Last week I told you Kona was back to a one-day race. Last Saturday, it delivered. Taylor Knibb, an American, won the women’s race in 8:36:28. This one is personal. Her first triathlon win came in May 2011 at TriRock Annapolis, a Competitor Group race we built, and her dad posted the photo to prove it:

Riding that course like she already knew where this was going.

Fifteen years from a bridge in Annapolis to a world title in Kona. That is what a pipeline looks like when it works.

On the men’s side, Vincent Luis won in his Ironman debut, the first Frenchman ever to take the title. First Ironman, world title, $125,000. Most of us mortals spend our first Ironman negotiating with a cramp at mile 18 and promising ourselves we will never sign up again. Then we sign up again.

Endurance sports finish lines are the best!

Mainstream sports biz spent the week covering ESPN closing in on exclusive rights to a 24-team College Football Playoff, Netflix buying the 2030 World Cup in Spain in the same week it cut 1,000 jobs, and Stephen Ross selling another sliver of the Dolphins at an NFL record price. Meanwhile, a bocce league turned into a national roll-up, one of pickleball's fastest-growing franchisors landed in Chapter 11, a youth baseball company bought a 78-acre campus outside Atlanta, college women got a real flag football league, and the endurance events with the hardest entry are still the ones selling out.

That’s the beat. Welcome to Issue 007.

The Cap Table

1. The bocce league that ate its rivals ·

Adult Rec · M&A

Volo Sports started in Baltimore in 2010 as a single 16-person bocce league (Inc.). Sixteen years later, it has more than 500,000 annual members in 17 U.S. markets and is buying the competition. In June 2025, it bought ZogSports, the country’s second-largest adult social sports platform with more than 120,000 players. On September 30, it added Fray, which runs over 20,000 player registrations a year in Washington, D.C. alone, plus the Miami operations of kickball league CLUBWAKA (PR Newswire).

The fuel: $21 million from Bluestone Equity Partners, raised in November 2024 and earmarked specifically for acquisitions (Bluestone).

Volo’s own pitch is that people crave in-person connection as “loneliness, digital burnout and dating app fatigue” push them to look for it elsewhere (PR Newswire). Sound familiar, running industry? Dating-app fatigue is now a line in a private equity thesis. Somewhere a Hinge product manager just felt a chill. And the data backs Volo up: about 20% of adults played on an adult team in 2025, up from 11% five years earlier (Inc., citing Axios).

Last issue we covered Brodie raising a seed to bring rec basketball to five U.S. markets. This is the other end of the same trend. The upstarts build a brand around the Tuesday night game. The consolidator buys the operators who already own the permits, the field slots, and the bar after. Both can work. The risk with a roll-up is that the thing people pay for, the friend you made on your kickball team, is the one asset you cannot integrate in a spreadsheet. Volo says DC Fray’s “leagues, venues, and #FrayLife community carry over” (DC Fray). That promise is the whole deal. Keep it, and the roll-up is a network. Break it, and you bought a registration database with a nice logo.

And here I am, reminiscing about the beer-league hockey I played back when the only ice time available was 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. on a Tuesday. Nobody needed a private equity thesis to explain why we showed up.

2. Youth baseball buys a campus ·

Youth · Real Estate

Capacity Sports Group, formed in January when Prep Baseball merged with Bullpen Ventures, just took ownership of the 78-acre LakePoint property in Emerson, Georgia, about 40 miles northwest of Atlanta, including eight major league-sized turf fields, plus a lease to run the 170,000-square-foot Champions Center indoor pavilion. Terms were not disclosed. It is Capacity’s fifth announced move this year, after Play9 Sports, two Philadelphia-area multisport facilities, Sideline Soccer Solutions, and Flag Football Life (Youth Sports HQ).

CEO Ken Kocher was refreshingly honest about what families should expect at first: “not much.” He also said, “Families will judge us on whether the event runs well, the facilities are spectacular and we are there to help when they need it.”

I have spent enough weekends at swim meets and destination tournaments to know he is right, and to know the list families actually judge on is longer: parking, the price of a mediocre hotel the night before, and whether you can find a decent cup of coffee before an 8 a.m. warm-up. That last one gets underrated.

The model here is simple. Own the events, then own the venue the events run in, then sell the scouting, profiles, and media on top. It is the Field of Dreams strategy with a better spreadsheet: if you buy it, they will come, because they already have to. That captive audience is the business and the risk. When the same company controls the tournament, the field, and the recruiting showcase, parents have fewer places to go when the price goes up. Kocher says “the fit matters more than the structure.” Parents will decide whether it fits their wallet.

Anyone interested in an endurance sports park?

3. College flag football grows up ·

Women’s · Pipeline

Women’s college flag football has been run by students for years: club presidents booking fields, hunting refs, and selling T-shirts to pay for vans. This spring that changes. NIRSA, the campus recreation association, will run a league for 86 college club women’s teams across Division I, II, and III, in 10 conferences, with about 15 games each from January to April and a national championship in April. The NFL is funding it with a multiyear grant its own league leader would only call “sizable.” The entry fee is $350 per team (Front Office Sports).

UCF’s club president Rylee McDaid summed up what the league is really selling: “Refs, scheduling, fields … it’s going to take all that off my plate.” That is the most honest product pitch of the week. Nobody is building a sport around a logo. They are building it around the admin nobody wants to do.

At the other end of the pyramid, SMAC Entertainment, CAA, and EverWonder Studio are launching the Grand Slam of Flag with the sport’s international federation: six women’s national teams, $500,000 in prizes, in Los Angeles during Super Bowl LXI week in February (SBJ). The NCAA votes early next year on making women’s flag a championship sport, with first title games not until spring 2028.

That gap is the opportunity. The pro event, the club league, and the high school states are getting built before the NCAA shows up. The sport will reach the varsity level with its own infrastructure, its own following, and its own stars, and that gives the athletes leverage most women’s sports never had. Rutgers founder Allison Gandlin put it best: “Look, it’s ready for you. Just press the button.”

And you thought pickleball was going to be the next big thing.

4. The Picklr gets caught in the kitchen ·

Pickleball · Restructuring

The Picklr, one of the largest indoor pickleball franchisors in the country, filed for Chapter 11 last Friday in the Northern District of Texas. Founder and CEO Jorge Barragan says the problem was early growth: the holding company guaranteed leases for about 40 early franchise locations. “We signed, unfortunately, too many corporate guarantees that landed on the holding company, and that’s on us,” he told SBJ. “I own it.” The Picklr was founded in 2021, started franchising two years later, and now has more than 70 U.S. locations. It lost $4.4 million on $10.3 million in revenue in 2025 and carried about $19 million in total liabilities as of March (Entrepreneur). An investor group led by franchisee Tom Neale committed $4.5 million in debtor-in-possession financing and is expected to sponsor the reorganization. The clubs stay open, and the franchisees are not part of the filing (Franchise Times).

Credit to Barragan for saying “I own it” out loud. Most founders reach for “macro headwinds.”

Don’t get me started on how much capital has chased activities you can play in flip-flops with a cocktail in hand. The game is fine. The financing was the problem. When the franchisor signs the leases, the franchise model stops being a capital-light business and turns into a real estate bet with a paddle logo on it. As I tell my son when he heads out the door: have fun, be smart, do what makes you happy, and don't bet the whole allowance on one thing. Pickleball investors could have used the same talk.

5. The hardest entry wins ·

Endurance · Scarcity

SBT GRVL opened its 2027 random-selection lottery on October 14 for 3,000 riders, up from 2,750 after Routt County unanimously approved an expanded permit. It is also adding a 20K trail run and a two-day run-bike challenge, so you can now destroy your legs on Saturday and then ride 108 miles of Colorado gravel on Sunday (Bicycle Retailer). Getting that permit back meant changing start times, cutting congestion, and leaning into “less of a race, and more of a ride” (Steamboat Pilot).

The SBT GRVL folks seem to be taking a page out of the Leadville playbook: a summer of events that drives real economic impact into a small mountain town, including slower shoulder seasons. That formula worked so well that Life Time bought the Leadville Race Series in 2010 for a reported $1 million (Colorado Encyclopedia) and promptly corporatized it. I’m happy I earned my buckles and sweatshirts before Life Time replaced Leadville as the aspirational brand. It is also a formula the people in the Town of Vail still don’t seem to understand, where they have a habit of killing anything good that gets built locally or comes to town.

Saturday in Wilmington, a record 3,500 athletes start IRONMAN 70.3 North Carolina. It sold out in five months, one of the fastest sellouts of any Ironman event in North America this year (Wilmington StarNews). I raced it before it was an IRONMAN, when it was Bill Scott’s Setup Events Beach2Battleship, a race to benefit the local YMCA. Ironman bought it from the YMCA of Wilmington in 2016 (Wilmington StarNews). Another iconic event rolled up into a larger entity. Great course, great town, great people.

Wilmington was our first potential property for TriHabitat!

As someone who has entered more event lotteries than I’d like to admit, I can confirm that losing one makes you want it more. The endurance events that win are not the ones with the biggest marketing budget. They are the ones that treat the town as a partner and the cap as a feature. Last week the Big Apple Triathlon showed what happens when you lose the city. Leadville and SBT GRVL showed what it takes to keep it. Scarcity only works if the host community keeps saying yes.

Fumbles & Vaporware

Odds Couple. On Tuesday, Kalshi filed a rule with the CFTC making athlete harassment an “impermissible activity,” with possible fines, account shutdowns, and police referrals for bettors who go after players. Good. Overdue, but good. Two days later, Chicago-based PredictArena launched a prediction market built for creators, handicappers, and former athletes to point their audiences at markets on the topics they cover. The company says creators can “participate economically” but has not said what that means or whether they get paid. So one company is building a penalty box for bettors who harass athletes, and another is building a platform for athletes to send their followers into the market. It is a bit like hiring lifeguards and selling cannonball lessons at the same pool. Former athletes, read the agreement before you lend your name to it. “Participate economically” can mean a lot of things, and most of them aren’t in your favor.

Signal Lost. SportsGrid, the sports-betting video network, is for sale through Telos Advisers after losing FanDuel and BetMGM as partners. Its revenue was $20 million in 2022 and has declined since, per bankers pitching the deal. The lesson is not that betting content is dead. It is that when two customers are your business, you are not a media company. You are a vendor with a set and a nice logo.

Signal Check

$0: the subscription fee on Garmin’s Cirqa band, a screenless tracker priced at $199.99, against a Whoop membership that starts at $199 a year.

Garmin released Cirqa in July, and it is starting to get the “Whoop killer” headlines. It tracks heart rate, stress, pulse ox, skin temperature, sleep, and HRV, adds Garmin’s Training Readiness and VO2 max, and sends it all into the same Garmin Connect app the rest of your watch data already lives in. BikeRadar’s reviewer said he would pick it over Whoop for that reason alone: one app, one ecosystem, no annual bill. His one complaint is the Velcro strap, which he worries will collect fluff and grime. Fair. Nobody wants a recovery tracker that looks like it lost a fight with a dryer.

Whoop built a great business on a simple idea: give away the hardware, rent the insight. Garmin is testing the opposite: sell the hardware once and treat the insight as a feature. As someone whose wrist, phone, and bike computer are already loyal Garmin subjects, I get the appeal of not paying rent on my own heart rate. The bigger signal is for every wearable charging a subscription. When the incumbent with 80-plus activity profiles makes the data free, your monthly fee has to buy something the device alone cannot: coaching, community, or a reason to open the app that is not guilt.

Full confession: I just canceled my Oura subscription after the ring’s battery started crapping out before the end of the day, and I ordered a Cirqa.

Who’s Building

• Chad Mumm (Pro Shop). The company behind Netflix’s Full Swing, co-producer of Happy Gilmore 2, and owner of GolfWRX raised a $24 million Series B led by Arthur M. Blank Sports and Entertainment, with Causeway Media Partners and Ares joining and the PGA Tour returning. Pro Shop says it reaches more than 35 million unique users and doubled revenue year over year (Pulse 2.0). Golf’s best growth story is not on the course. It is in a studio that figured out the sport is also a TV show, a podcast, a shop, and a social club. Happy Gilmore would approve, but he would still want to see the deck before swinging away.

• FloSports (FloLacrosse). Flo signed a multiyear deal to become the exclusive global streaming home of the National Lacrosse League, moving it off ESPN in the U.S., and launches FloLacrosse on November 5 as its first new channel since 2024 (SBJ). A Saturday game of the week and the Finals also run free on the FloSports Channel on Prime Video, YouTube, and LG. The full ride costs $39.99 a month (NLL). Flo’s model has always been to own the niche and own the superfan. At that price, it had better be the most dedicated superfans in sports. Lacrosse parents, I see you reaching for your wallet. I moved USA Cycling’s streaming off Facebook and onto FloSports in 2021 (SBJ), and the debate then was the same one every emerging property has now: build exposure by giving it away for free, or drive revenue to a struggling NGB and pay for production quality is worth watching. My older USA TODAY Sports Media Group colleaague, Phil Wendler, led Flo’s side of the NLL deal, and I’d bet Ryan Fenton had a hand in it too. Well done, FloSports team.

• Taylor Hoekstra (Popfly). The outdoor creator marketplace, with a vetted network of more than 20,000 creators, banned AI-generated influencers after one tried to join, wrote the ban into its terms, and launched a petition asking brands to keep real people behind creator content (Outdoor Industry Association). Hoekstra calls mass-produced AI content “digital litter.” In a category that sells authenticity, that is not a culture-war stance. It is quality control. Nobody buys a tent because a synthetic person pretended to sleep in it.

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Overheard

“I think if you’re a business that defines yourself as innovative and forward-thinking, you’re going to find yourself in situations that don’t always go the way you want them to do, and that’s in service of growth.”

NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman, on the league’s failed streaming deal with Victory+, which she called “definitely not ideal” (Front Office Sports).

That is a classy way of saying the check bounced. The Athletic reported the deal fell through over nonpayment, and Victory+ collapsed by early September. The league moved games to its own NWSL+ and then to The Roku Sports Channel, and Berman says re-shopping the rights was “a competitive process.”

The Texas Rangers hit the same wall this summer but never had to re-shop anything, and they weren’t as transparent about it. They moved their games midseason to BZZR, a platform where minority team owner Neil Leibman served as a director and investor, giving them a crash landing pad. The team’s announcement didn’t mention Leibman’s BZZR role, and fans were less than happy with how it went down (Sportico). (Disclosure: I previously served as BZZR’s Chief Strategy Officer.)

I give Jessica credit. She has leveled up into one of the most underrated commissioners in sports (hear that, WNBA?). Most commissioners would have buried this. She owned it. But the lesson for every emerging property is not “be innovative.” It is to underwrite your distribution partner like you would underwrite a sponsor. Volo is promising that the community survives the roll-up. Capacity is promising families will not notice the new owner. FloSports is promising lacrosse fans their league is in good hands. Every one of those is a counterparty bet.

Innovation is fine. Make sure the other side of the deal can pay.

Build Accordingly.

Bouker Pool · Managing Partner, Weck Enterprises · Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.

Got a tip, a fumble, or a build worth covering? Send it. Overheard exists for you.

Full disclosure: I advise and invest across sports-tech, media, youth sports, endurance, and wearables. When B&P covers a company I’m involved with, I’ll do my best to note it in the item.

Private equity has become the face of everything families dislike about youth sports: rising fees, long drives, packed calendars, and the suspicion that every step in a child’s development now comes with another invoice.

Some of that criticism is earned. But making private equity the entire story is too convenient. Capital did not create the demand for better fields, dependable ice time, qualified coaches, or competitive opportunities. In many communities, investors moved into gaps that schools, municipalities, and volunteer organizations struggled to fill.

The harder question is what we intend to do about those gaps and what terms we set for the businesses filling them.

The Debate Has Moved

Congress is paying attention. In May 2026, Sen. Chris Murphy and Rep. Chris Deluzio introduced the Let Kids Play Act. It would restrict investors designated as “vulture investors” from owning youth sports entities and require covered investors to divest within two years. Its scope extends beyond clubs and leagues to facilities, tournaments, camps, and technology platforms. The measure remains a proposal, not an enacted remedy.

At a June House hearing, lawmakers heard competing accounts of private investment. The leader of a community hockey association described losing access to its home rink after an investor-backed operator bought the facility. A private sports center founder described how outside capital can help build places for local children to play. The hearing’s chair, Rep. Kevin Kiley, said two things could be true at the same time: investment can fill gaps left by declining local support, while consolidation and mandatory add-ons can leave families with fewer choices and higher bills.

That is a more useful starting point than deciding every investor must be either a savior or a villain.

Families have reason to be frustrated. The Aspen Institute’s Project Play found that the average sports family spent $1,016 on a child’s primary sport in 2024, up 46% from 2019. That is an average for one primary sport, not the cost of an elite travel season, and it does not show that private equity caused the increase. Higher registration, travel, lodging, camp, and instruction costs all contributed.

Why the Money Is Coming

Youth sports presents an attractive business opportunity: committed customers, recurring spending, and thousands of local operators that investors believe they can bring together. A family might pay a club, rent space at a facility, enter a tournament, book travel, buy video access, and seek training or recruiting help, all around the same athlete.

Bringing those services together could make the experience easier. It could also give one operator more opportunities to charge the same family.

The deals show how broad the opportunity has become. Unrivaled Sports raised $120 million in 2025 in a round led by Dick’s Sporting Goods, at a reported valuation above $650 million. GTCR-backed Ascent Sports Group acquired youth sports streaming platform LiveBarn in a deal reported at roughly $400 million. Investors are not simply buying teams. They are assembling facilities, events, technology, media, and services around participation.

