The Future of Youth Sports Is Being Built by Operators

May 11–12, 2026  •  Dallas, Texas

For the first time, LeagueApps took NextUp to Texas— and Dallas delivered. Over two days, hundreds of youth sports operators, capital partners, brand leaders, and athletes gathered for something that doesn’t really exist anywhere else: a conference for the people actually making youth sports happen.

Here are the moments, ideas, and announcements that stuck.

1. A Marketplace of Ideas

Before the first keynote, LeagueApps’ president Jeremy Goldberg ran an Open Space session — a participant-driven format where attendees set the agenda. Anyone with a question or a pain point on their mind raised a hand, named it, and a table got assigned. Player retention. Volunteer coach recruitment and development. Coach retention. Parent communications. Sponsorship and fundraising. Tech and player development. Access and fundraising for underserved communities. The list goes on. 

Fifteen-plus tables, no scripts, just discussion. It set the tone for the whole event: this is a working conference, not a watching one.

2. Two Narratives Are Colliding — and Operators Are in the Middle

Brian Litvack and Jeremy Goldberg opened the formal program, joined by Adam Blumenfeld (CEO of Varsity Brands / BSN Sports) for a Dallas welcome. Jeremy then named the elephant in the room: youth sports is having a moment, and not always a flattering one. On one side, headlines about nine-year-olds signing NIL deals, Little League gambling scandals, and federal legislation being introduced to regulate the industry. On the other, billions of dollars in capital flowing in from private equity, family offices, and pro leagues.

The people in the room sit between those two stories. As Jeremy put it: “The organizations that win are the ones that understand their importance in the story.”

There isn’t one right way to run a youth sports business. But there are patterns showing up across the operators who are winning right now.

Spotlight: LeagueApps Tryouts Launched Live in Dallas

Also announced and launched during the Day 1 opening, LeagueApps Tryouts lets partners run end-to-end tryouts fully inside the LeagueApps platform — mobile evaluations, score reconciliation, same-team assignment requests, and team formation that flows directly into season scheduling and player development. If you’re running tryouts this summer or fall, this is the moment to take a look.

LEARN MORE

3. An Operator Perspective

Three youth sports owners took the stage to talk about how they actually built what they built. 

Brad Wilde (Charlotte Soccer Academy) walked through how a club of 8,500+ players turned a million dollars of annual rental costs into ownership of a 55-acre complex — and just signed the first-ever U.S. youth development partnership with Manchester City. Kate Wojciechowski (Ripken Baseball, Pigeon Forge) shared ten years of designing a Major League–quality experience for kids — walk-up music, mom home run derbies, white water rafting between games. Jordan Baltimore (New York Empire Baseball) told the story of how an email asking to rake baseball fields turned into a 1,100-player club, a foundation teaching baseball to refugees, and a recent acquisition by Shore Capital — because of the culture, not in spite of it.

Brad’s facility story drew multiple follow-up questions: The club was spending over a million dollars a year renting fields with nothing to show for it. So he ran a drive-time analysis on 20+ pieces of land, landed on a 55-acre former dump site, financed it, and broke construction into three manageable phases. Eighteen months ago, Charlotte Soccer Academy paid back its initial investors. Today they own the complex outright.

“It elevated us above most others in terms of what we were providing.”

What tied the panel together: every one of them runs the operation like a real business — financials, hires, brand decisions — and centers it around the experience they’re building for their customers.

4. AI in Action: Three Plays You Can Run This Week

LeagueApps PMs Jeff Clark and Brittni Dunn ran a packed Day 1 breakout on using AI as a partner, not a replacement. The single biggest shift, they argued, is to stop asking AI for the answer and start asking it for the approach.

The magic prompt: “Ask me questions one by one until you’re confident you know what I want.” That single line flips AI from fast-and-shallow Type 1 thinking into deliberate Type 2 thinking — surfacing the constraints and edge cases you’d normally miss.

