A guy in cargo shorts running a $40 billion market off Venmo and a group text. That's youth sports in 2026, and I just spent an afternoon at the Buying Sandlot Summit in Philly watching a room full of very smart people try to figure out what to do about it.

The room was packed. 400+ people from all over the country. Presidents of Hudl and LeagueApps. CEOs of Perfect Game and Pixellot. C-suite from TeamSnap, GameChanger, and IMG Academy. A Bloomberg reporter. Panels covering everything from PE-backed super clubs to streaming economics to the facility construction boom.

Think about that for a second. 400+ people from a $40 billion industry could fit inside a single conference hall in Philly. That's the tell. Youth sports have almost no aggregation and no real governing bodies running the show. It's one of the biggest markets in American life and nobody is actually in charge of it.  

Sure, the tech on display was sharp. AI highlights, automated cameras, wearable integrations, and streaming tools that would've cost six figures five years ago. All of it real, all of it working.

But I simply couldn’t stop thinking about the fragmentation and the revenue problem underneath all of it. Operators are charging families $1,016 a year (nearly $1,500 when you count the second sport) and still running the business like a lemonade stand. That mentality is leaving obscene amounts of money on the table and, ironically, making the experience worse for everyone paying into it. Better tech doesn't fix that. Better financial thinking does.

For half a day in a hotel ballroom, I left Philly with a lot of takeaways and thoughts.

Much of tech conversations at the Buying Sandlot Summit centered on workflow, interoperability, AI-first operations, and parent demand.  

From where I sit as a CFO, software earns its keep when it reduces friction, raises retention, fills more inventory, or creates attach revenue. Anything short of that is an expense line item dressed up as innovation. Tech in youth sports is becoming the plumbing. Necessary? Absolutely. A differentiator on its own? Not for long.

The deal activity backs it up. LeagueApps acquired RecTimes in May 2025 to bolt facility scheduling onto its operating system. A month later, Genstar backed the PlayMetrics-Stack Sports combination to merge a club OS with real scale. Buyers are paying for integrated platforms that solve operating pain, not isolated features.

All that talk about software being plumbing leads somewhere. It leads to the money.

PE is in this market for the fragmentation. Full stop. Nobody at Blackstone is rolling up clubs because they caught the 8U travel soccer bug. A $40 billion market, recurring family spend, noncyclical demand, thousands of operators all running their own playbook. The roll-up thesis basically writes itself.

Consolidation and exits had their own track at the summit, and "Super Clubs," is the conversation worth watching. Single-sport or multi-sport. Own the facility or rent it. Bolt on tech, academies, sponsorship. Build a brand that travels. Probably the hottest corner of the market right now, and it's not hard to see why.

The banker deck always leaves out the awkward part, though. Institutional capital doesn't actually pay up for chaos. It pays for leadership depth, standardized ops, clean data, and community trust. I've watched enough roll-ups to know how this movie goes. Gorgeous on slide 14. A disaster the second a local community figures out their kid's club got absorbed by a holding company nobody in town can pronounce.

Youth sports families are loyal to coaches and programs, not logos. Lose that, and you bought yourself an expensive mess.

So if trust is the product, what does that look like on a P&L? 

Start with what families are buying. 

A parent spending over a grand per year per kid isn't paying for games. They're paying for an experience they can feel good about. Better venues, smoother logistics, strong communication, quality film, verifiable stats, and recruiting visibility. The bracket is just the wrapper.

The Buying Sandlot Summit kept circling back to this. Session after session pointed to athlete profiles, verifiable data, streaming, automated highlights, and tools built for parents. The startup panel said it plainly: tech platforms spent years building for leagues and clubs and left the actual end user (the parent writing the check) underserved.

Companies like SkillShow and KlutchShots already see it. SkillShow films over 300 events a year and produces recruiter-ready content for 20,000+ athletes annually. KlutchShots is packaging instant multi-angle highlights, athlete profiles, and scout access into one place.

Neither company runs a tournament. But you better believe that both make tournaments worth more to the families who pay for them. The picks-and-shovels, if you will.

Registration fees are the warm-up act. The real business is everything operators don't think to bill for.