One headline investment figure is most interesting to dig into. S&P Global Market Intelligence reported $2.11 billion in private equity and venture capital transactions in amateur sports in the first five months of 2026, compared with $550 million in all of 2025. But S&P says that increase was driven largely by TPG’s $2 billion acquisition of Learfield, a collegiate athletics services company. The figure shows investor interest in the broader amateur sports market. It does not mean $2.11 billion flowed into children’s leagues.

The story is substantial enough without over-indexing the numbers.

Investment Is Not Extraction

Better infrastructure costs money. A rink needs maintenance. A field needs lights. A well-run program needs trained coaches, background checks, scheduling, insurance, and staff who can stay longer than a season. Streaming can let relatives watch a game they otherwise would miss. Better technology can spare volunteers hours of administrative work.

The problem begins when an operator’s advantage comes less from improving those experiences than from controlling the choices around them.

If the same company controls the rink, the club, the league, and the tournament calendar, a family may have few practical alternatives, even when each charge appears voluntary on paper. If a tournament requires a designated hotel, or video and recruiting tools are presented as essential to being seen, the total bill is no longer captured by the team fee. These are among the practices lawmakers raised at the House hearing.

Ownership structure alone cannot tell a parent whether a program is good. A nonprofit can be poorly run; an investor-backed facility can serve its community well. The better test is whether an operator improves the experience, expands who can participate, and leaves families with real choices, or uses control of the pathway to make them spend more.

The Missing Middle

This is where the debate too often stops short. Restricting a particular kind of investor might curb harmful conduct. It does not, by itself, reopen a closed rink, add a school team, restore a town league, or find dependable coaches.

Project Play’s research offers an important reminder: community-based teams, free play, and school teams remain more common settings for children’s primary sports than travel clubs. That is the foundation of sport: free play, even if the private club pathway exerts growing influence as athletes get older.

We should protect affordable, local sports rather than treat them as a consolation prize for children who cannot afford something else. That requires public investment, but it need not require public ownership of every pool, rink, or indoor field. A school district or municipality could partner with a private operator for space and expertise while setting explicit terms for pricing, access, and community use. At the June hearing, witnesses pointed to partnerships between public agencies and private businesses as a way to bring in investment without surrendering those guardrails.

Premium academies and ambitious travel teams still have their place in the matrix. Families should be free to choose them. But premium cannot become the only credible way to play, improve, or be noticed.

Name, image, and likeness opportunities add another layer of pressure. Visible college athlete deals can make a child’s sports journey feel like an investment portfolio: training, results, video, audience, exposure. That perception may lead families to buy more services earlier, whether or not those purchases materially improve a child’s prospects. We should be especially wary of selling possibility as probability.

Better Terms for Capital

A serious youth sports investor should welcome questions that distinguish building from extraction. Before a municipality signs a facility agreement, a club sells, or a family commits to a season, the answers should be clear:

• What is the full cost of participation, including travel, admission, video, uniforms, and required add-ons?

• Which services are truly optional? Can a family decline them without limiting a child’s opportunity?

• Can independent teams use the facility or enter the event on fair terms?

• How many subsidized places are available, and can families find and use them?

• What happens to community access, pricing, and existing programs after an acquisition?

• Who can use a child’s video, performance data, and likeness, and for what purpose?

• Does the model keep more children playing over time, or does it depend on moving families into increasingly expensive tiers?

Those questions apply to every operator, not only private equity.

Private capital did not break youth sports. It found a system with unmet demand, uneven public support, and families willing to make enormous sacrifices for their children. In some places, it has helped improve several underlying systems that have not been updated for centuries. In other places, those entities have gained leverage over families with nowhere else to go.

If policymakers focus only on getting investors out, they may leave the underlying shortage untouched. If investors focus only on capturing more of each family’s spending, they will prove their critics right.

The better ambition is to build enough affordable, local, well-run places to play that private providers have to earn families’ business, not rely on families having no alternative.

Tomorrow, two triathlons start on the same morning in very different water. In Kona, the IRONMAN World Championship is finally back to being one race on one day, with pro men and women on the same start line for the first time since 2019 (USA Triathlon). It only took three years of splitting the sport’s crown jewel between Hawaii and Nice for someone to remember why it was a crown jewel; but don’t wear your smart glasses!

In Manhattan, about 1,300 athletes are expected to jump into the Hudson and ride a fast current downriver alongside the rats and the plastic bags, for the first New York City triathlon in two years, now called the Big Apple Triathlon and run by a new organizer (New York Post). One race is back to being the Super Bowl of the sport. The other is trying not to become a meme.

Mainstream sports biz spent the week on Skydance folding CBS Sports and TNT Sports into one company that insiders expect to be “a bloodbath” (Yahoo Sports), BC Partners lining up as much as $300 million to pull LIV Golf out of Chapter 11 (Reuters), and Anta paying €1.51 billion to become Puma’s largest shareholder (Inside Retail). Meanwhile, players became the biggest owners in women’s basketball’s hottest league, Congress opened an investigation into the largest youth sports organization most parents never think about, Teamworks paid $170 million to own more of the coach’s laptop, Live Nation started buying the people who manage creators, and more Americans went skiing last winter while fewer of them are buying passes for this one.

That’s the beat. Welcome to Issue 006.

The Cap Table

1. The players are the cap table now · Women’s · Capital

Issa Rae joined Unrivaled’s Series C this week, her first investment in an entire league (Yahoo Sports). The round, led by Ten Pillars Sports Fund, valued the 3-on-3 league at $650 million, up from $340 million a year earlier. The number I think matters most, and the one that signals where this is going: players remain the league’s largest shareholder group, with a player equity pool worth close to $200 million (Unrivaled). That is roughly 30% of the league. Jerry Maguire said, “show me the money!” Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier said show me the cap table.

League One Volleyball named the owners of LOVB Miami, its tenth team. Lisa Leslie and Sha’Carri Richardson headline a group that includes Champ Bailey, Phil Dalhausser, Tri Bourne, and a dozen current or former athletes alongside Tiger Global founders Chase and Stephanie Coleman. LOVB has now sold stakes in seven of its ten teams at roughly $20 million each (Sportico).

Athlete equity used to be a press-release highlight, the celebrity cameo in the announcement. In women’s sports, it is becoming a legitimate and powerful operating model. Unrivaled built it into the founding structure, and LOVB is using athletes as the credibility layer that makes a $20 million franchise check feel like a bet on people instead of a spreadsheet.

The cautionary read: the cap table is getting crowded at the top while the pipeline is thinning at the bottom. The Women’s Sports Foundation’s first Sport Report found that 58% of higher-income girls play sports compared with 31% of lower-income girls, and that it costs 25% more for girls to participate (WSF). The leagues are selling the future of women’s sports. While we keep debating the privatization of youth sports, the pipeline that is supposed to deliver that future is broken.

2. Congress finally looks at AAU · Youth · Governance

The bipartisan leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee opened an investigation into the Amateur Athletic Union after a ProPublica and Washington Post investigation found that the organization, with about 760,000 athletes and coaches, does not offer the child-abuse-prevention training it claims to, does not publish a banned-coach list, and has used confidential arbitration clauses to keep victims’ lawsuits out of open court. The committee asked AAU president Jo Mirza for a briefing by October 21. Its letter called it “unacceptable that AAU is failing to implement standard reforms to protect child athletes, and is misleading the public, parents, and athletes about preventative measures in place within AAU sports” (ProPublica).

I have coached on a pool deck under three different organizations, and nobody gets near a swimmer without a background check and abuse-prevention training. That is not asking a lot. It is common sense for the health and safety of youth athletes. AAU sits outside the Olympic movement’s safeguarding system, so the floor is whatever AAU decides it is.

Every youth sports debate this year has been about price and private equity. This one is about the boring infrastructure underneath both: training, screening, a public list, and a way for families to get into a courtroom. None of it is expensive relative to what the industry charges for a travel season. If your business involves kids, assume this question is coming for you next and answer it before someone with a subpoena asks.

3. Teamworks buys the coach’s video room · Tech · Platforms

Sportradar agreed to sell Atrium Sports, the coaching and scouting business of Synergy Sports, to Teamworks for $170 million in cash, keeping the camera, graphics, and computer-vision pieces that feed its betting and media business (Investing.com). The same week, Rule42 bought 64 Analytics, a college baseball and softball transfer-portal database. Rule42 EVP Jed Lowrie put the market plainly: outside the Power Four, programs do not have the budget to hire staff for this work, but “they still have to manage NIL, they still have to manage the transfer portal” (SBJ).

Sportradar decided the team side is not its business. Teamworks decided it is the whole business. That is a clean split: one company sells data to people betting on the game, and the other sells software to people coaching it.

Revenue sharing and the transfer portal have turned every athletic department into a roster-management operation with fewer people than it needs. Every mid-major is now running Moneyball with a staff of three and a shared Google Sheet. The builders winning that market are not selling dashboards. They are selling the staff a mid-major cannot afford to hire.

4. New York gets its triathlon back, under new management · Endurance · Events

The New York City Triathlon ran from 2001 until Life Time sold it in 2023 I raced the event in 2006 - 2009). Since 2017, the former race director said, each edition had to shorten the run, cut the bike, or cancel the swim. Heat canceled the 2019 race, water quality killed the swim in 2021 and 2023, and the prior organizers walked away before 2024 registration after failing to agree with the city on a fall date. Tomorrow it returns as the Big Apple Triathlon under Alpha Win, with about 1,300 athletes paying mostly $350 to $625 to swim the Hudson, ride the West Side Highway, and finish in Central Park (New York Post). The new race director’s pitch is that it is “considered one of the fastest swims in the sport.” It is. That is what happens when the river’s current is doing most of the work. Trust me, you don’t want to be in that water any longer than you have to!

It is a smaller field than the more than 2,000 athletes NBC New York said were expected in August (NBC New York). It is also a race that exists again, which is more than anyone could say for two years.

City races are the hardest and most expensive asset in endurance. You do not own the course, the water, the road closures, or the calendar. You rent it all from a city, pay officials time and a half, with a dozen other priorities. The organizer that makes this work will not do it with better medals. It will do it by becoming a reliable partner to the city and by building a race people want to come back to even when the swim gets canceled.

5. Live Nation starts buying the managers · Media · Creators

Live Nation is putting capital behind Creator Nation, a new company led by Scott and Alexis Fisher that will acquire and scale creator-management firms across content, commerce, brand partnerships, and live experiences. Live Nation will not run it day to day, and the first acquisitions are expected within months. Creator-economy deal volume hit a record 70 transactions in the first half of 2026, with talent-management firms valued at 3 to 9 times EBITDA (Net Influencer).

The company that owns the concert, the ticket, and increasingly the venue now wants to own the people who decide where a creator’s audience goes next. That is the same play it ran in music, applied to a talent pool with no union and no standard contract. If you have ever tried to buy Taylor Swift tickets, you already know how this movie ends for the people without leverage.

For athletes building their own media, this is the question to ask every manager pitching you this year: who owns you next year? A roll-up buys the management firm. It does not buy the creator. Read the contract!

Fumbles & Vaporware

TAM Fam. Altro Health raised a $7 million seed led by NFX for software that lets personal trainers, gyms, and medspas sell lab tests, clinician-prescribed peptides, GLP-1s, and hormone therapy under their own brands, starting at $319 a month and live in as little as two days (Athletech News). Founder Andrea Corleto says direct-to-consumer brands were fighting over the same customers, "so we went after something bigger." Bigger is right. Come for the burpees, stay for the hormone panel. Altro says every product is clinician-supervised and comes from licensed pharmacies, and that matters. But the pitch to the gym is not better care. It is a new revenue line with your logo on it, sold by the person whose job is to count your reps. The market for this is real. The trust it borrows belongs to the trainer, and that is not a line item the trainer should be selling.

Signal Check

31.96 million Americans went skiing or snowboarding last winter, up 3% and the most in six seasons (SIA via Business Wire).

Last issue, we covered Vail’s North American pass units falling about 12% for this season. Both numbers are true. More people showed up, and they showed up less: skiing days fell nearly 6% on poor snow. Snowboarding drove the growth, up 9% to 10.6 million, while alpine skiing stayed flat at about 13.2 million.

So the industry does not have a demand problem. It has a commitment problem. Skiers have discovered the dating-app approach to winter: very interested, not ready to commit in September. The growth is coming from younger, more diverse snowboarders rather than the skiers who built the pass model. The resort that wins the next decade sells the first day as well as it sells the fiftieth.

Who’s Building

• Brodie Rec League. A Toronto-born adult rec basketball league that says it runs 600 events a week across 25 locations, with more than 100,000 athletes and fans and no paid marketing, raised a $3.6 million seed led by Lerer Hippeau and Golden Ventures. Five new U.S. markets open this winter: Manhattan, Atlanta, Long Island, New Jersey, and Seattle (Brodie). Lerer Hippeau’s thesis is that one in four adults plays rec sport and almost nobody builds a brand for them. Brodie did, and it is betting the Tuesday night game is the product. White Men Can’t Jump, now with a seed round.

• Donna Orender (UPSHOT League). The former WNBA president’s development league is adding Baltimore, Nashville, and Tampa ahead of its second season (Just Women’s Sports). While the headlines go to $650 million valuations, UPSHOT is building the floor underneath them: paid, professional minutes for the players who are not yet on a cap table.

• Keith Barlow (XENOM). A competitive fitness series built for the athletes who think a sled push is a warm-up, with ten events over two days covering strength, endurance, gymnastics, and conditioning. It raised $15 million from Wndr, debuted in Dallas, and now has HYROX co-founders Christian Toetzke and Moritz Fürste investing and joining its board (Athletech News). When the category leader invests in the challenger, it is not a threat. It is a map of where the leader thinks the next customer is. It is also a lot friendlier than the last time the category leaders met: Spartan bought Tough Mudder out of bankruptcy in 2020 for about $700,000 plus debt.

• Jimmie Johnson (Legacy Motor Club). The seven-time Cup champion is turning his NASCAR team into a broader motorsports lifestyle brand, backed by an ownership group of athletes and entertainers (Forbes). He also just hired Michael O’Conor as chief revenue officer, after stints running revenue at U.S. Ski & Snowboard, business development at the USOPC, and growth at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum (SBJ). Olympic-sport commercial people know how to sell a story without a weekly TV package behind it. Congrats, Michael.

Overheard

“Race results tell you what happened on the clock. They don’t tell you what happened to the person.”

Lars Ronning, founder of Palena, a race-report platform for endurance athletes that launched in Kona this week ahead of the IRONMAN World Championship (endurance.biz).

Endurance sport runs on one commandment: if it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. So we spent twenty years building infrastructure for the clock: timing chips, results pages, segment leaderboards, power files. All of it is useful, and almost none of it is why people come back. People come back because of what happened to them out there, and that story has mostly lived in blog posts, group chats, and the drive home.

The same gap runs through this issue. Teamworks is buying the data on what happened. Unrivaled and LOVB are betting the value is in the people. The Big Apple Triathlon has to win back a city with a story, not a split time.

The builders who own the clock will always have a business. The ones who own what happened to the person will have a community, and that one is harder to copy.

Build Accordingly.

Bouker Pool · Managing Partner, Weck Enterprises · Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.

Got a tip, a fumble, or a build worth covering? Send it. Overheard exists for you.

Full disclosure: I advise and invest across sports-tech, media, youth sports, endurance, and wearables. When B&P covers a company I’m involved with, I’ll do my best to note it in the item.

Welcome to October. Hockey season has started, and Igor Shesterkin scored the first goalie goal in New York Rangers history, an empty-netter to cap the home opener at the Garden (NHL.com). Oh, how I'm jealous.

The same week, MSG Sports’ board approved spinning the Rangers off from the Knicks, creating two separately traded companies by October 26 (MSG Sports). It is a cleaner ownership structure and a fresh public benchmark for single-franchise sports holdings. Here is the part worth remembering: neither company will own the building. The Garden belongs to Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which hosts both teams under long-term agreements (MSG Entertainment 10-K). The asset is not the logo. It is whoever controls the building, the calendar, and the relationship with the people who show up.

Mainstream sports biz spent the week on the Senate passing the Protect College Sports Act 77-22, Rogers closing its $4.35 billion takeover of MLSE, and the Knicks-Rangers split. Meanwhile, the youth coaching and officiating pool shrank for a third straight year while participation kept climbing, Vail’s Epic Pass sales slid for a second season, Oura shelved its $2.2 billion IPO the day it was supposed to price, a women’s track meet drew 7.3 million viewers in London, and a free Brooklyn run club cleared $640,000 selling the party after the run.

Oh, more CSL swimming on tap on ESPN+!

That’s the beat. Welcome to Issue 005.

The Cap Table

1. Youth sports has a demand problem. It is too much demand ·

Youth · Infrastructure

U.S. team-sports participation hit 92.3 million people in 2025, up 7.6% and the fifth straight year of growth, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s annual study. Participation among kids 6 to 14 rose 5% from 2022 to 2025. Over the same three years, youth coaches fell more than 18% to 6.9 million, the third straight annual decline (SBJ). Officials are next. New Jersey leagues already struggle to find people willing to walk the field and take abuse from parents convinced their kid is the next chosen one, and new state worker-classification rules could make officials even more expensive (Philadelphia Inquirer). Project Play’s latest federal-data read puts youth participation at 58%, almost back to its 2016-17 high, while the gap between the poorest and wealthiest kids widened to 38.5 percentage points (Project Play).

I am one of those 6.9 million, on a pool deck and on a mountain bike trail, so I will say the quiet part: the kids are no longer the constraint. The adults are.