Play 1 — Schedule building. Jeff fed an AI tool the basics of his rec league (8 teams, 3 fields, weeknights, season dates). The tool asked about practice frequency, field availability, Memorial Day blackouts, blackout dates, coach conflicts, same-night game-and-practice rules, even sibling pairings. Then he handed it the LeagueApps schedule import template and the AI tool returned a CSV-ready schedule in about 10 minutes — formatted for direct upload.

Play 2 — Marketing flyers. Another AI tool updated an existing camp flyer’s dates in 15 seconds. For a net-new softball camp flyer in a series, they fed it the baseball version as a reference and asked it to generate something visually distinct but clearly part of the same series. Then: “Now give me social and email sizes.” Four perfectly sized assets came back in 2 minutes. The takeaway: the first answer is almost never the last answer, but iteration is cheap and fast.

Play 3 — Team building. For a 102-kid Little League draft, the tool took the tryout spreadsheet, asked questions about composite scoring (don’t just balance on score — balance on pitching, fielding, hitting, running separately), handled sponsor anchors, sibling locks, coach-kid pairings, and negative pairings, and built eight balanced teams with a composite spread of 0.03 across teams. Then Jeff pulled the result into LeagueApps’ new Team Builder for the human gut-check pass.

Three universal takeaways: start with the problem, not the solution; give it real context (your spreadsheet, your template, your constraints); and don’t be afraid to iterate.

5. The Risks You Can’t Ignore

The Day 1 closing panel — Mike Jules (GameBreaker), Tyrre Burks (Players Health), Jennifer Peacock (Vertical Insure), and Seth Lieberman (Ankored) — opened with heavy-hitting stats.  Nuclear verdicts on liability claims are up 56% in three years. Insurance premiums are up 20–30% for less coverage. And the orgs that take safety seriously — background checks, headgear in collision and contact sports, real risk management — are growing faster and more profitably than those that don’t. “Wherever you are today, that’s where you are,” Seth said. “It’s a commitment to continuous improvement.”

Check out our recent webinar with this panel here.

6. Multi-Sport, Play, and Creating Memorable Experiences

The Day 1 happy hour at Dude Perfect’s Frisco headquarters may go down as the best venue in Next Up history. Attendees threw footballs, sank trick shots (Jeremy’s 50-footer made the LeagueApps Instagram), and got an inside look at what it means to build a brand around joy.

The bigger message previewed itself there: 70% of kids drop out of organized sports by 13. The remedy isn’t more professionalization. It’s more play, more multi-sport experiences, more reasons for a seven-year-old to come home thrilled about catching three balls at her first softball practice. Dude Perfect CEO Andrew Yaffe would carry that thread into Day 2.

7. Trust Is Earned in Drops, Lost in Buckets

Day 2 opened with a conversation that may have been the most quoted of the conference. Kate Denton (AT&T, formerly Gatorade and the Indiana Pacers/Fever) and Andrew Yaffe (CEO of Dude Perfect, formerly NBA) sat with Jeremy to talk about what families actually want.

Andrew’s line — “trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets” — landed hard. One bad email, one unsafe practice, one missed communication, and parents are gone forever. Kate’s reframe of the customer journey hit just as squarely: kids, parents, coaches, and the community are all customers, and the coach is the most overlooked link in the chain. “They are shaping the experience that the parents and the kids have,” she said. 

Their advice to operators: stop trying to be everything to everyone. Build your special sauce. Create core memories — a hat-signing day, a T-shirt with the brand, a tradition the kids tell grandma about. (Andrew noted that in years of NBA fan surveys, the #1 retention driver wasn’t the halftime show. It was the T-shirt gun.)

Kate also walked the room through how Gatorade rebuilt itself after the 2008 crash by getting maniacally clear on its brand — shifting ingredients, opening the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, and recognizing that the brand had to inspire its audience. What does your brand actually stand for? was the question she left every operator with.

8. The Future of Rec Sports

Jeremy moderated the first Day 2 breakout. The premise: while the industry obsesses over travel teams and trophies, the base of the pyramid — recreational sports — is where the real long-term opportunity sits. Three operators showed why.

