How to Scale a Youth Sports Club Without Doing Everything Yourself

Lauren Miller has seen youth sports from just about every angle. She spent 15 years as a competitive fencer, starting at age eight by practicing in her parents’ kitchen and finishing as a two-time All-American and two-year captain at Yale. 

She later invested in consumer businesses at Plus Capital and worked with Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, so she knows a thing or two about customer experience. Today she’s VP of Strategy and Operations and GM of the club business at Rocket Youth Brands.

At NextUp 2026, she opened with a story about her childhood fencing coach. He coached her and ran the club on his own. He cared about building great fencers, but he also dreamed of opening more clubs nearby, and there was plenty of demand. He never managed to make the jump. Lauren believes the stress and time of running the club day to day simply never let him lift his head up and plan for growth.

If that sounds familiar, her talk is for you. Here’s what she’s learned about creating room to grow.

1. Get the day-to-day off your plate so you can grow

Think about everything Lauren’s coach was juggling. On weekends, he was on the sidelines at tournaments at home and abroad. During the week, he ran camps, clinics, and private lessons. And in between, he was paying other coaches, negotiating with vendors, doing the books, filing taxes, and handling contracts.

That back-office work is exactly what Rocket Youth tries to take off its partners’ plates. Lauren doesn’t think it’s a good use of an operator’s time. The goal is to free club leaders to focus on their coaches, players, parents, and programs.

Rocket Youth also sets up dashboards to track key numbers for every business that joins. That helps everyone see where the biggest opportunities are and decide where to spend time.

What to do:

• List every task you handled last month, and mark which ones only you can do.
• Hand off, hire out, or automate bookkeeping, payroll, contracts, and vendor work wherever you can.
• Pick a handful of key numbers, like enrollment, retention, and revenue per athlete, and review them regularly.
• Block time on your calendar each week to think about growth.

2. Know your options for outside capital

Rocket Youth launched about two and a half years ago. Since then, it has partnered with 35 companies made up of about 80 brands and locations across 17 states. Its partners include rec businesses like gymnastics and swim, along with clubs in volleyball, basketball, soccer, and lacrosse. Lauren said they serve more than 100,000 athletes a year, plus tens of thousands more at about 500 events.

As Lauren sees it, a youth sports operator has three main paths:

• Go it alone, like her fencing coach did, running the business yourself.
• Sell 100% of the business, walk away, and move on.
• Take on a partner while keeping control of your program.

Rocket Youth uses the third approach. Under its partnership model, partners keep local control over their teams and day-to-day operations, and their brand stays the same. They also share in the rewards as the business grows, while getting the support of a national organization.

What to do:

• Decide what matters most to you: control, your brand, a payout, or room to grow.
• If you’re talking with investors, ask exactly who will control your brand, staff, and daily decisions.
• Ask how you’ll share in future growth, not just what you’ll get upfront.
• Talk with other operators who’ve taken on partners about what changed for them.

3. Grow through enrollment, not price

Lauren shared that, on average, club businesses have grown about 60% after joining Rocket Youth. One club in the audience quadrupled its business in less than two years.

She was quick to explain where that growth came from. It wasn’t clubs raising prices 60% the moment they joined. Most of it came from enrollment: more kids joining more programs that partners launched. That ties back to Rocket Youth’s mission of getting more kids off screens and onto fields and courts.

The same thinking applies to costs. Hotels, flights, tournament fees, and equipment keep getting more expensive. Rather than passing those increases on to parents, Rocket Youth uses its size to negotiate with vendors, share resources across businesses, and land sponsorships.

What to do:

• Track how much of your growth comes from new kids versus higher prices.
• Set enrollment goals, not just revenue goals.
• Look for ways to cut costs before raising fees, like buying in bulk, partnering with other clubs, or finding sponsors.

4. A playbook for common growth problems

Lauren spends every workday helping partners grow. She walked through a few situations most club leaders will recognize, along with how her team approaches each one.

Tryouts went too well. Hundreds of kids showed up, but there wasn’t room in the facility, so the club had to turn many of them away. Or there was room, but kids didn’t want to join the fifth, sixth, or seventh team in an age group when they could be on the top team at the club down the road. The fix might be opening a new facility, launching a new sub-brand, or both.

Tryouts didn’t go well. If one weekend makes or breaks your year, that’s a lot of pressure. Lauren’s answer is to build programs that run throughout the season, like clinics and camps, so the business doesn’t rest on tryouts alone.

Parents don’t know about new programs. A great new camp doesn’t help if families can’t find it. Rocket Youth quickly builds simple, easy-to-use websites for new programs and draws on what’s worked across its partners to run paid ads and email campaigns.

Coaches keep leaving. Coach retention is one of the most common challenges Lauren hears about. Her team works with partners on creative pay plans that keep coaches excited to stay and turn them into a club’s best salespeople.

All of it serves one goal: getting more kids into programs earlier, keeping them longer, and bringing them back more often.

What to do:

• If you’re turning kids away, look at adding space, teams, or a second brand.
• Add year-round programs so your business doesn’t depend on tryouts.
• Give every new program a clear, easy-to-find web page, and promote it by email.
• Revisit coach pay, and reward coaches for helping bring in and keep families.