Every debate about youth sports this year has been about who owns it and what it costs. It is an important conversation and part of the ecosystem. But a market where demand is growing, and the supply of qualified people is shrinking, won't fix itself with a new ownership structure. It fixes itself with recruiting, training, certification, scheduling, and pay, and with infrastructure nobody has built at scale, or that I see mentioned, in the private equity ownership debate.

The tell: when supply shrinks against rising demand, prices go up, and access goes down. That is exactly what the income gap shows. The next durable youth-sports business is not another league or another app for parents. It is whoever makes it easier, safer, and worth someone’s time to coach and/or officiate.

2. The Epic Pass stops selling itself ·

Outdoor · Platforms

Vail Resorts reported that North American pass unit sales for the 2026/27 season were down about 12% through September 18, with pass sales dollars down 6% thanks to pricing and product mix (Vail Resorts, Motley Fool transcript). CEO Rob Katz blamed last winter’s historically poor conditions in Colorado and the West and expects skier visits to rebound, though perhaps not to pre-drought levels (Denver Post).

Weather is an easy fallback explanation, but it is not the whole story. The Epic Pass was the best subscription product in outdoor recreation because it turned a day ticket into an annual commitment and moved the risk of a bad season onto the skier. When fewer skiers sign up after one bad season, the pass no longer does what it was designed to do: make the decision before the snow report does. I wrote about how a world-class ski machine forgot the magic that made it matter:

Beyond Epic or Beyond Soul?

The tell: dollars falling half as fast as units means Vail is holding revenue by charging the remaining loyalists more. That works until the loyalists start caring and doing the math.

Full disclosure: I grew up in Vail and have had an Epic Pass for as long as they’ve been around. I didn't renew this season and will opt for some Ski Cooper days.

3. Oura shelves its IPO, and the market reads the fine print ·

Wearables · Capital

Oura postponed its IPO indefinitely the day it was expected to price, citing “uncertainty in the IPO market” despite what it called strong demand (Reuters). The deal would have raised up to $2.2 billion at a valuation of up to $15 billion, against an $11 billion private round last October. Most of the proceeds were earmarked to cover tax obligations on employee share grants vesting at the listing, and Forerunner Ventures was set to sell its entire 9.3% stake for about $1.2 billion at the midpoint (TechCrunch).

“Market uncertainty” is code for nobody wanted to buy this structure at this price. A growth IPO is supposed to fund the company. This one was mostly built to pay employees’ tax bills and gave early investors an exit, leaving Oura’s own cash untouched.

Sportico tallied the sports money waiting on the other side: Shaquille O’Neal, Manu Ginobili, Jimmie Johnson, and Lance Armstrong backed Oura in its 2018 Series A extension, the Dodgers’ Elysian Park Ventures came in early, and executive chairman David Shuman is a new Islanders investor. Sportico also notes it is unclear whether all of them are still invested (Sportico). The ring is still a great product. The IPO was a liquidity event dressed as a growth story, and the market didn’t like the readiness score.

4. ATHLOS proves the format travels ·

Women’s · Media

ATHLOS London reached a reported 7.3 million viewers across broadcast and streaming on September 25, the largest audience in the meet’s history and its first event outside the United States. It sold out StoneX Stadium, paid out $1.057 million in total prize money ($65,000 to each event champion), and drew 31.2 million social views (endurance.biz). Ahead of the meet, ATHLOS announced a Cash App partnership to pay athletes within minutes of confirming their results. (City AM).

Last week I wrote that every new track league now pitches against Grand Slam Track’s ghost, and the first slide is proof the check clears. ATHLOS put that slide in the product: guaranteed prize money, instant payment, a single night, and a show built around the athletes rather than around the meet schedule.

The Read: one sold-out night in a city with deep athletics culture is not a season, and “reported viewers” summed across ten distribution partners is a generous way to count. The real test is whether the second international event, and the third, hold the audience without the novelty. I have high hopes the trend continues.

5. Overtime raises again and looks less like media every year ·

Media

Overtime closed a new strategic round led by Eldridge Capital Management, the asset management arm of Todd Boehly’s Eldridge. Terms were not disclosed. The company says it reaches more than 120 million followers, posts over 150 pieces of original content a week, and now runs four competitions: Overtime Elite and Overtime Select in basketball, and OT7 and Overtime Nationals in football. Five NBA team owners and more than 6% of active NBA players are investors (Business Wire).

Overtime started as a highlight account. It is now a league operator with an attached media company, which is the right order. Content audiences churn. Competitions you own create the content, talent, sponsorship inventory, and reason to come back next week.

The Read: undisclosed terms after a $100 million Series D in 2022 leave the valuation question open. But a strategic check from an owner of the Lakers, Dodgers, and Religion of Sports is a bet on the leagues, not the feed.

Fumbles & Vaporware

TAM Fam. Rivals launched Rivals Recruits: $29.99 to claim a high school football player’s profile (then $59.99 a year), and $399 for a scout evaluation that includes “consideration for a ranking” in its official database (Front Office Sports). Owner Shannon Terry says scouts, not AI, do the evaluations, and he hopes to lower the price. Fair enough. But a ranking a family can pay to be considered for is not a ranking. It is an ad with a star rating, and every family already stretching for camps, travel, and showcases now has one more line item that sounds like it might matter.

Cap Space. Back in Issue 003, the Women’s Pro Baseball League’s governance fight was already putting its future in question. This week, CEO Keith Stein removed the league’s largest investor, Mina Kim, from the board after she reportedly rejected a $600,000 offer to drop her Delaware lawsuit seeking the league’s financial records. Kim had invested $500,000 (Front Office Sports). When the settlement offer exceeds the investment, the investor isn't the problem you are trying to solve. Write the operating agreement like you expect to disagree. Then open the books before a judge asks you to.

Signal Check

$1.77 billion, paid to 34,915 athletes at 307 schools, in year one of revenue sharing (ESPN).

That works out to roughly $5.8 million per school, against a $20.5 million cap. Only 68 schools reached the cap or came within 5% of it. The Senate bill that passed this week would raise that cap to $48.8 million.

So the cap isn't a ceiling for most college sports. Only about 68 schools got close to it, and roughly 240 did not. Raising it doesn't lift the middle; it pulls the top further away. If you are building anything for athletic departments, from capital to rights representation to Olympic-sport survival plans, the market is not the 68. It is everyone trying to stay in the same division as them.

Who’s Building

• Ryan Bell (High Fidelity Institute). NASA, the White House, NATO, four Emmys, and, by his own account, the hardest problem he has ever worked on. Diagnosed as autistic late in life, Bell went into the research and found that autistic people die by suicide at nearly three times the rate of non-autistic people. Most help starts at the crisis, and very little of it is designed by neurodivergent people. So he is building a neurodivergent-led institute focused on what happens upstream: education, family and practitioner training, small facilitated labs, and paid roles for people with lived experience. He is raising $150,000 to launch it, with a Founding Circle for companies, foundations, and teams (GoFundMe). I worked with Ryan through the Comcast SportsTech program. High Fidelity isn't a sports company, but it is exactly the kind of builder this newsletter exists for: someone who saw the system starts too late and decided to build what comes first.

• Meghan O’Leary and Kira Karlstrom (Triple Threat). A two-time Olympic rower who built marketing platforms like Making Team USA and an Emmy-winning marketer who led the Twitch DJ program launched an agency that combines IP development, management, and an AI brand-intelligence platform called BR3KAWAY. Launch clients include USRowing, Twitch, Live Nation, COACH, and Angela Ruggiero (Record of the Day). The premise is right: Olympic athletes don't need another agent who sells logo placement. They need someone to help them build something they own.

• Owen Akhibi Herrera (Peak and Pace). Started a free Saturday run club in Brooklyn in 2024 to meet people. The first run drew 12. In 2025, the company brought in more than $640,000, almost entirely from $15 to $25 parties and events built around the runs, at a 15% margin (CNBC). Since he started the platform, he's reinvested every dollar back into the club and the experience. Building a platform isn’t always about the money; sometimes it is about staying true to the mission: “building the biggest community through movement in NYC.” The run is free. The belonging is the product. Every race organizer charging $150 for a start line and nothing after the finish should take note.

• Bandit Running. The New York running brand opened its first permanent European location in Barcelona with Madrid-based Odda, combining retail with coworking, sauna, cold plunge, showers, and community runs (Athletech News). An American brand exporting the run club as a physical place. If Bandit wants a cautionary tale, it is one sport over. Rapha, the British brand that wrote the cycling clubhouse playbook, lost its CEO last week and announced job cuts after a £25.3 million net loss, nearly a decade into Walton-family ownership through RZC Investments. The apparel or clubhouse was never the problem. Trying to grow into somebody else's valuation was.

Overheard

“When you control your own building, you control your real estate, your revenues, your costs and your calendar. You stop asking permission.”

Jen Millet, president of NWSL expansion club Denver Summit FC, on why the club is building its own privately financed stadium at Santa Fe Yards (Sportico).

That last sentence is the whole issue. The Knicks and Rangers are about to become two public companies that still play in someone else’s building. Vail owns the mountains and is learning it doesn't own the right to show up. Overtime decided it would rather own competitions than only cover other people’s. And a free run club in Brooklyn never asked anyone; it just threw the party.

Permission is expensive in ways that never show up on a term sheet. It costs you the calendar, which is where the dates you actually need go to someone else’s priorities. It costs you the data, because the person who owns the building owns the relationship with whoever walks in. And it costs you the upside, because every dollar the experience creates outside the game itself goes to whoever holds the lease.

Not every builder can or should own a stadium. But every builder should know exactly which part of their business runs on someone else’s permission, and what it would take to own it. That is usually where the margin is hiding.

Build Accordingly.

Bouker Pool · Managing Partner, Weck Enterprises · Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.

Got a tip, a fumble, or a build worth covering? Send it. Overheard exists for you.

Full disclosure: I advise and invest across sports-tech, media, youth sports, endurance, and wearables. When B&P covers a company I’m involved with, I’ll do my best to note it in the item.

I understand why some in the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic movement are celebrating the Senate’s passage of the Protect College Sports Act. They fought for provisions intended to protect sports, scholarships, and walk-on opportunities. Those are worth defending. The Senate passed the bill 77–22, and it now faces an uncertain path through the House.

I can find no reason to celebrate.

The problem is not protecting college roster spots. It is treating those protections as though they secure Team USA’s future, or as though they justify giving the institutions that govern college sports more legal protection without comparable power for athletes. The Olympic movement’s own history warns that a federally recognized governance structure does not, by itself, ensure athletes have the economic resources or influence they need. The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act gives athletes formal representation in USOPC governance, but a seat in that structure is not the same as control over how the movement creates and shares value.

The athletes we will cheer at LA28 began developing more than a decade ago. The leadership in Colorado Springs will have every opportunity to stand beside them, celebrate their medals, and present those results as evidence that the current system works. But those athletes came through youth, club, college, and national-team pathways built more than a decade before today’s decisions about who gets access, who gets a roster spot, and who can afford to keep competing.

The old system was far from equal or perfect. It did, however, give many athletes room to develop through school and community sports, followed by college programs that offered coaching, facilities, competition, and time. Now families face rising costs at the grassroots level, while college teams and developmental roster spots face mounting pressure.

The USOPC knows how much it depends on college sports. In Paris, 75% of the U.S. Olympic team and 53% of the U.S. Paralympic team had competed collegiately. That makes non-revenue sports and developmental roster spots worth defending. It also makes the cuts happening now a warning, not a problem a Senate bill provision can solve.

The bill does not bring back the developmental rosters that existed before House v. NCAA. At qualifying schools, it temporarily protects an aggregate count of non-revenue-sport roster spots and athletic-aid opportunities based on 2024–25. Schools can still shift opportunities among sports, some can seek waivers, and the requirements eventually expire.

READ THAT ONE AGAIN! - the requirements eventually expire!

A floor under the total doesn't guarantee a spot for a particular team, walk-on, or late bloomer.

Nor does it restore programs schools have already cut. A report from Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office says colleges have eliminated more than 100 women’s and Olympic-sport programs since 2023. We should also be honest about the national picture: Division I teams and roster spots have increased over the past five years. Both facts can be true. A new roster spot at one school does not reopen a discontinued swimming program at another or replace the coaching and developmental route it offered athletes in its community.

That is why I resist calling the bill’s roster provisions a solution to the Team USA pipeline. They may prevent some future cuts at some schools. They do not rebuild lost programs, guarantee opportunities in every sport, or address whether a young athlete can afford to reach a college roster in the first place.

With the Los Angeles Games in 2028 and the Utah Winter Games in 2034, the USOPC has an extraordinary platform on American soil. Its leaders should use that platform to confront a weakening pathway from school and community sports through college and beyond. They should stop treating the nonprofit governance structure established under the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act as a reason not to rethink how the movement creates and shares value. Public-interest governance and a parallel commercial model that sends more resources to athletes and the organizations developing them can coexist.

Instead, they are celebrating narrow protections in a bill that would give college sports institutions more legal power, while leaving the USOPC’s own authority largely unquestioned, without confronting who will fund the next generation of Team USA.

A strong medal count in LA28 would show what an earlier generation of opportunities made possible. It would not vindicate the people currently governing the system, and it would say nothing about whether a child entering sport today can afford to become a future member of Team USA.

I made that distinction in The Broken Pipeline: college sports can keep producing visible success while the opportunities behind it contract. Teams and developmental roster spots matter not only to the athletes currently on them, but also to late bloomers who need time, coaching, and competition before anyone knows what they might become.

The pressure starts well before a college coach offers a roster spot. Rising costs shape who can enter and remain in youth sports. After college, too many Olympic and Paralympic athletes must piece together jobs, family support, and fundraising to continue competing. As I argued in Private Equity Didn’t Break Youth Sports, blaming the latest source of private capital misses the longer retreat from accessible, school-based opportunities.

College sports is essential to the Team USA pipeline, but it is not the whole pipeline. Congress cannot rebuild that pathway by declaring a few campus safeguards and calling the job done, nor should it be asked to do the work that sports institutions have failed to do themselves.

That work belongs to athletes, colleges, clubs, national governing bodies, sponsors, and investors. They should build a stronger commercial model that sends more of the value athletes create back to athletes and to the organizations doing the coaching and development. They do not need Congress to run that model, and they do not need the institutions already in control to own every part of it.

Congress does have a responsibility when sports institutions ask for special treatment under federal law. The Senate-passed bill would establish national rules and give the organizations enforcing them specified legal protections. Before granting those protections, the House should ask what athletes receive in return: fair treatment, a meaningful share of the value they create, the freedom to earn from their skills and public profiles, enforceable rights, a real voice in the rules that govern them, and accountability for promises made in their name.

I want lasting protections for Olympic and Paralympic sports. But I cannot celebrate provisions that give institutions greater control without giving athletes comparable opportunity, economic power, and a meaningful say in their future, or offering a credible plan to keep the pathway open for those coming next.

Are we protecting the opportunities and a route for the next generation, or protecting the institutions that have failed to build one?

The most important shift in sports media is not that athletes are posting more content. It is that some are building businesses around the attention they have already earned.

Brands have spent years trying to make campaigns feel personal by hiring influencers, borrowing their voices, and placing a product in a familiar-looking feed. Sometimes it works. But audiences can also recognize when a supposedly candid moment exists because a creative brief required it. In a 2025 survey by BBB National Programs, only 5% of respondents said they trusted influencer content completely, and 70% felt deceived upon discovering an undisclosed partnership. The lesson is not that paid partnerships are inherently untrustworthy. It is that trust is difficult to manufacture and easy to spend.

Athletes begin from a different place. People have watched them compete, improve, lose, recover, and make choices under pressure. Their public story was already underway before a brand stepped in to sponsor it.

That does not make every athlete authentic, or every endorsement convincing. It does give athletes an advantage that a campaign cannot create from scratch. The opportunity now is to turn that earned attention into something they control: a body of work, a direct relationship with their audience, and, in some cases, a company.

The athlete is no longer just the subject of someone else’s story. Increasingly, the athlete is the studio.

From talent to owner

For decades, an athlete’s commercial life was largely organized by other people. Leagues and teams controlled access. Broadcasters determined which stories reached a mass audience. Sponsors decided how the athlete appeared in campaigns. The athlete was valuable talent inside systems built and owned elsewhere.

That model has changed. An athlete can announce news directly, produce a series, host a podcast, develop a documentary, build a consumer business, or introduce fans to a part of their life that never appears in a game broadcast. Distribution is still hard, and none of those ventures is guaranteed to make money. But an athlete no longer needs a network slot or a sponsor’s permission to begin.

Coco Gauff is a useful example of how far beyond endorsement this can go. She launched iROC Media Group in 2025 and partnered with Religion of Sports on original projects. Its first releases included Tennis Channel short documentaries about fashion in tennis and Zina Garrison. Gauff described the difference plainly: “I don’t want to just promote a brand or a product. I really want to be a part of it.

Gauff is not merely extending her visibility into media. She is making decisions about what gets made, who helps make it, and what kind of company could exist beyond her playing career. That is a different position from being the face of a campaign.

Naomi Osaka has also treated business, culture, and media as connected parts of her public life rather than a series of unrelated endorsements. The larger point is not that every athlete should start a production company. It is that athletes increasingly have the ability to choose whether their value ends at their appearance in someone else’s work.

The harder test comes later. Can the business make something people want when its founder is not on screen?

Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions shows why that question matters. Peyton and Eli Manning appeared in more than 70% of the company’s early projects; they now appear in roughly a quarter of them. Omaha has expanded its slate and its commercial production work, with branded content and campaigns accounting for about a quarter of revenue. Manning’s reputation helped open the door. A company capable of developing and producing work beyond his appearances is what gives the business a chance to last.