Scott Blackford (Nevada Youth Sports) grew from 3,500 participants in 2013 to roughly 13,000 today, with 30–40,000 individual registrations a year across volleyball, basketball, baseball, soccer, football, and more. He’s the athletic governing body for 82–90 charter schools in Las Vegas. He runs free leagues inside public schools as a top-of-funnel feeder into paid programs. His scaling philosophy: stay true to your brand, treat every kid the same, attention to little details.

Travis Vaughn (Upward Sports) equips churches to run sports leagues in their own communities — 225,000+ kids will play Upward Sports this year. After a decade-long decline, they reversed course by over-training every new church partner (they onboard ~290 new churches a year) and building a market-research engine that turns parent feedback into product changes. Their non-negotiable: the sport has to come first. A high-quality sports experience earns the right to do anything else.

Justin Nihiser (ex-CEO of Code Ninjas, ex-School of Rock) made the franchise case. His pitch: most youth sports operators don’t recognize that franchising is a proven format for taking a great local program and scaling it without burning corporate cash. The hardest year is always year one — pick the right candidates, boot-camp them, and stay close.

Closing theme: the model isn’t the problem — expectations are. Families want one of two pathways: social or developmental. Build clearly toward one, communicate which one you are, and you’ll win the families you want.

9. Revenue Beyond Registration

The second Day 2 breakout — Unlocking Your Revenue, with Carrie Gamper (BASE Sports Group), Mark Botterill (GameBreaker), Brandon Shangraw (USA Prime), and Brad Wilde (Charlotte Soccer Academy)— tackled the question every operator is sitting on: where else does the money come from?

Mark’s stat stopped the room: 60% of a parent’s disposable spend in your organization gets spent on apparel outside of your purview. Most operators treat their apparel program as a liability. Mark’s argument: build a product strategy across buckets (on-field, cageware, cold weather, travel, hotel wear), use sublimation and affinity design, and apparel flips from a chore into one of the highest-margin lines in your business.

On sponsorship, Carrie’s framing: “It’s not about the first contract, it’s about the second one.” Brands are starting to spend real money in youth sports, but if their first experience is bad, they leave the whole category, not just your org. Her rule: set realistic expectations and over-deliver. You can have two teams and still be ready for a sponsor, as long as the price tag matches what you can actually deliver.

Brandon (USA Prime, ex-PE chief strategy officer) gave the cleanest framework of the day for thinking about expansion of any kind — new revenue streams, new locations, new programs: build, partner, or buy. High conviction and matches your core? Build. Need to be in it but it’s not core? Partner. High conviction but outside your competency? Buy. “Know your why before you decide which one.”

Mark closed with a tactic that quietly resets sponsorship economics: ship-to-home. 70% of parents look forward to something arriving at their door in a direct marketing campaign; only 15% trust a digital-only offer. If you can ship uniforms with inserts, your sponsor conversation becomes a different conversation.

Brad’s tactical add on parent fatigue: tier your sponsor communications. Top partners get rare direct emails. The rest get value-add slots in a monthly newsletter. Track read rates. Don’t bombard. Carrie’s addition: schedule announcements have nearly 100% open rates with parents — that’s the place to embed sponsor messaging organically.

And on the perennial “do parents care why we signed a sponsor?” debate, Carrie cited a 13,000-parent survey: 79% want to see brands invest in youth sports over college and pro. Parents aren’t adverse — they just want authenticity.

10. Data that Drives Growth

The afternoon panel — Norm Shippers (Elodia Basketball Academy), Kelsey Tyson (Salix, BVB), and Mike Gilligan (Penn Athletics) — traded concrete examples of data changing real decisions. Norman tracks year-over-year registrations 20 days before close to trigger specific marketing moves, like pushing an early-bird deadline two days when he realized it was landing before payday. Mike uses cumulative seasons played — not skill evaluations — to build parity divisions in rec sports, protecting new teams from blowouts while keeping friend groups intact through sixth grade and beyond.

