in spreadsheets, texts, and last-minute staffing fires — not because they lack effort, but because they lack systems built to scale.”

In other words, efficient back-of-the-house operations are a missing puzzle piece for youth sports event management.

Niche services exist, but they typically focus on one role in the ecosystem, Wellner said.

Operators must toggle back and forth while relying on word-of-mouth to find coaches and gameday staffers. Then come the handwritten notes and spreadsheets, the calls and texts. All of this without a centralized place to deliver communications, reminders, schedules, and even information on where to park and when lunch will be served.

It is a juggling act on top of everything else that goes into running an event with no real-time insights or visibility into who is confirmed, who has arrived, who has no-showed and what gaps remain.

Operators cannot easily identify cross-staffing needs with fragmented platforms and tools, Wellner said. There is no way to hone in on reliability trends or benchmark stipend rates. And then everyone has to be paid with all W-9 and 1099 documentation properly obtained and filed.

"The urgent part of what people are doing is to put their attention on the field, the players, the parents, the kids," Focus on the Field CEO Tyler Kreitz said. "And that's where it should be. But doing this stuff is extremely necessary, and it gets triaged down."

Everyone in youth sports knows there is an officiating crisis.

Ref shortages are often attributed to bad sportsmanship and safety fears, but compensation and tax preparation lapses don’t help the cause. And operators expend energy chasing all the pertinent information down.

The cost goes beyond time and sanity, too; an accounting firm found a small business could pay as much as $330 per 1099 recipient for complete compliance, and that is before any investment needed to address avoidable mistakes after the fact — especially when payroll tax or tax-exempt status concerns are in play.

It is not just an officiating problem. Over 70% of youth sports organizations reported being either very or extremely concerned about all staffing availability, according to a SportsEngine survey conducted in 2023.

Tourney Direct automates all of the above, Wellner said. The platform serves as a marketplace for events staff and manages all workers and scheduling with integrated payrolls and complete tax services, including W-9s and 1099s. All management tools are unified.

The platform offers predictive alerts and can identify potential staffing conflicts and gaps along with worker reliability data, churn forecasts and real-time data. The end-to-end technology is designed to learn from past events and optimize future operations as more users adopt it, Wellner said.

Wellner said a Tourney Direct client ran seven events in their first year with the platform and then scaled to 14 in Year 2 using the tools.

“I’ve felt the grind firsthand -- recruiting staff, juggling spreadsheets, writing checks at 3 a.m., chasing W9s and bracing for game-day chaos," Wellner said. "I know the pain — it’s broken, unscalable, and built on duct tape. We’re fixing the system itself, giving organizers the intelligence, automation, and visibility they need to run events that are not only smoother today, but smarter tomorrow.”

This piece was created in partnership with Tourney Direct, which unifies communications, scheduling, staffing and payments across all roles through intelligent automation that simplifies workflows, predicts staffing gaps and unearths insights to drive profits and retention.

Founder and CEO Kate Wellner paired her 20-plus years of expertise in enterprise strategy and scalable transformation for brands like AT&T, Oracle and the American Red Cross with her experiences as a youth sports parent, college coach’s spouse and events operator to launch the platform.

Tourney Direct becomes an event operator’s “co-captain” by honing in on five core principles:

The youth sports industry has evolved to the point that operational inefficiency means financial risk.

Every delayed payment, scheduling error or staffing failure sparks a domino effect that impacts hundreds of games and thousands of participants. And those moments can threaten the long-term credibility and viability of events.

The path to growth is clear: Replacing reactive chaos with proactive operational intelligence.

That’s Tourney Direct.