Trust is not a campaign

The influencer industry has become highly skilled at converting attention into action. It knows how to identify what an audience wants, offer useful content, and point people to where to go next. There is plenty for sports businesses to learn from that discipline.

But there is a line between understanding an audience and manufacturing a relationship with it.

An athlete does not need to invent a struggle to be relatable. The work is already there: the training no one televised, the injury that changed a season, the teammate who deserves attention, the sport that is difficult to find on TV. The best athlete-led media gives people access to a real point of view. The weakest athlete campaigns take those same ingredients, script them, and ask fans to mistake the result for spontaneity.

Brands should ask a more demanding question than whether an athlete can deliver impressions: Would this still be worth watching, reading, or attending if our logo were removed?

If the answer is no, the brand may be renting credibility for a moment. If the answer is yes, it has the potential to support something that both the athlete and the audience value. That might mean financing a recurring series, helping an athlete document a season, building a clinic or event around their expertise, or backing a media property in which the athlete has real creative authority.

It also means accepting that the athlete’s voice cannot always be made to sound like brand copy. CreatorIQ’s 2026 survey found that 53% of creators with at least 500,000 followers felt tension between the content their audiences wanted and the content brands wanted them to make. Athletes face that same tension. A partner that removes the voice people came for is weakening the asset it hoped to use.

A following is not a business

The tools to build direct media are more accessible than they used to be. YouTube, podcasting, newsletters, subscriptions, commerce platforms, and community products let an athlete and a small team do work that once required a much larger institution.

But publishing directly is not the same as owning the relationship.

A clip can reach millions of people without giving the athlete a reliable way to reach them again. A large following can disappear from view when a platform changes how it distributes posts. A successful sponsorship can pay well without leaving behind any lasting intellectual property or customer connections.

So the business question is not simply, “How many followers does this athlete have?” It is: Do people come back? Is there a format they recognize? Can the athlete reach that audience across channels? What rights do they retain? Is the work sustainable alongside the demands of competition?

The economics deserve some humility. In a 2026 survey of 5,095 creators across 100 countries, 67% reported earning less than $10,000 from creator work in the prior year. The tools have lowered the barrier to making media; they have not made a durable media business easy to build.

This is where an operating team matters. Someone still has to develop ideas, clear rights, produce work, manage distribution, sell partnerships, and protect the athlete’s time. Gauff retains creative control at iROC, but she works with Religion of Sports on the production capabilities her tennis schedule cannot accommodate. The lesson is not that the athlete must do everything. It is that support should increase the athlete’s capacity without taking away their say in what gets made.

Women athletes show the stakes

For women athletes, direct media can do more than broaden a sponsorship portfolio. It can make it easier to discover an athlete in sports that have not always offered consistent coverage or comparable earning opportunities. It can bring fans to a team or league through an interest that has little to do with a box score.

PWHL player Sarah Nurse has said that some fans first found the league through her beauty content on TikTok and Instagram. That is not a distraction from hockey. It is an entry point. A person follows Nurse, becomes interested in her work, and discovers the sport through her.

TOGETHXR’s Snap the Gap program offers athletes production support and coaching to help them develop those connections. In one cohort, Michelle Alozie’s Snapchat following grew from 127,000 to 204,000 over three months. The cohort produced millions of Story and Spotlight views. Those are meaningful discovery numbers, though the program did not provide revenue figures to Digiday. The longer-term question is whether that attention translates into income, retained audiences, and work that athletes can sustain.

“Become a creator” can easily become one more unpaid job for an athlete. A stronger model gives athletes useful support, fair commercial terms, and ownership of the value their work creates. It also gives leagues and teams another way to grow. Nurse’s audience does not have to compete with the PWHL’s audience. One can lead people to the other.

The larger media lesson

Sports makes this shift unusually visible, but it does not stop at sports.

The old media question was, “What’s on?” A network, publisher, or schedule organized the audience’s attention. Increasingly, the question is, “Who do I want to hear from?” People follow a voice across video, audio, writing, live appearances, and communities. They do not always care which institution first gave that person a platform.

That does not make institutions irrelevant. Leagues, teams, brands, networks, and production companies still bring capital, reach, access, and expertise. But they no longer have a monopoly on the relationship between talent and audience.

The best ones will stop treating an athlete’s independent audience as a threat to control, or merely as inventory to sell. They will help athletes do better work, protect their voice, and share in the upside on terms that recognize each partner's contribution.

Athletes, in turn, should be careful not to confuse visibility with ownership. A deal can be lucrative and still leave them with no rights, no audience connection, and nothing that survives the campaign. The point is not to reject partners. It is to choose partners who help build something worth keeping.

Brands cannot manufacture the history that makes people care about an athlete. They can recognize it. They can respect it. And, if they are willing to give up some control, they can help turn it into work that lasts.

That is the real promise of the athlete as studio: not another kind of influencer campaign, but a business built around a person whose story was compelling long before anyone tried to market it.

I almost put this in my Overheard section, as I’ve probably heard or read it ten times this week. Can we please retire it and be more thoughtful than “I didn’t have that on my bingo card”? Could it have officially jumped the shark?

So, no bingo cards here.

Mainstream sports biz spent the week on Apollo buying 16% of the Yankees, Paramount clearing its last antitrust hurdle to swallow Warner Bros. Discovery, and whether the NHL is really headed to Texas. Meanwhile, a free local streamer died, and its rights found new homes within weeks; a relaunched tennis league paid Coco Gauff partly in equity; a $17 million fencing federation borrowed an audience of 200 million; the PWHL put its own logo up as loan collateral; and the executive who ran Formula 1’s parent company is running the same playbook on horse racing.

The question is not whether something surprising happened. The question is whether somebody has built a platform that will still matter after the surprise wears off.

That’s the beat. Welcome to Issue 004.

The Cap Table

1. Victory+ is dead, and the pieces went four different directions · Media · Platforms

Victory+ launched in September 2024 as a free, ad-supported local sports streamer and shut down September 1 after the Rangers, Ducks, and NWSL walked over missed payments. It had two million app downloads, and viewership beat cable for the Stars. Free access just never produced enough revenue (Yahoo Sports). The rights scattered: the Stars and Ducks to Prime Video, the NWSL to Roku, and the Lynx to FOX 9+ for their final game (SBJ). BZZR picked up the Rangers’ paid DTC service and Rams preseason (Yahoo Sports).

Full disclosure, and my one personal line this week: I led the BZZR build, so read the rest of this with that in mind.

Reach is not a business model, and “free” is a pricing decision, not a distribution strategy. Victory+ proved that fans will show up for local games on an app. It never proved anyone would pay for the privilege, or that advertisers would pay enough to cover the rights and the teams’ patience. The Stars’ CEO, Brad Alberts, said it plainly (Yahoo Sports): “If this would have been run differently, there’s no reason why we couldn’t have continued this.”

The tell: the rights did not die with the platform. They went straight to Amazon, Roku, a local broadcaster, and a paid service within weeks. The inventory was never the problem. The operating model was.

2. Trbine wants to lend to athletic departments before private equity buys them · College · Capital

George O’Conor’s Trbine has built a revenue-based security that works like an interest-only loan. A department issues bonds secured by a percentage of future athletic revenue, renewable every seven years, at a projected cost of capital of 4.5% to 8.5%. Using Ohio State’s $336M in revenue as the example, pledging 5% (about $17M a year) could raise roughly $500M (SBJ).

The need is real: a GAO report found that 94% of Division I programs spent more than they generated in 2023-24, or 330 of 352 schools (House Education and Workforce Committee).

O’Conor’s pitch to athletic directors is refreshingly unglamorous: “It’s borrowing money. It’s a bridge. And if you still want to sell part of your thing in seven years when you know what you’re selling, consider it then.”

That is the right instinct. Most of the private equity conversation in college sports assumes a department knows what it is worth today, and nobody does, because the revenue-sharing era is barely a year old and Congress is still rewriting the rules. Buying time is a legitimate strategy when the price discovery has not happened yet.

The skeptic’s read: it is still debt against the same revenue every other stakeholder wants a piece of, and “refinance once things stabilize” is a bet on stability that nobody in college athletics has earned. A bridge is only as good as the other side.

3. Equity is the new appearance fee · Leagues · Athletes

World Team Tennis is back after five years, under Intrepid Sports Group, founded by former USTA and UTR executive Stephen Amritraj. Coco Gauff plays two of six December events for the Florida Flamingos, and her package includes WTT equity tied to the team. CNBC and Fandango carry it through Versant’s USA Sports (SBJ). The same week, Kerri Walsh Jennings became co-owner of Major League Volleyball’s NorCal Rumble expansion franchise and explained why she picked MLV over LOVB (Front Office Sports).

This is a pattern, not a deal. Challenger leagues cannot outbid incumbents on cash, so they are paying stars in ownership. It is the smartest currency a startup league has because it turns the most expensive line item in the budget into the most motivated shareholder on the cap table.

It is also a slow-motion problem. Equity only works as compensation if it is worth something later, and every star with a stake is a star with an opinion about the next raise, the next expansion market, and the next down round. Leagues handing out paper should write the governance before they need it.

4. USA Fencing hands the microphone to 200 million followers · Federation · Media

USA Fencing staged a Creator Showdown in Lower Manhattan, pairing more than a dozen creators (200 million-plus combined followers) with four Team USA fencers, built with the London agency Creator Showdown. A 2027 edition already has a title sponsor. The federation’s annual budget is roughly $17M, mostly registration and dues (Sportico). Separately, Togethxr signed on as USA Fencing’s official media partner through LA28 (SBJ).

This is an NGB building its own commercial and distribution layer instead of waiting for someone in Colorado Springs to do it for them. Creator Showdown’s CEO, Carsten Thode, named the failure mode most rights holders live in: creators get tickets and a hospitality box, and “what you get are sort of vanity posts from the creator.” USA Fencing put them on the strip instead.

The only question that matters for a dues-funded federation is whether creator attention turns into registrations or just impressions. A $17M federation borrowing a 200 million-follower audience for a day is a great headline. The 2027 title sponsor says somebody thinks it is also a business.

5. The PWHL’s logo is now collateral · Women’s · Capital

Mark Walter’s PWHL Holdings pledged nine league trademarks, including the PWHL wordmark and logo, as collateral on a loan from BlackRock’s HPS, per a June 30 security agreement. Loan terms and the value of the IP were not disclosed. The league raised more than $100M earlier this year from Kilmer Sports Ventures and Ilitch (Sportico).

Women’s sports IP just became a financeable asset class. That is the most bullish sentence you can write about the category, and also the most dangerous. A lender taking the logo as security means somebody ran the numbers and believes the brand has durable value independent of any one season. It also means that if the numbers are wrong, the brand is the first thing on the table.

Fumbles & Vaporware

TAM Fam. Amplify filed for a sports ownership ETF that can hold up to 15% in private team stakes (GlobeNewswire), and REX launched Alpha Sports to build ETFs tied to MLB and NHL teams (Markets Media). Two ways to buy a sliver of a sliver of a minority stake, arriving right as the institutional money finishes buying. When the retail wrapper shows up, it is usually because the people who got in early would like a buyer.

Cap Space. Grand Slam Track athletes are still waiting on half of what they are owed, with the money stuck in escrow after the bankruptcy (The Guardian). Meanwhile, Athlos is partnering with Cash App so athletes get paid within minutes of their result being confirmed (City AM). Every new track and running league now pitches against GST’s ghost, and the first slide in that pitch is not the format. It is proof the check clears.

Doh: Peloton launched three new treads, from a $2,195 folder to a $6,695 flagship with AI running analysis bolted on (CNBC). The bet is that runners want to be coached indoors the way cyclists do. Runners have a word for that. It's not called the dreadmill for nothing.

Signal Check

Two-thirds of U.S. parents call their kids’ extracurriculars at least somewhat expensive, and only 10% call them very affordable (SBJ / CivicScience).

Put that next to this week’s Overheard. Every league dreaming of turning young players into lifelong fans is building on a base where two out of three families already feel the cost. The participation funnel is not just the cheapest audience in sports. It is the one most likely to shrink first when the season checks get bigger.

Who’s Building

• Greg Maffei and Danny Epstien (Horse Racing League). The former Liberty Media CEO who oversaw the modern F1 era is raising $30M for a team-based thoroughbred league: 10 teams, 12 races over three days from March to May 2027, $10M in purses, exclusive deals with Santa Anita, Gulfstream, and Keeneland, and several franchises already sold at mid-seven figures (JohnWallStreet). The F1 playbook, applied to a sport that already has the heritage, the venues, and the betting handle. The job is not to invent an audience. It is to give an existing one a reason to care about teams.

• Florian Lussy (r-evo). A former North Texas distance runner turned sports-tech and live-events operator, Lussy is building r-evo on the premise that every running brand, broadcaster, and race organizer understands: running is one of the most-participated-in sports in the world, and almost nobody watches it. His answer is not another event series with faster splits and more sponsor flags. It is city-based franchises, athletes with stakes in those franchises, street races built for spectators, and a format scored on duration rather than distance. He has told City AM he wants running to compete for attention with SailGP and Formula 1. The launch is in Europe, but the problem he is solving is most acute in the U.S.

• Ryan Clark (Pivot25). Let go by ESPN in July after 11 years, now backed by Howard Schultz, who is taking a stake and coming on as a strategic adviser (SBJ). The flagship show has 1.5 million YouTube subscribers and a multiyear Netflix deal, and the plan runs to live events, licensing, and corporate partnerships. An individual platform outgrowing the network that let him go, two months later.

Overheard

“You are literally growing up playing in this league, and then you become a fan of that league on top of it.”

Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, who invested in League One Volleyball through her firm Next 3 Ventures, on why she backed a league that runs both youth clubs and a pro tier (Front Office Sports).

That sentence describes the most underpriced asset in American sport: the kid who plays becomes the adult who pays to watch. LOVB is built on it. Youth clubs and a pro league sit under one roof, so the path from registration to ticket is handled end to end by a single company. She called it “vertical infrastructure,” and that is exactly what it is.

Most of the industry runs that pipeline in pieces. Clubs, schools, federations, and pro properties each own a slice of the same athlete, and none of them owns the relationship. That gap sits under half this issue. USA Fencing is borrowing creators’ audiences because a dues-funded membership never became a viewing public. r-evo is trying to turn millions of weekend runners into fans. The Horse Racing League is working the other direction, trying to turn people who already bet into people who care.

The test for builders is whether the participation layer and the spectator layer sit on the same rails. Vertical integration is the fastest way to prove it, and also the easiest to get wrong: the moment families suspect their club fees are underwriting a pro payroll, the flywheel turns into a grievance. But if your participants never become your audience, you do not have a platform. You have two businesses sharing a logo.

Build Accordingly.

Bouker Pool · Managing Partner, Weck Enterprises · Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.

Got a tip, a fumble, or a build worth covering? Send it. Overheard exists for you.

Full disclosure: I advise and invest across sports-tech, media, youth sports, endurance, and wearables. When B&P covers a company I’m involved with, I’ll do my best to note it in the item.

I spend much of my professional life in front of a screen, working at the intersection of digital platforms, artificial intelligence, content, live experiences, and the complicated institutional systems that shape participatory, college, and youth sports. Much of that work involves helping organizations raise capital, clarify strategy, develop partnerships, and grow. It also means identifying opportunities that are not always obvious: where technology can improve access and decision-making, where media can build deeper connection, where sports properties can create more sustainable commercial models, and where partners can align around shared objectives to create meaningful value.

I genuinely enjoy the work. I like the pressure of a complex problem, the process of finding a path through competing interests, and the moment when a conversation becomes a practical idea a team can actually execute. I enjoy the energy of meetings in New York City, the intensity of negotiations, the pace of building relationships, and the ambition that comes from being surrounded by people who are trying to make something happen.

At the same time, I have learned that the work remains meaningful only when another internal drive is fueled by something more elemental.

For me, that place is outside.

I Do Not Seek Balance

I do not think of the outdoors as a counterweight to work, and I do not seek “balance” in the conventional sense. Too often, balance suggests compromise between two competing forces: give a little here, take a little there, and settle somewhere in the middle to avoid falling. Balance is a form of settling for mediocrity.

That has never been especially compelling to me.

I do not want a life engineered to avoid failure, discomfort, or intensity. I do not believe that the goal is to reduce the peaks and valleys until everything becomes manageable. The summit is not reached through moderation alone. It requires commitment, preparation, discomfort, persistence, and, at times, an acceptance that the conditions will be difficult.

The outdoors does not diminish my professional ambition. It strengthens it. It gives it perspective, discipline, and energy. It reminds me that effort is not something to be avoided; when directed toward something meaningful, it is often the point.

Sport Before the Industry

Before sport became an industry of rights packages, recruiting systems, NIL strategies, audience analytics, creator platforms, and content calendars, it was fundamentally about movement. It was about using your body, testing yourself against distance or terrain, learning what you could handle, and sharing the experience with others who had chosen to do the same.

That is still what draws me to outdoor sport. Running, cycling, skiing, hiking, and open-water swimming have each given me something different over the years. Together, they have brought comfort, challenge, success, pain, loss, perspective, and community.

A long run can make a difficult business problem seem less fixed than it did an hour earlier. A ride can create enough space for an idea to develop without forcing it. Skiing can restore the simple pleasure of being fully engaged in the present, where the terrain and conditions demand your attention. Hiking slows the world down, while open-water swimming offers a more immediate lesson in focus, composure, and respect for the surrounding environment.

Those experiences do not remove the pressure of work. They put it into perspective and fuel the internal drive that makes sustained work possible.