One thing cut across all three operators: The friend group matters. Single-grade team structures let rosters stay together for 10–12 years; that continuity is what beats the 70% sixth-grade dropout rate. On AI: Kelsey’s workflow — using different AI tools together based on their individual strengths— drew the loudest response of the session. “Game changer. It will change your life.”

11. Owning Your Space: Facility Strategy for Youth Sports Clubs

Leon Blazer (Houston Stars Volleyball) and Matt Quinn (Indy Premier / Club Compass) walked through the rent-lease-buy spectrum with one consistent message: right-size first, expand later. Leasing is the recommended entry point — cheaper than building, more control than renting. Leon’s first leased space was 16,500 square feet over four and a half years; that runway gave him the financials to eventually purchase a semi-abandoned warehouse and convert it into the Stars Training Academy. His warning on buying:  smaller clubs have tried to build way beyond their actual capacity and didn’t survive it. Matt echoed the same principle — Indy Premier started in 20,000 square feet, ran it at near-capacity for eight years, then moved to a 52,500-square-foot leased space only when they had established business to bring with them. “We knew we were moving business with us. We weren’t creating it from scratch.” An 80–90% utilized smaller facility beats a half-empty large one every time; the latter just means you spend all your time chasing revenue instead of running your program.

On programming, both operators follow the same order of operations: Lock in your core competency first, then build outward. Leon sized his facility around his actual team ceiling (20–25 volleyball teams), then layered in partner clubs. Matt’s Indy Premier model keeps Monday–Thursday as unmonetized training space for nearly 100 travel teams, then generates all facility revenue through weekend indoor leagues — and has learned that three 4v4 soccer fields produce more revenue per hour than one 7v7. The eternal challenge for both is daytime hours. Matt’s answer: a STEM-based soccer school now at 38 students and approaching break-even. Leon’s: look at the YMCA calendar for inspiration — homeschool co-ops, senior fitness classes, and a $650 all-summer-camp pass positioned as a daycare alternative are all in play.

12. Investment, Capital, and the Business of Facilities

The Day 2 lunch panel brought three of the more battle-tested operators and investors in the space. Chad Hutchinson — former NFL/MLB quarterback turned partner at Arctos, which holds stakes in roughly 30 pro teams — opened with the macro: the same professionalization story that played out at the league level over the last 15 years is now compressing into college, then high school, then youth. Real estate around the team is the new revenue line. Sponsorship, ticketing, suites, hospitality — every line is being unbundled and rebuilt. Operators sitting still are going to feel it.

Greg Kristof (who scaled Zero Gravity from 4 events in 2017 to 224 events in 16 states) offered the operator’s rule: “Always invest in talent. If someone is just out of your price range, find a way. Take less and find a way.” You can’t scale on your own.

Jason Clement (Sports Facilities Companies — ~150 venues under management, $1.5B in current design/construction) gave the facilities ecosystem its clearest map of the day: seven components — inventory, programming/content, operations, tech platform, media, real estate, and people. Pick your specialization, partner for the rest. On facility economics: roughly 25% of complexes are loss leaders, 25% break even, and 25% are very profitable. “It’s not mission versus margin — mission plus margin equals movement.”

Practical advice on sale processes: clean books are the price of entry. Develop a relationship with the investment-committee members, not just the associate sourcing the deal. Talk to three to five operators who’ve sold (the happy ones AND the unhappy ones). Look at quality of life over a 3–5 year window, not the headline number. Chad’s closing line stuck: “It’s a long obedience in the same direction.”

NextUp ’26, October in NYC

Our flagship conference returns in October — NextUp ’26 in New York City. Two days of operators, capital, brands, athletes, and the conversations you can’t have anywhere else. Expect more programming, more workshops, and more honest conversation about what the next decade of youth sports is going to look like, and who’s going to build it.

If you were in Dallas, you already know what this conference is. If you weren’t, this is the one to be at.