youth-sports
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Frank Tillinghast and the Five-Minute Store
A Rhode Island CPA spent decades learning the apparel trade, then helped turn one of youth sports' least glamorous chores into an online store. His career is a study in what happens when the person counting the costs has also coached the team.
Why Hesperia charges $5 more to let you sit still
At Hesperia Lake, an extra $5 buys an uninterrupted day of fishing. Behind that small convenience sits a public park district balancing recreation, shared space, and the very real cost of keeping a lake running.
FC London’s big ambition starts on a local pitch
A North American title, a Toronto FC connection and a C$2 million field helped FC London build a route through the game. Its harder assignment is making player development and the scoreboard agree.
Dave Marcello Put the Back Office On the Scoreboard
He once won attention with a free-kittens flyer and acquired music fans for 32 cents apiece. Now Dave Marcello is selling a less glamorous, more consequential idea: the people running youth sports deserve serious operating tools.
Chris Farrell Knows the Unsexy Work Is Where Markets Move
A career built across banking, billing and software taught Chris Farrell to look past the shiny pitch. At Raintree Systems, he is turning the stubborn machinery of therapy practice into a story people can actually use.
Mason Hale Turned Swim-Meet Chaos Into Software That Outlived the Startup Playbook
A volunteer assignment, one overworked laptop and 250 young swimmers gave Mason Hale a problem worth fifteen years. His answer became SwimTopia - a patient SaaS company built around the people who keep community sports alive.
The Racecar Driver Who Made Football's Lightest Helmet - and Landed in 30 NFL Locker Rooms
Nicholas Esayian bought a bankrupt racing-helmet business from a legend, halved the weight of a football helmet, and now has Virginia Tech calling his Apache the best-rated helmet it has ever put on a crash rig.
Ryzer Turned Camp Paperwork Into Recruiting Data - A Playbook for Founders in Boring Markets
The Iowa company began with envelopes, checks and harried coaches. Nineteen years later, its event network became the missing front door for a college-recruiting platform.
The Soccer Catalog That Learned to Outfit the Whole Team
Sports Endeavors began with a teenager who could not easily buy the right cleats. Four decades later, the company sits where fandom, youth-team logistics and specialty retail meet - with a 200,000-square-foot fulfillment engine behind the screen.
DICK'S Is Turning the Sporting-Goods Store Into a Playing Field
A $300 bait-shop bet became a sports retail platform. Now DICK'S is testing a larger idea: the store as clubhouse, playground, media set and front door to a global sneaker business.
Perfect Game Built Baseball’s Most Valuable Waiting Room
A weekend tournament company became the data layer between a teenager’s fastball and the people who can change his future. Thirty-one years in, Perfect Game’s real product is not the game - it is the record of who showed up and what happened next.
BSN SPORTS
The low-profile Texas company that outfits 150,000 school and college teams - and quietly became the biggest name in Nike and Under Armour team gear.
Varsity Spirit
Varsity Spirit is the dominant force in cheerleading and dance, a Memphis-based company that designs and manufactures team uniforms and apparel, runs training camps and clinics, and produces the sport's biggest competitions. Founded in 1974 by Jeff Webb, it grew from a summer camp operation into a vertically integrated business - apparel, camps, competitions, and governing-body partnerships - that touches more than a million athletes each year. It operates as a division of Varsity Brands, owned by KKR.
Players Health
Players Health is a Minneapolis-based sports insurtech that combines a digital risk-management platform with tailored insurance products so youth, amateur and collegiate sports organizations can keep athletes safe and stay compliant. Founded in 2015 by former pro football player Tyrre Burks, the company pairs safety assessments, background checks, incident tracking and HIPAA-compliant education with sports-specific coverage. It supports more than 40,000 sports organizations and over 5.5 million athletes, and in December 2024 closed a $60 million Series C led by Bluestone Equity Partners.
Mustard
Mustard is a Los Angeles-area sports-tech company that puts elite athletic coaching in an app. Using AI and computer vision, it analyzes ordinary smartphone video of a pitcher's throwing motion or a golfer's swing, compares it against a decades-deep biomechanics database, and returns a report card plus a personalized drill plan. Co-founded by legendary throwing coach Dr. Tom House, the company aims to make world-class, data-driven coaching accessible to any athlete, starting with baseball and golf and expanding toward other sports.
Rocky Collis
Rocky Collis is the co-founder and CEO of Mustard, a sports technology company that uses computer vision and AI to put world-class coaching in a phone. A former Cornell pitcher drafted by the Seattle Mariners, he detoured through Georgetown Law and big-firm litigation before teaming up with legendary throwing coach Dr. Tom House, mental-performance coach Jason Goldsmith, and his brother Luke to build an app that gives any kid the kind of mechanics analysis once reserved for Tom Brady and Nolan Ryan. Mustard has raised roughly $5.45M-$6M from backers including Mark Cuban, Ronnie Lott, and Justin Rose, and has expanded from pitching into golf through a partnership with Golf Digest.
Chris O'Dowd
Chris O'Dowd is the co-founder and CEO of WIN Reality, an Austin-based virtual reality training platform for baseball and softball hitters. A former professional catcher who played six seasons in the minor leagues after starring at Dartmouth, he built WIN Reality with his father, longtime MLB executive Dan O'Dowd, to close the gap between practice speed and real game speed. The Meta Quest-based product lets players face game-speed pitching from a library of thousands of real pitchers, and is now used by youth players, more than 200 colleges, and a majority of MLB franchises. The company raised a $45M+ round led by Spectrum Equity in June 2022.
David Lokshin
David Lokshin is the co-founder and CEO of Trace, an AI sports video company that places an autonomous camera on the sideline of youth games and hands each player a personalized highlight reel. He started the company in 2011 as AlpineReplay, a side project with his father Anatole, building GPS sensors that tracked skiers and snowboarders, then pivoted the same data-and-camera engine into team sports. A Harvard applied-math graduate who began his career trading FX options at Barclays, Lokshin describes Trace as 'the creator and keeper of memories.' The company has raised roughly $71.8M through a Series C and employs around 130 people from its Austin base.
Trace
Trace is an Austin, Texas sports technology company that uses computer vision, GPS sensors and AI to automatically film youth sports games and edit a personalized highlight video for every single player - no camera operator required. Originally founded as AlpineReplay to track skiing and snowboarding, the father-and-son team pivoted to team sports and built one of the largest video datasets in youth athletics. Trace has delivered millions of automated highlights to over a million athletes and raised a $47M Series C at a reported $190M valuation.