A Colorado Sense of Place

I was born and raised in Colorado, and I still feel a powerful gravitational pull toward its outdoor lifestyle and culture whenever I return. The landscape has a way of making the world feel both larger and clearer: mountains that reset your sense of scale, weather that reminds you that you are not in control, and long stretches of trail or road that reward patience more than speed.

Colorado remains magical to me not simply because it is where I grew up, but because it shaped some of my earliest understanding of what sport could be. The outdoors was never merely a setting for activity. It was part of the experience itself, a place that demanded preparation, instilled humility, and made achievement feel earned.

The mountains taught me that progress often happens gradually. You reach a summit, complete a long ride, or navigate a difficult run not through a single burst of effort, but by continuing to move forward when the work becomes uncomfortable. They also taught me that the best experiences are often shared: meeting someone at a trailhead before sunrise, riding alongside a friend through changing weather, or recounting a difficult day over food afterward.

Those lessons have stayed with me, even as my professional life has moved into very different environments.

A Change of Scenery

Since relocating from New York to northwest Connecticut, I have found another version of that connection. It is different from Colorado, but it has become equally meaningful in its own way.

The wooded trails, quiet roads, lakes, and changing seasons create an outdoor life that feels close and accessible rather than distant or dramatic. A run can begin directly from home. A bike ride can become an extended stretch of solitude and thinking. A hike can transform an ordinary afternoon. A skin up a nearby ski hill offers a quick reset, while an open-water swim can make the rest of the day feel more grounded.

What I appreciate most is that the outdoor world here has become woven into daily life. It is not something reserved for a major trip, a special occasion, or a carefully planned weekend. It is part of the rhythm of where we live. That accessibility has created a genuine sense of peace and happiness while connecting us with people who understand the value of being active outdoors.

There is a particular kind of community that grows around outdoor sport. It is less concerned with status and more grounded in shared effort. People show up for the same early rides, choose the same difficult routes, wave or exchange a friendly word when passing, wait out the same weather, and learn to appreciate the small rituals that make a life outdoors sustainable over time.

What the Work Can Learn

The relationship between my professional world and my outdoor life is not a contradiction. In many ways, it is the point.

I believe deeply in the potential of technology, AI, data, media, and new business models to improve sports. Those tools can help people navigate complex systems, increase access to useful information, reduce administrative friction, tell more meaningful stories, and make participation easier for athletes, families, coaches, schools, and communities.

But technology should strengthen the human experience of sport rather than replace it.

Sports organizations often speak about engagement, retention, belonging, wellness, participation, and community. Outdoor sport offers a powerful reminder that those ideas cannot be reduced to a metric, a marketing campaign, or an optimized funnel. People remain connected to sport because it gives them a reason to move, an opportunity to challenge themselves, a group to belong to, and memories that are difficult to replicate elsewhere.

The strongest sports organizations of the future will understand that their responsibility goes beyond attracting attention. Their real work is to create the conditions for people to participate, progress, connect, and develop a lasting relationship with a sport and the communities around it.

That is true whether the organization is a youth program, a college athletic department, an endurance event, a ski destination, a swim club, a professional league, or a media platform.

The event matters. The platform matters. The business model matters. But what matters most is the life people can build and the connections they can form around those experiences.

Returning to Center

I do not want less ambition in my work. I want ambition that remains connected to something real.

I enjoy the city, the meetings, the work of building, the negotiations, and the challenge of helping ideas become durable businesses or institutions. I want to continue working where sports, technology, media, and culture intersect, particularly when there is an opportunity to build systems that are more useful and more humane than those that came before.

At the same time, I sometimes dream about returning to my days as a ski bum or ski and snowboard instructor. I think about what it would mean to work in a role that helped more people get outside and discover that rare, magical moment of weightlessness; when worry, deadlines, meeting rooms, rings, beeps, and the constant hum of a connected world fall away.

I also know that I think best when I remain connected to the world beyond the screen.

Running reminds me that progress is built through consistency. Cycling creates distance from the immediate pressure of a problem and often makes the answer easier to see. Skiing demands presence because hesitation and distraction rarely serve you well. Hiking teaches patience and attentiveness. Open-water swimming reminds me that uncertainty can be uncomfortable without being dangerous, and that composure is often the difference between panic and possibility.

The outdoors does not pull me away from the work. It gives the work its proper context.

It reminds me that sport is not only an industry to modernize, a property to monetize, or a system to restructure. At its best, sport is a vehicle for confidence, connection, health, courage, friendship, and a fuller life.

That is why, before my day begins in earnest and after the meetings, deadlines, travel, calls, and work of trying to build what comes next, my return to center is outside.

If you are expecting commentary on the shituation with HYROX, well, other than the entire debacle in China, it was a massive lesson in how not to handle a…not going to say it. The social media rabbit hole has brought out some of the best and worst creativity. Ok, on to things that actually matter.

Mainstream sports biz spent the week covering the Senate college sports bill as a football story, a broadcaster's leave of absence, and whether Clearlake is done meddling with Chelsea. Meanwhile, two guys with a failed pro league on their résumé built a televised NCAA swimming league for under a million dollars, three former pros sat on a panel and admitted private equity is now inside your kid's hockey season, and a twenty-year fintech operator is quietly building the identity layer nobody in youth sports has.

That’s the beat. Welcome to Issue 003.

The Cap Table

1. Two guys built a televised college league for less than one football roster spot · Federation · Media

The College Swimming League (CSL) opens next Wednesday and Thursday at FMC Natatorium outside Chicago. Twelve NCAA programs, every one of them a top-25 finisher at the 2026 NCAA championships, across the ACC, SEC, and Big Ten. Eight matches in a four-team format at six venues coast to coast, ISL Skins and Super Skins events, then a wild card and championship at the IU Natatorium in Indianapolis on November 5 and 6. ESPN+ carries the regular season, ESPNU takes the postseason, DAZN handles international.

Rob Kent, former GM and owner of the ISL’s Toronto Titans, and Kyle Sockwell, a former Arizona State swimmer, founded the thing in December 2025 with backing from the ISL. Nine months from founding to a national broadcast deal. The whole season, including travel, accommodations, and prize money, runs on just under $1 million.

I may be a bit biased and overexcited about this one, as I have participated in and continue to coach this sport, have a son looking at college programs to take his talents to, and have built a college-fit model for my own kid within it. For twenty years, everyone in college swimming has been handed the same argument: you are a cost center, the revenue sports carry you, be grateful. Kent and Sockwell did not argue with that. They went and built the inventory. They cover travel and lodging for the programs, which is the entire reason a Louisville or an Auburn athletic director signs a piece of paper for a fall exhibition series in the first place.

The tell: The ISL model failed as a professional league. It works here because college swimming already has what the ISL had to manufacture from scratch: rivalries, home venues, alumni, and a coach at every school whose job security depends on visibility. Kent did not invent a format this week. He found the format a market.

I’m glued. I want an event on the East Coast. I want this to WIN!

2. Youth sports found its villain this week, and it is the easy one · Youth · Policy

At Front Office Sports’ Asset Class event, Ndamukong Suh said of private equity in youth sports, “They’re always gonna be looking for those returns. To me, I understand it, but I don’t necessarily agree with it,” before conceding, “It’s inevitable at the end of the day.” Jay Williams, three kids deep into it, said his children “are actually not getting the type of skill training that I would like for them to have” while costs keep climbing. Eli Manning, now a Brand Velocity Group partner, defended the model: “This isn’t about raising prices for families. This is about keeping prices low and adding access so that more kids can play sports.” (Front Office Sports)

My own senator, Chris Murphy, co-sponsor of the Let Kids Play Act with Chris Deluzio, went further on Black Bear Sports Group: “They see my son’s hockey experience as a chance to make a massive amount of money.”

I wrote about this in July, and the panel did not change my mind:

Read the three quotes in that order, and that panel just made my argument for me.

• Williams is describing a supply problem, not an ownership problem. His kids cannot get quality skill training locally because the school-based system that used to provide it has been hollowed out by a culture of testing, liability concerns, aging facilities, and a broken teacher-coach pipeline.

• Manning is describing a design question: whether a roll-up prioritizes volume and access or margin and exclusivity.

• Suh’s “inevitable” is the most honest line anyone said all week.

Murphy is right about the incentive and wrong about the sequence. Divestment is the politically safe move because it names an ownership structure without funding, staffing, or maintaining anything. Nobody on that stage or on the Senate floor said who operates the rinks, fields, and ice time if institutional capital walks. I live in Litchfield County, I coach, and I have written the season checks, so I am not romantic about the pricing. But the fee curve is a symptom. The cause is thirty years of public retreat, and you cannot legislate your way out of a vacuum you refuse to refill.

The real opportunity here is the hybrid nobody is funding. Districts partnering with private facilities while keeping athletes on school teams, community-backed programs with modern coaching, public infrastructure operated with private discipline. If you are building in youth sports, that middle ground is where the next decade of durable businesses gets built, because it is the only model that survives both budget and political cycles.

3. SPiN is building the thing last issue’s Overheard quote was asking for · Youth · Platforms

Last week I ran an Overheard line from a founder-turned-advisor: “The front end is now cheap. The hard part is the data spine underneath it.” Michael Hutner has been building that spine for youth sports, and I only connected the two this week.

Hutner spent two decades in fintech before founding SPiN, the Sports Profile Network. The thesis is “integrate first, build second.” SPiN is not trying to kill TeamSnap, SportsEngine, or LeagueApps. It connects them and layers on a Lifetime Profile ID, a persistent sports identity that follows an athlete across teams, seasons, and sports. Parents create and control the child’s profile, and data does not move without parental approval. No public commenting. Connections require both sides to approve. The money comes from a revenue share when third-party vendors reach clubs or families through the platform, and sports organizations can share in that. The company closed a seed round in 2025, led by KB Partners, and is in active discussions with multiple National Governing Bodies about aggregating participation data. (Youth Sports Business Report)

Read this one against the youth sports item above it. Everybody is arguing about who extracts the money from youth sports. Almost nobody is addressing the actual structural failure: a fourteen-year-old who has played club soccer, school basketball, and varsity tennis has no portable record of any of it. Not for a coach, not for an NGB, not for a college, not for a health provider. Whoever owns that identity layer owns the participation data that every one of those parties wants, and none of them has.

The fintech background is not a footnote. This is a rails company wearing a jersey, and rails companies get boring and valuable in that order. The permissioning design is the hard part, and it is also the only part that survives a privacy news cycle. Ask Revolut, which leaked data on roughly 680 customers this week, including a La Liga player and a touring tennis pro.

4. Race Space absorbs Racecheck, and the participation stack starts consolidating · Endurance · Platforms

Race Space acquired the reviews platform Racecheck and folded Accelerator, Racecheck, and the Race Space Platform into a single brand covering discovery, registration, and repeat participation. Racecheck brings 120,000-plus reviews and 1,500 event organizers. Accelerator claims average first-year registration growth of 35%, and Racecheck Premium users report a 22% conversion lift. (endurance.biz)

The same week, Spartan signed a multi-year agreement to return to ACTIVEWorks Endurance as its registration provider.

This is the Hyrox and Röko story from Issue 002, one layer down. When the events consolidate, the tech stack under them consolidates roughly six months later. I sat on the business/race director side of these vendor conversations for years at Competitor Group, and the leverage in that room comes entirely from having three credible options. The options just got cut down.

5. A rapper with no performance credentials built the year’s best run club · Wearables · Media

Fitt Insider makes the case that Wiz Khalifa, who started running in late July, posts to a following Fitt puts north of 40 million, and smokes weed around his workouts, has accidentally built more running energy than most brands manage on purpose, with Nike, WHOOP, GU, COROS, and AG1 all publicly offering product to the “weed speed run club.” I have been an Oura subscriber for three years; I run in Avelos and train with FORM goggles, so I am the last person to argue against measurement. But I have also argued that tracking should sharpen your judgment, not replace it. Five performance brands just sprinted toward the one guy in running who refuses to score himself.

Fumbles & Vaporware

TAM Fam. Don Yee launched Power-I Football, and SBJ ran it as “a Bloomberg Terminal for the NFL”. That is at least the fourth Bloomberg Terminal for sports announced this year, and I am starting to think nobody making the comparison has ever paid for a Bloomberg Terminal. A terminal is defined by proprietary data nobody else can get and a user base that cannot do the job without it. A subscription hub that aggregates football information for agents and coaches is a very good newsletter with a login. Which is a real business. Just name it for what it does.

Beta Blocker. Branding agency Multiplier shipped two AI tools, Property Pulse and Brand Heat Check, to help brands evaluate rights holders. Sponsorship valuation has been a black box for forty years because the underlying attribution data does not exist, not because no one has thought to run a model on it. Put a language model on top of missing inputs, and you get a semi-confident number, which is strictly worse than no number. But there is no industry standard, so numbers for marketers and media buys are all over the place. Cornhole anyone?

Cap Space. Front Office Sports reported a power struggle at the Women’s Pro Baseball League serious enough to put the league’s future in question before it has played a full season of consequence. This has nothing to do with women’s baseball; it has everything to do with founding documents and being a buttoned-up business. If you raise on a category thesis and then litigate your own cap table in public, the category takes the reputational hit, and your competitors get to fundraise off your governance. Write the operating agreement like you expect to disagree, because you will.

Signal Check

Doubling down here, because it’s my newsletter and I can: A nationally televised league costs 4.6% of what one school can pay its athletes this year.

CSL is running twelve top-25 programs, eight matches, and six venues coast to coast, with travel and accommodations covered and prize money on the line, for just under $1 million for the season. The same week, post-audit figures put the 2026-27 House settlement revenue-sharing pool at $21,583,913 per school, and The Athletic reported that many programs are structuring compensation well beyond that.

One league, twelve schools, national distribution, for under five cents on the dollar of what a single athletic department will move to athletes in the same twelve months.

The lesson is not that swimming is cheap. The cost of standing up distribution has collapsed, while the cost of competing within the existing structure has exploded. Those two curves crossed at some point in the last three years, and most of the industry has not repriced for it. If somebody is telling you your category cannot afford to exist, find out whether they are pricing the sport or pricing the bureaucracy stacked on top of it. Those are very different numbers, and only one of them is your problem.

Who’s Building

• I know, now I’m tripling down on this topic, but I am fired up for the swim season, and my head is in the college swim recruiting space personally. Rob Kent and Kyle Sockwell (College Swimming League). Took a format that failed as a pro league and pointed it at the one part of swimming that already had rivalries, venues, and motivated coaches. Nine months, twelve programs, ESPN. If you run an Olympic-sport property and you are still waiting for your federation to build your commercial layer, next Wednesday should ruin your week in a productive way. You already know I’ll be watching.

• Michael Hutner (SPiN). Twenty years in fintech, now building the Lifetime Profile ID for youth and amateur sports. “Integrate first, build second” is the correct answer and the harder one to raise on, because it does not let you claim you are replacing anyone.

• Ken Rideout. Former prison guard, former Wall Street trader, former opioid addict, sober since 2010, and currently the fastest marathoner in the world over fifty. He won the Gobi March, a 155-mile self-supported race across Mongolia, at 52, then took the Masters 50-plus marathon world title a few months later. He founded Camrock Advisors in 2018, launched a talent agency out of Nashville, wrote Everything You Want Is on the Other Side of Hard, and hosts a podcast. (thekenrideout.com) I am putting him in ‘Who’s Building’ on purpose, not in some inspiration slot or because I consider him a good friend (who once saved my life, true story, and a story for another issue). He rebuilt a person first and then built companies on top of that person, in that order. Most founders try it the other way and wonder why the company keeps inheriting their problems.

• Lucy Schodell (Watch Women’s Sports). Built an app that compiles collegiate schedules so fans can find women’s sports near them. Discovery is the entire problem in women’s sports attendance, and she shipped a fix while everyone else wrote a deck about it.

Overheard

“One thing you can’t do is you can’t tell people how to run.”

A conversation this week with a longtime product executive in the footwear business, now a founder himself, on a well-funded running brand that never scaled.

Any product that requires the customer to change before it works has a hard ceiling: the number of people already willing to change. That group is always smaller than the deck says, and it is usually the group that found you first, which is why early traction from true believers reads like proof and is actually a warning.

Run the headlines in this issue through that filter, and it sorts fast. CSL is not asking anyone to swim differently; it is packaging what swimmers already do into a format people will watch. SPiN wins if the record builds itself as a byproduct of a season a family was going to play anyway, and loses the moment it becomes homework. And a rapper with no performance credentials beat five performance brands to the same customer by not asking anybody to optimize anything.

So before you go out to raise on a behavior change thesis, count the people who already behave that way. That is not your beachhead. That is your market.

Build Accordingly.

Bouker Pool · Managing Partner, Weck Enterprises · Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.

Got a tip, a fumble, or a build worth covering? Send it. Overheard exists for you.

Full disclosure: I advise and invest across sports-tech, media, youth sports, endurance, and wearables. When B&P covers a company I’m involved with, I’ll do my best to note it in the item.

As the parent of a future college athlete, I am saying ‘NO’ to the Protect College Sports Act.

And shame on the NCAA for using a database of young people it encourages families to enter as early as sixth grade to lobby those children and their parents for legislation that primarily expands the NCAA’s own power.

An email sent to the NCAA Eligibility Center database

the only way I know is my 17-year-old son forwarded it to me asking if he should act on it

is framed as a friendly invitation to “get involved.” It tells students and families that Congress is considering a bill that would “protect the opportunities you’re working toward,” and then directs them to contact their senators in support of the bill.

But that message carries a different weight when it comes from the organization that controls a crucial gate on the path to NCAA participation.

The NCAA Eligibility Center says that students may register at any age and specifically encourages sixth graders considering college sports to create a Profile Page. It also makes clear that students who want to compete at an NCAA school must register with the Eligibility Center. That gives the NCAA a direct line to families long before a child is old enough to understand federal legislation, antitrust law, labor rights, NIL policy, or the tradeoffs embedded in a major college-sports bill.

