When DICK’S Sporting Goods reported second-quarter results this August, the headline was ugly. A $2.5 billion Foot Locker acquisition swung from a projected nine-figure profit to a full-year operating loss, guidance came down sharply, and shares fell nearly 20% in a single morning.

Buried in the same earnings call was a quieter story about where DICK’S is finding growth. GameChanger, the youth baseball and softball scorekeeping app it bought in 2016, is now closing in on $150 million in annual revenue, growing at ~40% compound rate since 2017, with 10 million unique users and nearly 10 million games scored a year. Executive Chairman Ed Stack pointed to more Little League games being streamed on GameChanger as a direct offset to Foot Locker’s struggles. CFO Navdeep Gupta told analysts the platform will become a bigger driver of merchandise margin expansion heading into 2027.

That is a useful data point for anyone thinking about how to get exposure to youth sports as an investment theme. Instead of buying a bigger baseball glove business, DICK’S bought a piece of software that sits adjacent to the game. A decade later, that adjacent asset is doing more to protect the company’s earnings than almost anything else on the balance sheet.

The Thesis: Own the Infrastructure, Not the Field

Direct participation in youth sports, club dues, tournament fees, and travel costs are enormous and growing. U.S. households now spend an estimated $40 billion a year on youth sports, growing 8% to 10% annually according to legal analysis from White & Case, and average annual household spending has risen more than 46% from 2019 to 2024.

But owning a youth club or a single tournament series is operationally intensive, locally fragmented, and politically exposed. That exposure is exactly why a bill in Congress, the Let Kids Play Act, has specifically targeted private equity ownership of youth sports organizations. A second, bipartisan bill, the STRONG Kids Act, was introduced in July 2026 to fund youth sports access grants from sports betting tax revenue rather than restrict ownership, backed by a coalition that includes LeagueApps and TeamSnap. Congress’s attention to this sector is not limited to a single regulatory theory.

Owning the Infrastructure

The more durable investment thesis has shifted toward the infrastructure that sits around the game. That includes the technology that families and coaches use every day, the media and streaming platforms, the licensing arrangements with professional leagues, the facilities and tournament operators, and the equipment and apparel supply chains. These businesses tend to carry recurring or subscription-like revenue and scale nationally in a way that a single travel ball club never will. However, the regulatory distinction that matters is about who owns the asset, not what the asset does: the pending bills target private equity fund ownership specifically, and by their own definitions reach registration platforms and equipment suppliers as readily as they reach clubs.

The Let Kids Play Act has a specific case in mind. Sponsors have named Black Bear Sports Group, the largest owner-operator of ice rinks in the country, whose control of rinks, clubs, leagues, and streaming in youth hockey is the subject of a Michigan attorney general investigation and a nine-month USA Today investigation. Black Bear is a useful stress test for the idea that ownership structure, not asset type, determines regulatory exposure: several of the businesses it has been criticized for owning, scoring and streaming technology among them, are the same categories described here as durable infrastructure. What actually separates a defensible infrastructure business from Black Bear’s model is ownership by strategics, family offices, and minority-stake sponsors rather than a controlling private equity fund, combined with a footprint that does not bundle facility access, league participation, and technology into one mandatory package.

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s numbers show how fast private equity investment in amateur sports has accelerated. Private equity investment in amateur sports reached $2.11 billion in just the first five months of 2026, already more than four times the $550 million invested in all of 2025. That jump is concentrated in one transaction, TPG’s roughly $2 billion acquisition of Learfield Communications, so the more durable read of the data is direction, not multiple.

What’s Actually Getting Bought

The deal list maps nearly every layer of the youth-sports-adjacent stack.

Private equity capital deployed into amateur and youth sports quadrupled from 2025 to the first five months of 2026.

Four Patterns Worth Noting

Strategics are validating the infrastructure ownership thesis alongside financial sponsors, which is the backdrop for four specific patterns worth tracking in where this capital is actually going. DICK’S is not only running GameChanger. It led the $120 million growth round into Unrivaled Sports, the Josh Harris and David Blitzer-backed rollup of tournament brands. A retailer is using its balance sheet to buy exposure to the same demand pool that already shops in its stores, which is a template other consumer-facing strategics, including equipment makers, apparel companies, and even regional healthcare or hospitality operators near tournament hubs, could copy.

Media, Data, and Streaming Rights

Media, data, and streaming rights are the highest-conviction subsector. GameChanger, LiveBarn, and SportsEngine, which Comcast spinoff Versant has also explored selling, are all variations on the same asset: proprietary video and data captured at the point of play, monetized through subscriptions and, increasingly, advertising.

Luca Blasi, head of private markets valuations at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told Benzinga that recent acquisitions focus less on traditional club ownership and more on the infrastructure behind youth sports, with valuations increasingly driven by proprietary data and platform effects rather than traditional financial metrics.

League Licensing

League licensing is its own defensible category. RCX Sports does not own fields or run camps. It holds the official youth-sports licenses for the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS, and NFL Flag alone reaches more than 830,000 participants. That is a business built on intellectual property and league relationships that a new entrant, regardless of capital raised, would find extraordinarily difficult to replicate.

Elite Training and Education

Elite training and education is the largest single transaction, and it reads more like a school deal than a sports deal. IMG Academy’s $1.25 billion sale to BPEA EQT paired it with an international-schools operator, Nord Anglia. The buyer priced a boarding school and college-recruiting business that happens to wear a sports wrapper, not a sports business with a school attached.

Rollup Economics

Rollup economics still work, but the supply of targets is thinning. 3STEP Sports has completed more than 50 tuck-in acquisitions since 2016 and kept buying, including Premier 1 Events, HoopSeen, and One Day Shootouts, even while running a sale process with Goldman Sachs. Consolidators are still finding well-run regional operators to buy, even as the largest platforms approach the size where they become acquisition targets themselves.

Three Sourcing Lanes

For investors, whether strategics, independent sponsors, or family offices, looking to build exposure to youth sports without taking on direct club ownership or its regulatory overhang, three sourcing lanes stand out based on where capital has actually gone.

1. Technology and data platforms with subscription or usage-based revenue: scorekeeping, streaming, registration and league management, and recruiting data. These carry SaaS-like margins, and GameChanger shows how one such platform can become a majority of a strategic acquirer’s growth story within a decade.
2. Facility and tournament infrastructure, where operating leverage comes from real estate utilization and event density rather than per-participant pricing: This is the model both Unrivaled Sports and 3STEP have scaled.
3. License, apparel, and equipment supply chains adjacent to existing club networks: Varsity Brands and BSN Sports buy suppliers that are underpenetrated in a channel they already sell into, rather than buying the channel itself.

The common thread across nearly every deal discussed is who is doing the buying, not just what is being bought. Strategics, family offices, and minority-stake sponsors are underwriting these categories; controlling private equity funds are the ones squarely inside the Let Kids Play Act’s reach, regardless of whether the asset is a club or a scorekeeping app. That distinction, ownership structure over asset type, is where the more durable capital is actually flowing.

What This Means for Operators

The same shift toward owning infrastructure instead of participation revenue is a signal for anyone running a club, facility, apparel supplier, or software platform that serves this market. The businesses attracting the most durable capital right now share a trait: they do not grow primarily by raising prices on participating families. A club or league that grows through tuition increases looks like the business model regulators are targeting. A facility, supplier, or software platform that grows through added volume, geography, or adjacent services looks like the businesses attracting durable capital today.

For operators, growth rate alone is no longer what current buyers are underwriting. The businesses drawing the most durable capital right now share two traits: they sit inside one of the three lanes above, and they are built with the reporting and governance that make the business straightforward to evaluate.