By my count, there are at least eight distinct revenue lines a well-run operation could build today: event fees, facility utilization, sponsorship, streaming, highlights, recruiting products, tourism partnerships, and data services. Most operators I talk to are running on two. Maybe three if they're feeling creative. 

That gap is where the next generation of real businesses gets built.

AI cameras and automated highlights have quietly turned into nine, ten, and eleven-figure businesses while most operators were still arguing with their Wi-Fi provider. Parents will pay to watch their kid play from two time zones away, and they'll pay for the highlights package on top of it. If you run events and you don't have a streaming plan, that revenue line is showing up on somebody else's P&L.

Brands want these families, and reaching them any other way costs a small fortune. A sponsor will happily knock $200 off a tournament fee just to get their logo on the jerseys and banners, which looks like generosity from the bleachers and a bargain line on the media plan. Everybody wins on paper. Almost nobody actually runs the play.

Sports ETA pegs youth tournaments at $52.2 billion in direct spend, $128 billion in total impact, and 73.5 million hotel room nights a year. For a lot of regions, those tournaments are the vacation economy. Your 12U showcase is moving Marriott stock and funding somebody's convention center expansion, whether the scoring table realizes it or not. The operators who figure out how to price their slice of that impact will be playing a very different game from the ones still counting gate receipts.

Three-day tournaments drag thousands of spectators past thousands of feet of blank space that could be selling. Signage, branded zones, activation space, naming rights, all of it is sponsorship inventory, and most operators treat it like landscaping. Base Sports Group is one of the few companies built specifically to solve this, running sponsorship sales for facilities, events, and operators across 40+ states and putting brands like YETI, IKEA, PRIME, and GEICO on spaces that used to earn exactly nothing. It's picks-and-shovels for the youth sports economy, and frankly, it should be illegal how much revenue is sitting on those walls right now.

Everything I've laid out so far points in one direction: professionalize. But I want to pause here because I watched a room full of very smart operators and investors wrestle with the other side of that coin. 

Aspen's Project Play found that family spending on youth sports jumped 46% between 2019 and 2024. The highest-income families are outspending the lowest by $1,471 a year on a single sport. That kind of gap attracts politicians, and the summit knew it. One panel tackled how Washington is already paying attention. Another asked point-blank whether the boom is still serving the kids at the center of it.

Good questions. Uncomfortable ones. And the right ones to ask before someone else asks them for you.

You can financial-engineer a roll-up. You cannot spreadsheet your way back to trust once families decide you're taking without giving. The operators who build lasting businesses from here will professionalize hard, add real revenue lines, and still make a 10-year-old feel like the whole thing exists for them. 

That's the hardest balance in this entire market. The ones who get it right will be worth a fortune.

If I'm being honest, the thing that hung with me on the drive back wasn't the deal activity or the tech. It was affordability. 

Youth sports have gotten expensive enough that good kids are getting priced out, and that's a problem whether you care about fairness or not. A product that only works at the top of the income distribution has a ceiling, and a ceiling in this business turns into a regulator with a clipboard.

That one falls to operators. Elite travel isn't going anywhere, and shouldn't, but there has to be a working version of this game for the rec-league family and the kid who just wants to be on the team with his buddies. Build a ladder, or somebody will build it around you.

The market is probably going to push in that direction anyway. Families who can't pay go find something cheaper, something cheaper grows, and the operators who figure out how to run real margin at lower price points are the ones who survive the squeeze. Which is exactly why those eight revenue lines matter. Price discovery doing its thing.

Step back from all of it, though, and this isn't a morality play. The PE money, the VC bets, the $40 billion figure everyone loves to quote, none of it is inherently good or bad. It's a fragmented growing market with recurring revenue, and capital was always going to find it.  

So, where does all of this land? I'll give you four predictions I'd put money behind.

I walked out of Philly thinking about one question. Every operator in youth sports is about to hear it from families, investors, and regulators at the same time: What exactly are we paying for? The ones with a good answer will build generational businesses. The ones without one will get acquired by someone who does. I've seen that movie enough times to know how it ends.