That should concern every parent and school administrator.

A Captive Audience Is Not Advocacy

The problem is not that the NCAA has an opinion. Every organization has the right to advocate for its preferred public policy.

The problem is the relationship between the NCAA and the people receiving the message.

A sixth grader or any child under the age of 18 exploring college athletics is not able to vote, let alone a policy insider. Most parents are not policy insiders and take what the NCAA says as fact, and will oblige because the NCAA is the gatekeeper to their student-athlete’s future. We are trying to help our children make sound decisions about education, health, academic eligibility, athletic development, recruiting, costs, and future opportunities. We reasonably assume that an eligibility registration system exists to protect and help a child navigate the path to college sports, not to turn our family into a lobbying target for the organization that may someday regulate our child.

The NCAA email asks families to:

• Learn about the Act through the NCAA’s own advocacy page.

• Contact their senator “with a click of a button.”

• Share the message with teammates, coaches, administrators, and family.

• Support a bill presented as necessary to protect health care, scholarships, NIL rights, agent regulation, and women’s and Olympic sports.

Those are legitimate subjects for public debate. But presenting the NCAA’s preferred legislation as a straightforward, child-centered protection package leaves out the central question:

Who gains new authority, and who loses leverage?

The NCAA’s own advocacy materials describe a proposal that would preempt certain state laws, establish nationwide rules on eligibility and transfers, and provide targeted antitrust protection for NCAA enforcement of rules governing eligibility, transfers, academic requirements, and revenue sharing. That is not a minor technical adjustment to the current system. It is a major shift in the legal balance among athletes, schools, conferences, and the NCAA.

Parents should not be encouraged to click a button before they have been given an honest explanation of what that button supports, and what it actually means for their child and family.

College Sports Does Not Need Immunity

Tom Farrey recently called the Cruz-Cantwell approach a “Frankenstein-like bill” aimed at “saving” college sports. The phrase is spot on.

College sports has real problems.

• The transfer portal can be chaotic.

• NIL arrangements need transparency and consumer protections.

• Athletes deserve health protections, meaningful academic support, safeguards against predatory agents, fair access to representation, and stronger enforcement against bad actors.

But none of that requires Congress to give the NCAA and its member institutions broad protection from antitrust scrutiny.

The NCAA and college leaders have had decades to build a fairer and more durable system. READ THAT AGAIN! AND AGAIN!

They could have created transparent NIL rules, meaningful health care protections, enforceable scholarship commitments, athlete representation, and sensible transfer standards long before Congress became their preferred escape hatch.

They could have treated athletes as essential partners in a multibillion-dollar enterprise rather than people to be regulated from above.

Instead, the Protect College Sports Act asks Congress to create nationwide rules while providing the NCAA and its member institutions special legal protection to enforce them. The Senate’s description of the legislation includes NIL requirements and a limited antitrust exemption related to certain joint media-rights arrangements. The broader NCAA-backed policy agenda also seeks protection for institutional authority over athlete compensation, transfers, and eligibility.

That should make every parent, administrator, coach, guidance counselor, and fan stop and ask what is actually happening.

When an organization repeatedly loses in court, or faces credible legal challenges to restrictive rules, the answer should not automatically be to change the law so that the organization can no longer be challenged. The answer should be to ask whether the rules are fair in the first place.

Here is what no one is talking about:

• College sports is not on the verge of disappearing if Congress rejects the NCAA’s preferred legislation.

• Ratings are strong.

• NIL has helped some elite athletes remain in school longer.

• Women’s sports are growing.

• Niche sports are finding audiences.

• The commercial center of college athletics is not as fragile as the NCAA’s lobbying rhetoric suggests.

The question is not whether college sports will survive without special protection. It will.

The question is whether Congress will use this moment to build a system that gives athletes meaningful rights, or simply reinforce the authority of institutions that have governed without adequate athlete voice or accountability.

The Olympic Warning

There is one important point where the claim that college sports will be fine requires more caution: the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic pipeline may not be fine.

The United States may lead the medal table at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. That would not prove the underlying system is healthy. Olympic outcomes lag institutional decisions by years. The athletes likely to compete in Los Angeles were developed through college, club, and high-performance systems that existed before the recent acceleration of roster reductions, sport eliminations, and resource concentration.

A strong showing in 2028 could mask, rather than disprove, the erosion already underway.

For decades, college athletics has provided much more than scholarships to athletes in non-commercial sports. Colleges have supplied coaching, facilities, athletic training, medical support, regular high-level competition, teammate depth, academic structure, recruiting networks, and a bridge between youth participation and international performance.

For many Olympic and Paralympic athletes, particularly late bloomers and athletes from middle-income families without access to elite private club systems, a college roster has been the pathway.

When institutions cut teams, reduce roster sizes, eliminate walk-on opportunities, or redirect resources toward football and basketball, they do more than rebalance an athletic department budget. They reduce the developmental capacity on which swimming, track and field, rowing, wrestling, gymnastics, diving, and other Olympic sports have depended.

The immediate loss may be one team or one roster spot. The longer-term loss is a generation of athletes who never receive the coaching, competition, support, or time needed to become elite.

The decline of college-supported Olympic-sport pathways does not show up immediately on a medal stand. It first appears as fewer young athletes continuing beyond high school, fewer developmental opportunities, fewer late bloomers, fewer affordable options outside wealthy regions, and fewer athletes who can take the risk of pursuing international competition. By the time the impact is evident in medal counts, the missing generation of developing athletes will be difficult to replace.

The warning is especially relevant because college programs have historically supplied a central part of the U.S. Olympic talent infrastructure.

Private markets do not reliably replace that infrastructure. Strong club systems may exist in selected sports and affluent regions, but they are expensive, unevenly distributed, and inaccessible to many families. Where college sports once offered partial scholarships, walk-on opportunities, large training groups, subsidized coaching, and institutional facilities, the replacement can become a pay-to-participate system shaped increasingly by geography and family wealth.

That is why the meaningful question is not whether the United States can win medals in 2028. It can and most likely will, and the hype and results will sweep the long-term problem further under the rug and out of the spotlight.

The question arising from the LA28 success is whether the country will retain the broad, affordable, and geographically diverse development system needed to sustain Olympic and Paralympic success in 2032, 2036, and beyond.

Farrey is right to reject the NCAA’s apocalypse narrative. College sports will not collapse if Congress refuses to give the NCAA the legal protections it wants. But “college sports is doing fine” and “the Olympic development pipeline is secure” are not the same claim.

The commercial center of college athletics may be healthy while the development system for Olympic sports becomes increasingly fragile.

Institutional Protection Is Not Athlete Protection

Families should also consider the broader warning from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic system.

The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act created a federally recognized structure intended to support American Olympic and Paralympic sport. But formal institutional status, nonprofit governance, patriotic language, and athlete-centered messaging have not guaranteed that athletes can earn a sustainable living from their sport or that they have meaningful power over the institutions governing them.

A recent account of a U.S. bobsled athlete illustrates the economic reality. Competing at a high level in the sport required him to maintain a full-time engineering job and rent out his home while competing internationally. Even a place on the top USA Bobsled team could provide no more than approximately $1,200 per month.

That is not merely a story about one athlete’s resourcefulness. It reflects a structural reality across much of Olympic sport.

Athletes in many non-commercial sports sustain their careers through outside employment, flexible employers, family resources, a spouse’s income, personal assets, fundraising, camps, coaching, appearances, and occasional sponsorships. They are expected to train and compete at an international level while also assembling the personal financial infrastructure needed to remain in the system.

Take away the outside job, flexible employer, family support, rental income, personal assets, and side work, and the picture becomes clearer. Sport-derived income alone would leave most Olympic-pathway athletes below a meaningful threshold for self-sufficiency. For many, it would leave them below the federal poverty line.

The athlete may wear a national-team uniform, but often still personally finances the opportunity to represent the country.

That is the lesson Congress should take from the Olympic model. Institutional legal protection does not automatically produce athlete economic security. Nonprofit status does not equal accountability. A national governing structure does not guarantee meaningful athlete voice. A system can invoke education, national pride, health, and opportunity while still relying on athletes’ financial precarity, private resources, and limited bargaining power.

Congress should not repeat that mistake in college sports.

The answer is not to give the NCAA broad new legal insulation and hope its institutions preserve Olympic opportunities voluntarily. Nor is the answer to pretend that college sports has no responsibility for the youth and Olympic ecosystems from which it draws talent.

If Congress creates a federal framework, that framework should require real athlete rights, independent oversight, financial transparency, meaningful governance power, and measurable commitments to preserve participation pathways.

Stability Cannot Mean Silencing Athletes

Supporters call the Protect College Sports Act a path to “stability.” The NCAA says that the proposal would replace a patchwork of state laws, preserve a five-year eligibility framework, allow reasonable transfer limits, strengthen enforcement, and codify athlete protections. Those protections include post-eligibility health care, degree-completion support, scholarship guarantees, NIL privacy, agent-fee limits, and representation on governance boards.

Some of those provisions are constructive. They deserve a place in any eventual national solution.

But parents should not be forced to choose between chaos and NCAA control.

A better system would pair national standards with genuine athlete power:

• Independent health and safety protections that athletic departments cannot weaken.

• Guaranteed multiyear scholarships and meaningful degree-completion assistance.

• Strong oversight of agents, collectives, and NIL intermediaries.

• Transparent NIL agreements and practical protections against exploitation.

• Meaningful athlete representation with actual voting authority, not simply a seat at an advisory table.

• A lawful process for athletes to organize and bargain collectively where appropriate.

• Rules created with athletes, rather than simply imposed on them.

• Protections for non-commercial sports and Olympic development pathways that cannot be discarded solely because they are not immediately profitable.

Professional leagues do not solve every problem. But they demonstrate an important principle: when compensation, mobility, eligibility, commercial rights, and working conditions are at stake, the people whose labor creates the product should have a meaningful role in negotiating the rules.

It is also important to be accurate about the legal history. The Northwestern football unionization effort did not result in an NLRB ruling that college athletes are employees. In 2015, the National Labor Relations Board declined to assert jurisdiction rather than deciding the employee-status question on the merits.

Families deserve an honest conversation about athlete rights. They do not need rhetoric that treats employment status and collective bargaining as settled questions. Nor do they need legal uncertainty used as a reason to give institutions more control while athletes remain outside the room.

The broader point is clear: Congress should not use a college-sports bill to reduce athletes’ legal and economic leverage while granting more protection to the institutions that already dominate the system.

Youth Sports Cannot Be Ignored

The most consequential omission in this debate is what it says, or deliberately omits, about youth and school sports.

College athletics does not exist in isolation. Its incentives flow downward. Families experience them through year-round travel schedules, private training bills, club dues, showcase fees, recruiting pressure, early specialization, injury risks, and the growing assumption that every 11- or 12-year-old needs to begin building a college-sports résumé.

Youth and school sports touch the lives of roughly 30 million young people. Yet only a small percentage of high school athletes will compete in college. The college recruiting ecosystem can nevertheless make families behave as if every child’s future depends on entering the race early and never stepping out.

Parents are increasingly dissatisfied with the costs, pressure, specialization, and uneven safety protections built into this model. Yet Congress is considering a proposal that would entrench important incentives within that system without a serious public examination of its downstream effects or a requirement that college sports help improve the broader ecosystem.

That is why it is especially troubling that the NCAA is sending a political call to action into a pipeline that reaches children as young as sixth grade.

A young athlete’s contact information should not be treated as a political asset. A family’s decision to understand eligibility should not become implied consent to participate in institutional lobbying.

Before Congress creates a new federal college-sports framework, it should examine:

• Whether the framework will make youth sports more accessible or more expensive.

• Whether it will reduce or intensify pressure for early specialization.

• Whether it will improve health, safety, and long-term athlete development.

• Whether it will reduce the advantage held by families able to afford elite club systems.

• Whether major college sports institutions will be required to invest in community, school, and youth sports access.

• Whether young athletes and parents will have a meaningful voice before national rules are adopted.

• Whether Olympic and Paralympic development will remain available to talented athletes who do not come from affluent families or elite private pipelines.

The Senate’s September 15 cloture vote, 74 to 24, to begin consideration of the Protect College Sports Act makes this debate immediate.

That urgency is exactly why families should not be rushed into clicking a button in an NCAA advocacy email.

What Congress Should Do

I am not asking Congress to ignore college sports. I am asking Congress to do its job more thoroughly.

Before granting special antitrust protection to the NCAA and its member institutions, lawmakers should conduct a full public examination of how this legislation would affect athletes, families, youth sports, women’s sports, Olympic and Paralympic pathways, lower-resource schools, and communities already priced out of the escalating youth-sports system.

Congress should insist on a framework that:

• Protects athletes’ independent legal rights rather than insulating institutions from accountability behind nonprofit status.

• Requires authentic athlete participation in decision-making, including voting power where policy directly affects athletes.

• Separates health and safety oversight from athletic departments’ financial interests.

• Protects education without using the term “student-athlete” to deny economic reality.

• Establishes meaningful safeguards for youth-sports access, affordability, safety, and inclusion.

• Requires college sports to contribute to, rather than merely extract from, the wider U.S. sport ecosystem.

• Protects Olympic and Paralympic development pathways by preserving participation opportunities, roster access, scholarships, and institutional capacity in non-commercial sports.

• Makes any federal preemption or antitrust protection conditional on enforceable public-interest obligations, not voluntary promises.

My child’s future, and any young person’s future in sports, should not be used to sell Congress a bill that gives the NCAA more control, more insulation, and more authority without demanding sufficient accountability in return.

So, to the NCAA:

stop treating young people in your Eligibility Center database as a ready-made lobbying list.

And to Congress:

do not confuse protecting college sports with protecting the institution that has long governed it.

Protect the athletes. Protect the families. Protect the children entering this system years before they can vote, and long before they can understand the political campaign being conducted in their name.

For years, I have been all in on wearable technology.

Not casually interested. Not simply wearing a watch to count miles. I have been deeply engaged, maybe even a little obsessed, with what smart sensors, health platforms, and performance apps might reveal about how I train, sleep, recover, work, travel, and live.

I have tried most of it: running watches, rings, sleep trackers, recovery platforms, heart rate monitors, cycling computers, smart goggles, activity sensors, and apps designed to make sense of nearly every signal coming from the body. If it measured readiness, stress, sleep, heart rate, training load, pace, movement, or recovery, I was interested.

Some of it has been useful. Much of it is technically impressive. A few products have genuinely changed how I train and how I think about performance.

But over time, I have begun asking a more fundamental question:

Why does this technology deserve a place on my body and in my mind?

That is the question the wearable technology industry needs to answer more honestly.

The Battle for Real Estate

Wearable technology is now deeply embedded in health, wellness, performance, and sport. Watches and trackers sit on wrists all day. Rings capture sleep data through the night. Apps assign scores to recovery, stress, readiness, cardiovascular health, and activity. Sensors are being built into shoes, glasses, footbeds, clothing, bikes, goggles, and almost anything that can sit close to the human body.

The premise is powerful. Better data should lead to better decisions. Better decisions should lead to better health, more sustainable training, improved performance, and perhaps a longer, more capable life.

In theory, that makes sense.

But the market is crowded with companies that remain more focused on the technology than the person using it. They celebrate the precision of the sensor, the sophistication of the algorithm, the volume of data collected, and the elegance of the dashboard. They often spend less time considering the emotional reality of the consumer experience.

The human body is not simply another data source, and a person’s attention is not free real estate.

To wear a device is to invite it into intimate parts of daily life: sleep, fatigue, movement, anxiety, aging, ambition, recovery, and self-image. A company is not simply asking a consumer to purchase hardware. It is asking for access to routine, attention, trust, and judgment.

That is a much bigger request than the industry often acknowledges.

I have not rejected technology. I have become more intentional about when I use it, where it belongs, and what I expect it to do.

Today, I wear technology primarily when I am training and when it has a clear, practical job. The best tools help me understand the work, improve the experience, or make the activity safer. They support the session without becoming the focus of it.

When I run, I use a Garmin watch and Avelo shoes.

The Garmin gives me the information I need: pace, distance, route, effort, and heart rate when it is useful. It helps frame the run without turning every mile into a negotiation with a screen. The Avelo shoes represent a newer, potentially more interesting category of performance technology. They are still earning their place in my personal fitness technology stack, but the opportunity is clear. Sensors are moving closer to the actual mechanics of running, enabling us to understand how we move, not simply how far or how fast we go.

When I swim, I wear FORM goggles.

This is technology that fits naturally into the activity. In the pool, real-time information can be genuinely useful. Pace, intervals, distance, and performance feedback can influence what happens during the workout, not just summarize it afterward. The data is immediate, relevant, and connected directly to the work being done.

When I ride, I use a bike computer, power meter, heart rate monitor, and flashing radar light.

Each tool has a defined purpose. The bike computer provides navigation and the broader context of the ride. The power meter helps quantify effort and manage intensity, particularly on longer rides or structured training days. The heart rate monitor provides another useful layer of context around effort, fatigue, and how the body is responding. And the radar light may be the most valuable technology of all. It improves situational awareness, alerting me to approaching vehicles and making the road environment a little more manageable.

Not every piece of athletic technology needs to promise optimization. Sometimes its greatest contribution is safety.

That has become my standard:

Does this technology have a legitimate job to do?

Technology Should Serve the Moment

The difference between useful technology and intrusive technology is often simple.

Useful technology is present when it improves a specific moment. Intrusive technology continues collecting, scoring, interpreting, and commenting long after its value has diminished.

A runner may benefit from pace and heart rate data during a training session. A swimmer may benefit from live feedback in a structured workout. A cyclist may benefit from navigation and a radar alert on an open road.

But that does not mean the same person needs a device interpreting every hour of every day.

The modern wellness ecosystem has built much of its business around continuous tracking. More data is assumed to be better. More measurements are assumed to produce better insights. More insights are assumed to create better behavior.

That chain is not always true.

More data can create clarity, but it can also create noise. It can lead people to question how they feel until an app confirms it. It can turn sleep into a test, recovery into a score, and training into a negotiation with an algorithm.

A person wakes up feeling rested, but the readiness score is low. Suddenly, they are unsure whether to trust their own feelings and experience.

A person feels tired after a difficult week of work, travel, family commitments, and training, but the app suggests they are ready to go. They may ignore a signal that deserves more attention.

The issue is not that the technology is wrong. The issue is that the technology is incomplete.

A device can measure selected signals. It cannot fully understand the context of a life.

The Body Is Still the Best Sensor

We have become remarkably good at handing over judgment to devices.

Before a run, many people check the score. Before a hard workout, they check recovery. After a night of sleep, they check whether the algorithm agrees that it was restorative. We have been trained to look first at a dashboard and only then at ourselves.

I am trying to reverse that order.

Right now, I am enjoying the silence that comes from not being tracked all day. I am listening more closely to what my body is telling me before looking to an app to give me an answer.

That does not mean abandoning data. It means returning data to its proper role.

The body communicates constantly. It tells us when effort feels easy or disproportionately hard. It tells us when soreness is ordinary training fatigue and when it may be developing into something more persistent. It tells us when sleep has been thin for several nights, when travel has taken a toll, when stress is beginning to accumulate, and when a workout should be adjusted.

Those signals are not perfect. They are influenced by mood, motivation, emotion, weather, workload, and habit. But they are real. Often, they are richer than a single number on a phone screen.

The best wearable technology should strengthen that awareness, not replace it.

A Periodic Return to Data

I may return to more continuous tracking at some point.

Maybe it will be quarterly. Maybe twice a year. I have not decided yet.

There is a strong case for using wearable technology as a periodic check-in rather than a permanent presence. A few weeks or a month of more comprehensive tracking could reveal patterns that are hard to see in the normal pace of life: changes in sleep consistency, resting heart rate, recovery, training load, stress, or the accumulated effect of travel and work.

Used this way, technology becomes a diagnostic tool.

It can help confirm an instinct, identify a pattern, or raise a question worth exploring. It can offer a more objective view of a season of training or a demanding stretch of life without requiring every day to be graded.

That may be a healthier relationship with the category for many people.

Technology should not become a permanent referee in the relationship between an individual and their body. It should be a resource available when needed.

A readiness score can be a prompt. It should not be a verdict.

The Design Challenge Ahead

The greatest opportunity in wearable technology is not simply to build better hardware.

It is building products that understand the difference between measurement and meaning.

The companies that win will not necessarily be those that collect the most data, send the most notifications, or persuade users to wear a device every hour of every day. They will be the companies that create trust by being genuinely useful.

They will know when to provide information and when to remain quiet.

They will respect the reality that people do not live inside a controlled laboratory. They live complicated lives. They train around work, school, travel, children, stress, injuries, relationships, and changing priorities. They do not need another system telling them they have failed because sleep was imperfect or because a hard day did not produce the right score.

They need tools that help them make better decisions in the real world.

That requires a more human centered approach to product design.

A runner should want to use the technology on the trail because it clarifies the run.

A swimmer should want it in the pool because it improves the workout.

A cyclist should trust it on the road because it adds awareness and safety.

When the session ends, the user should be able to take the technology off without feeling as though they are missing something essential.

What Earns Its Place

The future of this space will not be determined only by sensor accuracy, artificial intelligence, hardware design, or the next wave of health data integration.

The biggest question we need to ask is whether a product earns its place.

Does it help someone train better without making training more complicated?

Does it improve safety without creating fear?

Does it provide useful context without creating dependency?

Does it make a person more aware of their body, or more dependent on a screen?

For me, the answer is becoming clearer.

I want technology when I am running, swimming, or riding because it can improve those activities. I want it when it has a defined purpose. I want it when it offers a useful signal, greater awareness, or practical protection.

But I do not need it to narrate the rest of my life.

For now, I am choosing more silence. More instinct. More attention to what the body is already saying.

Perhaps that is the real promise of great wearable technology: not that it teaches us to trust the machine more than ourselves, but that it helps us become better listeners when the machine is turned off.

What Got Built This Week · September 11, 2026

Mainstream sports biz spent the week arguing about whether the Angels are worth $4B and whether Kroenke overpaid. Meanwhile, Apple weaponized the Health app against every wearable specialist, private equity closed in on a €600M endurance brand, and the USTA quietly backed three racket-sports startups nobody outside racket sports has heard of.

That’s the beat. Welcome to Issue 002.

The Cap Table

1. Apple just did to Oura what Speedo did to FORM · Wearables · Platforms

Apple Watch Series 12 shipped this week with VO2 Max via the iPhone camera, heart rate variability, daily readiness scores, at-home biomechanics screenings, and something called Health Age (I think I got one of those from my Function Health dashboard). Every single one of those features was, until Wednesday, the moat for Oura, Whoop, or one of the endurance sports-focused wearables I’ve spent the last five years wearing.

If this sounds familiar, just with bigger players and more dollars involved, it’s the same one I wrote about in Issue 001 with Speedo iQ and FORM. Incumbent with distribution moves into a category the specialist owns. The specialist has the better product. The incumbent has the wrist of every iPhone owner in America. The gap between those two facts is where the next 18 months of positioning gets decided, and it usually gets decided in the incumbent’s favor.

I once wore an Apple Watch every day, but I’ve since ditched that to my bedside table and wear my nice watches daily (I am intrigued by Ganance for those, but a topic for another day). I train in FORM goggles in the pool. I’ve been an Oura Ring subscriber for over three years. Watching Apple ship the specialist feature set in one keynote hit different, because I know exactly how much time Oura’s product team spent making readiness scores work. Now they’re a free bullet in a launch deck.

The tell: The exact same week, Apple’s press event went up, Oura announced its LA Dodgers deal and IPO paperwork. Read that with me again. That’s a company trying to build a brand moat before the distribution wave arrives. It might work. It also might not.

2. L Catterton nears a €600M Hyrox deal, and endurance PE gets its benchmark · Endurance · Marketplaces

L Catterton is closing on a controlling stake in Hyrox at roughly €600M ($697M), per Bloomberg this week. Hyrox launched in Hamburg in 2017 as CrossFit dressed in mass-participation cosplay: alternating runs and workout stations, chip timing, global leaderboards, expansion into Asia (Hong Kong hosts the 2027 World Championships, the first outside Europe or North America).

L Catterton owns Equinox, Hydrow, and L.A.B. Golf. They know consumer-fitness math. A €600M valuation on Hyrox sets the comp for every mass-participation endurance property in the market, including a few I used to sit across a table from when I ran marketing at Competitor Group. Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon at scale, at peak, never traded at anything close to that multiple. The category has been repriced.

The read-across: if Hyrox is worth €600M on ~10 years of category creation, what does Ironman get valued at the next time it trades? What does UTMB get on an outright sale? Every mass-participation-endurance cap table in Europe just got redrawn quietly, and every U.S. race-series operator should be running the same math this weekend.

I wrote about this:

HYROX and the Fourth Wave of Mass Participation Fitness

3. Oura signs the LA Dodgers, IPO reportedly imminent, and picks the worst possible week to do it · Wearables · B2B

Did anyone hear that through the crowd noise? Oura extended its pro-sports strategy to MLB this week, naming the Dodgers its official health wearable through 2029. That puts Oura’s roster at Team USA, LA28, U.S. Soccer, USTA, U.S. Open, the Knicks, the Dodgers, plus Coco Gauff and Taylor Fritz as endorsers. The same week, Bloomberg reported the IPO could file as early as later this month.

The sponsorship logic seems to be: Build brand equity in categories where wearable purchase happens (athletes, professionals, aspirational consumers) so that when Apple copies your features, buyers still think of you first. It’s the Peloton bike-in-the-corner-of-every-athlete-Instagram strategy, applied to a ring.

It’s also a bet against physics. Apple Watch ships preinstalled awareness to 100M+ American wrists. Oura ships to whoever walks into an airport Best Buy or clicks a Coco Gauff ad. The IPO timing is either brave or desperate; the market will decide which within 90 days.

4. USTA Connect names three racket-sports startups actually worth watching · Platforms · Federation

Third year of USTA Connect, the USTA’s tech accelerator that runs during U.S. Open week. This year’s finalists all target real infrastructure gaps:

• Tennis Oasis maps racket-sport “deserts” for facility development,

• Third Court built an AI scheduling engine for skill-based open play (won the $10K prize, piloting with USTA Mid-Atlantic),

• and HapticNav uses vibrational feedback to help blind and low-vision players navigate courts (piloting at the U.S. Open).

Two things worth calling out here. First, this is exactly the American racket-sports whitespace I called out in Signal Check last week.

Participation in padel and pickleball is climbing; the American software layer hasn’t caught up. USTA’s investment arm (USTA Ventures) added stakes in Rec and Fastbreak AI over the past year, both racket-sports-adjacent. The federation is behaving like a category-defining LP. Well done!

Second, Third Court’s model (AI matching open-play by skill level) is the most immediately useful of the three, because every racket-sports club in America handles skill-mismatch by hand. If you’re building anywhere in club software, watch this one; it’s worth checking out.

5. Röko quietly acquires the guts of pro cycling · Endurance · Supply

No one likes talking about butts, especially cyclists, but Röko, a Swedish serial acquirer, bought 99% of CyTech (€27M revenue Italian company behind Elastic Interface, the pad in most pro cycling teams’ shorts). Not headline-worthy or flashy. Someone is building a European endurance-supplier holding company piece by piece, 40+ deals since 2019. Sleeper of the week.

Fumbles & Vaporware

Late Fee. Nike will be booted from the S&P 100 on September 21, roughly 18 years in, after a 40% YTD drop and a market cap collapse from $276.7B in 2021 to $58.6B in August. CEO Elliot Hill’s 2025 wholesale rebuild sent partners ordering more product for 2026 than they could sell; the discounting cycle now runs through fiscal 2027 (Hmmm, something the cycling industry knows well). Meanwhile, in China (where Q4 revenue fell 12%), Nike is walking away from third-party online sellers just as livestream commerce becomes the actual distribution layer. Every time an incumbent decides to “get closer to the consumer,” a specialist somewhere gets a bigger runway. Hoka, On, Vuori, and Alo are all sending thank-you cards to Tracktown U.S.A.

TAM Fam. Resmed, maker of CPAP machines, signed its first U.S. sports sponsorship with a NASCAR team after learning driver Tyler Reddick was already using its device for sleep apnea. The “athlete organically uses product, brand builds sponsorship around it” story is fine. The “sleep tech giant steps into sports” framing is not. Resmed is a $30B publicly traded medical device company; this is not the next wearable frontier; it’s a marketing case study with good storytelling. Anyone pitching this deck to your fund in October, ask them to explain the difference.

Vaporwear. Whoever is running the Dude Perfect Wikipedia edits is having a week. A 2024 story about Andrew Yaffe being hired as “first-ever CEO” recirculated in the SBB feed this week, one week after he left. SEO does not care about your reputation.

Signal Check

The public athletic-brand market cap has evaporated by roughly $250B over three years, and the money didn’t leave the category.

Nike alone shed $218B in market cap between 2021 and August 2026. Under Armour trades below its 2011 IPO price. Adidas remains ~40% off its 2021 peak. Meanwhile, Deckers (Hoka’s parent) has quadrupled since 2021, On Running is up ~300%, and privately held Vuori and Alo Yoga both hit multi-billion valuations without a public raise.

The consumer athletic dollar didn’t leave the category; it shifted from incumbents to specialists who treated one category as their entire business. Hoka is a running brand (I love and run in their shoes, Mach 7, almost as much as my Avelo’s), On is a running brand; Vuori is a lifestyle brand; Alo is a yoga brand; and none of them started a “digital ecosystem,” or a “membership platform,” or a “wholesale rebuild.” They just made one thing better than everyone else (Reminds me of a great book, Running with Purpose by Jim Weber).

Every builder in the beat has now seen this movie in real time. The question for the next five years: which specialist gets big enough to earn the incumbent playbook problems in reverse?

Who’s Building

• Michael Hughes, USTA senior director of digital strategy, is running the most interesting federation-as-VC program in American sports. USTA Connect + USTA Ventures + real pilot slots at the U.S. Open. Any federation that does not copy this within 12 months is behind.

• Jorge Vilanova and his team at Gretel Planner shipped v2.0 of their race-planning platform this week. Used by Spartan, Skyrunner World Series, One Hundred World Championship. 20,000-athlete community. B2B endurance SaaS quietly maturing while nobody watches.

• Ochy, the phone-camera gait-analysis platform being tested publicly in SBJ’s “Building a Marathon Man” series. Wearable-less biomechanics measured from a video. If it works, it’s the demo product for every physical therapy clinic and running store in America.

• Rob Schaefer at SBJ, writing “Building a Marathon Man” through October. Public, longitudinal, honest review of the endurance-tech stack in service of his first NYC Marathon. Ally, not competitor. Send him a comp product.

• One final one that has me glued over the past few weeks: Rich Roll, 3.5 years without running after a decade of debilitating back pain and spinal fusion surgery, is documenting his rebuild in real time through his new home-gym series, Open Container.

  Goal: turn 60 at the end of October, then line up for the NYC Marathon a week later. Not to PR, not to impress anyone. “I just want to be a runner among runners.” Same marathon Rob Schaefer is documenting for SBJ. Two very different rebuilds, one finish line.

  Not every build in this newsletter is a company. Sometimes the build is your own body, and that gets under-covered in a beat obsessed with cap tables and product launches. When someone with Rich’s platform talks openly about starting over, the whole endurance community gets permission to do the same. That matters more than any Series B.

Overheard

“The front end is now cheap. The hard part is the data spine underneath it.”

A conversation in the past week with a founder-turned-advisor working across sports, health, and enterprise technology.

Everyone can build an AI-powered wellness dashboard. The real challenge is connecting the messy data underneath it: wearables, training platforms, bloodwork, nutrition, recovery, and performance signals that mostly live in separate apps.

That is why the bigger opportunity may be B2B, not another consumer interface. Coaches, teams, gyms, universities, and health organizations need a reliable way to view individuals and cohorts, spot patterns, and act on the data.

AI can make the front end look smart. Building the permissioned, interoperable data layer that professionals can trust, and turning it into a daily workflow, is the much harder, more durable business.

Build Accordingly.

Bouker Pool · Managing Partner, Weck Enterprises · Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.

Got a tip, a fumble, or a build worth covering? Send it. Overheard exists for you.

Full disclosure: I advise and invest across sports-tech, media, youth sports, endurance, and wearables. When B&P covers a company I’m involved with, I’ll note it in the item. No positions in any company mentioned this week.

It comes up on every call. It appears on virtually every membership page, investor deck, and brand-strategy document. It is embedded in the language of fitness clubs, endurance events, training platforms, run crews, cycling concepts, wellness spaces, outdoor brands, and digital subscriptions.

The pitch is familiar:

Join the community.
Become part of the community.
Pay for access to our community.

But community is not a product feature. It is not a line item in a benefits grid. It is not a premium amenity that can be placed behind an annual fee, bundled with programming, or offered in exchange for a monthly charge.

A membership can be sold. Community cannot.

Memberships, Subscriptions, and Entries Are Transactions

Memberships, subscriptions, and event entries are clear commercial exchanges. A person pays for something, and an organization delivers something in return.

That value may be substantial:

• Access to a facility, clubhouse, trails, equipment, recovery services, or workspace.

• Coaching, classes, training plans, and expert guidance.

• Discounts, priority entry, insurance, race registration, or equipment benefits.

• Curated trips, rides, runs, events, and social programming.

• Family programming, youth activities, child care, hospitality, or convenience.

• Content, data, digital tools, and a more structured experience around a sport.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. A well-designed membership should be direct about what it offers and why someone should pay for it.

The problem begins when “community” becomes shorthand for a weak or insufficiently differentiated value proposition. Instead of explaining the tangible value of the service, the brand sells the implied emotional promise of belonging.

That is a different, and much more precarious, claim.

Community Is What Happens Between People

A real community is not primarily the relationship between an organization and its customers. It is the relationship among people connected through a shared activity, identity, place, ritual, or purpose.

It develops over time. It is voluntary. It has its own rhythms, inside references, leaders, traditions, tensions, friendships, and points of view. It does not need to be administered into existence. And it does not disappear simply because a company changes its pricing, updates its app, loses a sponsor, changes ownership, or shifts to a new business model.

Community is horizontal.

It is the runner who sees another familiar name in a Strava group and sends a note: “A few of us are running at 6:30 tomorrow, want to join?”

It is the small group that organically turns a Saturday ride into coffee afterward.

It is the swimmer who initially comes for lane access but keeps returning because of the people on deck.

It is the group chat that starts around a race and becomes a place for training advice, job leads, family updates, injury support, and plans unrelated to the organization that originally brought everyone together.

No membership platform created those relationships. At most, it created the conditions in which they could happen.

That is an important distinction.

The Strava Test

The simplest way to identify real community is to ask a simple question:

If the organization, subscription, app, facility, or membership structure disappeared tomorrow, would the people still find one another?

Would they still organize a workout? Meet for coffee after a run? Travel to a race together? Share advice? Support one another through injury, a job change, or a difficult stretch of life? Continue using the same routes, meeting at the same trailhead, or observing the same small rituals?

If the answer is yes, there may be a real community.

If the answer is no, there may be a customer base, an audience, a loyalty program, an event field, a membership roster, or a well-managed group experience. Each can be valuable. None should be dismissed. But none is automatically community.

A Strava group can be more of a community than a branded, fee-gated “community” with polished content, private events, and a sophisticated membership funnel. The difference is not the platform, the price point, or the brand aesthetic. The difference lies in whether people relate to one another in ways that are self-directed and durable.

Why the Difference Matters

The industry’s confusion between membership and community is not merely a language problem. It produces bad strategy.

When organizations assume they can build community by charging dues and organizing events, they often overestimate the strength of the relationships in their ecosystem. They mistake attendance for affinity. They mistake activity for belonging. They mistake a database of paying members for a social network with its own agency.

They also create the wrong expectations.

A customer can reasonably expect the things a membership explicitly promises: access, programming, hospitality, coaching, discounts, facilities, events, content, and service.

But no organization can guarantee friendship. It cannot guarantee social chemistry. It cannot guarantee that a new member will feel known, included, or at home.

Those outcomes may occur. They may be among the most meaningful consequences of participation. But they are not inventory.

When “community” becomes the headline benefit, brands are effectively asking people to pay for belonging. That can feel transactional at best and manipulative at worst; particularly when the underlying offer rests on scarcity, status, access, and a well-managed sales funnel.

Community Has Become a Catch-All

Part of the problem is that “community” has become a catch-all word for nearly every social or relational function around a sports brand.

A company says it wants to “build community,” but what does it actually mean?

Does it mean acquiring customers? Retaining subscribers? Recruiting ambassadors? Paying affiliates? Partnering with creators? Generating user content? Activating local clubs? Hosting events? Building a loyalty program? Developing an owned social channel? Finding product testers? Creating a referral loop?

Those are all legitimate business activities. They may all matter. But they are not the same thing, and calling each of them “community” blurs the work instead of clarifying it.

A creator may have reach. An affiliate may drive measurable sales. An ambassador may lend credibility. An early customer may provide useful feedback. A local run club may offer access to an existing social network. A loyalty program may improve repeat purchases. A branded event may generate content and bring people into the funnel.

None of those things is automatically community.

The imprecision is not harmless. It turns community into a euphemism for customer acquisition, content production, social proof, and retention. It also leads organizations to believe they own relationships that they merely benefit from, or, worse, that they can manufacture belonging by placing a logo, a signup form, and a recurring payment mechanism around a group of people.

A more disciplined organization uses more disciplined language.

Call creators creators. Call affiliates affiliates. Call ambassadors ambassadors. Call customers customers. Call a paid product a membership or subscription. Call a local run club an independent run club. Call engagement engagement. Call retention retention.

And reserve “community” for what it actually describes: the voluntary, self-directed relationships that develop among people and endure beyond the company’s ability to program, monetize, or control them.

A Better Way to Say It

Organizations do not need to banish the word. They need to use it with more humility and precision.

A company can credibly say:

• We create opportunities to meet people who share your interests.

• We host rides, runs, races, classes, gatherings, and local events.

• We provide a physical or digital home base for people pursuing an active life.

• We make it easier for people to participate consistently.

• We create repeat occasions for members to spend time together.

• We support local leaders, club captains, coaches, volunteers, and organizers.

• We provide the structure, place, tools, and hospitality that make connection more likely.

Those are substantial claims. They are also honest ones.

The language shifts from “buy our community” to “join a club, platform, event, or program that gives you meaningful reasons and repeated opportunities to connect.”

The organization sells what it controls. Participants create what it does not.

What Organizations Can Build

Sports and wellness businesses can build excellent membership propositions. They can build clubs, facilities, events, routes, coaching platforms, content products, race series, training groups, hospitality experiences, and digital networks.

They can build the scaffolding.

They can also cultivate conditions in which community is more likely to emerge:

• Consistent, recurring opportunities for people to participate together.

• Welcoming environments that lower the social friction of joining in.

• Space for member-led rides, runs, workouts, events, and traditions.

• Recognition for volunteer leadership rather than top-down control of every interaction.

• Shared rituals that become meaningful through repetition.

• A tolerance for organic interaction that does not always serve the brand’s content calendar or conversion funnel.

• A willingness to let members connect and organize beyond the company’s direct control.

But the moment an organization tries to own every interaction, monetize every gathering, control every message, and make every relationship contingent on continued payment, it stops nurturing community and starts managing customer retention.

Those are different objectives.

Let’s Call It What It Is

There is no shame in being a membership organization.

A gym is a gym. A private club is a private club. A training platform is a training platform. A race series is a race series. A subscription is a subscription. A Strava group is a digital gathering place. A loyalty program is a loyalty program.

Each can offer real value. Each can bring people into closer proximity. Each can become the setting in which genuine relationships form.

But the relationship is not the product.

The strongest operators understand this. They do not hide a transactional offer behind vague claims of belonging. They make the membership proposition compelling on its own terms: exceptional access, useful services, thoughtful programming, hospitality, expertise, convenience, and a distinctive sense of place.

Then they do something more difficult: they make room for people to create their own connections.

Community is not a benefit that a brand hands down to its members. It is what members build with one another when the brand has done enough to bring them together, and has the good sense not to confuse the invitation with the outcome.

What Got Built This Week · September 4, 2026

The mainstream sports biz press spent the week explaining, for the eight-hundredth time, why the Seahawks are worth $9.6 billion. Meanwhile, Congress introduced a bill to regulate private equity in youth sports, Speedo finally shipped a connected-swim platform, and a federation-backed resale marketplace launched for endurance sports.

That’s the beat. Welcome to the first one.

The Cap Table

1. Congress introduces the Let Kids Play Act, and PE in youth sports finally has a federal target · Youth · Policy

The Let Kids Play Act, introduced this week, is the first federal bill to name private-equity roll-ups in youth sports as the target. Legislators pegged the youth sports economy at $40B and framed pay-to-play as a market-structure problem, not a values one. Hmmm.

I’ve been writing about this dynamic for a while (the piece I published in July on the same topic sits here on Substack). What’s new this week is federal air cover. If you’re building, following, or just interested in youth sports (travel leagues, tournament operators, facility groups, coaching platforms, streaming, recruiting tech, and on and on and on), a federal bill signals that the acquisition curve of the last five years has crested into political territory. Nothing passes this Congress. But the Overton window moved. The next round of PE roll-up decks will need a “regulatory posture” slide, and LPs will start asking questions they weren’t asking twelve months ago.

The tell: the bill dropped in the same week SBJ published “The EBITDA churn trap”, a piece arguing the best-looking youth-sports assets carry hidden discounts because their revenue is churn-dependent. Regulators reading that piece just got a data point. Buyers just got a discount lever.

2. Speedo launches Speedo iQ, and swim finally gets a connected-tech layer · Wearables · Youth

Speedo shipped Speedo iQ, a connected swim-tech platform, this week. The swim-tech gap is filling fast with the launch of this product, ZWIM, and eo Swim Better, and my read hasn’t changed: swimming was the last major youth-and-endurance category without a real data layer. Cycling has Zwift and Wahoo. Running has Strava, Garmin, and Avelo. Triathlon has TrainingPeaks (recently snapped up by Garmin). Swimming had a pace clock and a printed set list on a whiteboard.

Full disclosure: I swim in FORM goggles, which is the other serious player in this category and has a two-year software head start. Speedo owning the connected layer for a sport it already dominates in equipment is the platform play that only makes sense if the incumbent moves first. They finally did. What FORM does in response is the more interesting question. They have the better product; Speedo has the better distribution. That gap is where the next round of positioning gets decided.

3. Momento launches Venue Vision, the fan-data play for the sponsor side · Platforms · B2B

Momento launched Venue Vision, a fan-data platform for venue operators. The category is crowded (Satisfi, Greenfly, Elevate, Fevo all have adjacent plays). What sets Momento apart: the pitch isn’t about fan engagement; it’s venue-side operational data. The sponsor-facing “here’s what your activation actually did” layer that most rights-holders still handle with a spreadsheet and a slide deck. Aaron Duckmanton at Everton called this the “trading mindset” earlier this year. Momento is trying to be the receipts.

4. Kit Revolution and British Triathlon launch KitHub, resale infrastructure comes to endurance · Endurance · Marketplaces

British Triathlon and Kit Revolution launched KitHub, a marketplace for pre-loved and surplus gear. Federation-endorsed resale is an interesting play in endurance. Every cyclist (yours truly included), triathlete, and federation has at least $3K of unused gear in a garage; anyone interested in Assos or Cuore USA Cycling team kits? The friction in selling it has been the entire problem; eBay and Facebook Marketplace have become a scammers' paradise. Federation seal of approval solves trust, discoverability, and sizing anxiety in one move. The category question: who in the U.S. copies this first? USA Cycling, or a direct-to-athlete platform that goes around the federation entirely?

5. Russell Westbrook joins Project B as co-founder and investor;

The athlete-as-operator move continues. SBJ.

Fumbles & Vaporware

Rug Pull. Dude Perfect lost its CEO this week, less than two years after the Highmount Capital raise that was supposed to turn a YouTube channel into a media company. Turns out sports IP built for algorithms is hard to convert into a franchise the way private-equity models say it should convert.

Beta Blocker. Good Good Golf is still handling last month’s crisis badly, per a crisis-comms expert quoted in Insider Sport this week. When the expert is on the record saying you’re doing it wrong, you’ve graduated from a PR problem to a business-model problem.

TAM Fam. Sports fans, per SBJ this week, are drawing the line on AI-generated content. Every “AI-powered sports content” deck raised in the last 18 months just got a new slide it doesn’t want to write.

Signal Check

U.S. sports participation just hit an all-time high, led by two sports most sports-tech decks don’t include.

The SFIA 2026 report came out this week. Flag football and padel drove participation to a record. Neither sport has meaningful native tech infrastructure in the U.S. No dominant scheduling platform, no dominant tournament OS, no dominant coaching app, no wearable partnership. If you’re a builder scanning for whitespace, this is your whitespace. Padel especially: courts are being built faster than the software layer that runs them. The category is currently served by European platforms (Playtomic, MATCHi) that don’t understand American club economics. That will not stay true.

Who’s Building

• Check out what Patrick Morris is building in SPOT SPORTS. This has potential and has me hooked since Autograph.io went down like Tom Brady being sacked by Von Miller.

• I’ve gone down the rabbit hole searching Neil Horowitz’s Skipper platform and finding all sorts of juicy information.

• The 20th Annual TOUR OF THE CATSKILLS is coming back as a 3-day stage race in 2027. This was one of my favorite events in its first few years before it moved to a gran fondo format (which I still rode, and loved). Dieter Drake can’t get enough of the race directing biz, and I’m here for it all!

• Royi Metser and Peter Ruppe have built the Avelo running shoe that I absolutely love to run in, oh, and it has a wearable sensor in the footbed that gives me all sorts of interesting data about how slow and inefficient I am at plodding around the block.

Overheard

“Every media company says it wants an AI strategy. Then you ask where its metadata lives, and the room goes quiet.”

Forwarded this week by a communications executive working with broadcasters and media-tech companies ahead of IBC.

The near-term AI land grab in media may have less to do with models than with the disorder underneath them: decades of video, audio, rights data, clips, archives, and production assets that nobody can reliably search, classify, reuse, or monetize. AI is becoming the sales pitch; metadata remediation is increasingly the actual work.

The companies that make the invisible library visible and turn it into revenue, rather than merely a better internal search bar, will have a far more durable position than those simply adding “AI-powered” to the deck.

Look for Eon Media and Ashish Agrawal (I’m an Advisor) at the IBC Show in Amsterdam next week.

Build Accordingly.

Bouker Pool · Managing Partner, Weck Enterprises · Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.

Got a tip, a fumble, or a build worth covering? Send it. Overheard exists for you.

Full disclosure: I advise and invest across sports-tech, media, youth sports, endurance, and wearables. When B&P covers a company I’m involved with, I’ll note it in the item.

This is Issue 001. Format will settle in the first three issues. Feedback welcome; this is a build in public.

I drew this a long time ago.

It was the Competitor Group (CGI) era. Rock ‘n’ Roll was the biggest marathon series in the world; Competitor magazine was still landing in mailboxes and free at specialty retail stores; Triathlete, Inside Triathlon, and VeloNews were on the newsstand; and every strategy conversation in the building came back to the same question: how do we turn a race entry into a relationship?

We were, at the time, very good at the top of the funnel. We knew how to buy runners into the start line. What we could not quite figure out, and what the whole industry could not quite figure out, was what to do with them once they said yes, and how to bring them back after they crossed the finish line.

So I started doodling and sketching what I saw as the connected runner consumer journey.

A single connected loop, with transactions marked wherever the runner was already reaching for a wallet, and a scribbled note at the bottom that has aged better than almost anything else on the page: everyone is on some type of journey.

For years, this map was directionally right and operationally out of reach. The industry knew the journey existed. It just did not know how to price it, staff it, or own it.

The 2026 RunSignup midyear report is the first time I have seen clean, industry-scale evidence that this is finally changing.

The Number That Matters Is Not the Participation Number

Almost every trade write-up of the RunSignup data leads with and focuses on the same line: races grew 5.9% per event in the first half of 2026, on top of 5% in 2025. Large events with more than 5,000 participants grew 8.2%. Race churn is running below pre-pandemic norms. Running, as an industry cliché goes, is back.

All true, not surprising, but not the most interesting or relevant data.

The most interesting number, and the one that made me stop and think, is that per-race revenue grew 9.9%, nearly two full points faster than participation (RunSignup). Revenue outpacing bodies is not a headline about a running boom in progress. It is a headline about a change in the business model. Something other than “one more runner in the start corral” is finally growing the bottom line.

Look at what else moved in the same report:

• 5Ks now average 1.3 price increases per race, up 30% year over year. Marathons average 2.5, up 13.6%. Even 10Ks and half marathons are seeing significant increases (RunSignup).

• The average marathon price range moved from $84.01 to $111.22 in 2025 to $89.16 to $120.19 in 2026 (RunSignup). The “same race, same product, one fee” model is quietly dying.

• Registrations 120+ days out jumped to 16.4%, up 84.2% year over year. Race-week registrations fell 26.6% to 17.4% (RunSignup). Marathons are now 55.4% pre-booked more than four months in advance.

• 63% of transactions are on mobile. And get out your iPhone: 31.9% of May payments were made via Apple Pay (RunSignup).

Read down the list and the story is very clear. Runners are committing earlier, on the device they carry through every stage of preparation, at prices that vary meaningfully across a tiered ladder. Events are finally being paid for the journey, not just for the bib.

The Top-of-Funnel Trap

I think back to understand why this matters, and I remember what we were actually doing at CGI, and what almost every large event company was doing at the same time.

We were spending an enormous share of our marketing energy at the very top of the sketch, the “marketing / advertising / decision” cone in the upper-left corner. National magazine media buys. Search. Direct mail. Local media. Ambassadors. Registration promos to fill the next race in the series. That work was measurable, defensible in a budget meeting, and immediately connected to a registration transaction.

Everything else on the page was, in practice, someone else’s business.

Training plans lived on third-party sites and in coaches’ inboxes. Training gear was at the specialty run retailer. Photos were from a separate vendor, with its own logo on the picture or as a watermark. Charity dollars flowed through Crowdrise, Charity Miles, and dozens of platform partners. Travel and lodging were handled by hotels and OTAs. Nutrition was at a booth at the expo. The “post-event glow” was part of an emerging trend on social media, mostly in blogs and online reviews. Re-engagement belonged, mostly, to whichever race the runner heard about next from a friend.

The event owned the transaction. Everyone else owned the journey.

This was not a moral failing; it was the incentive structure that drove us to fill corrals and drive EBITDA. Filling the top of the funnel was legible and rewarded. Serving the converted runner, the person who had already said yes, was diffuse, cross-functional, and hard to attribute. So the industry did what industries do when the metrics are misaligned with the strategy. It overinvested in acquisition and underinvested in the customers it already had in the database.

The runner, meanwhile, kept living the whole journey. She just did it across a dozen apps and vendors, none of whom were the event she was training for.

Ahead of Our Time

The group at CGI was keenly aware of the trends, the opportunity, and the pressure. To the chagrin of private equity owners who wanted to squeeze the most out of what we already had, we tried to shift the trend and reinvent the model from within.

We took a strategic stake in MapMyFitness, joining Austin Ventures and Milestone Venture Partners in the company’s $9 million Series B in June 2012, to give runners a GPS and training-tracking home connected to the events they were training for. We built a co-branded runner-travel platform with Travelocity, offering race-specific hotel blocks, bundled air and lodging, and itineraries built around early race-day starts for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon cities, because we knew a destination marathon was a trip before it was a race. We launched Gear Buzz, a flash-sale platform and short-form gear-review video segment pushed through Triathlete, Inside Triathlon, VeloNews, and Competitor magazine, with brands including Brooks and The Sports Authority, because a runner training for a half marathon was going to buy shoes, and we did not see why those dollars should leave the ecosystem. We ran an entire charity department that worked hand in hand with cause partners to build real programming, not just a fundraising minimum. We leveraged our own media to launch SportsCenter-style online segments: RunCenter, TriCenter, and VeloCenter. We understood that the athlete’s attention between races was as valuable as the race itself.

It was an incredible group of people reinventing an industry, redefining a business, and bringing outside business practices into what had, until very recently, been a mom-and-pop trade.

Some of those bets were early. Some were the right idea at the wrong altitude of capital, technology, or organizational patience. What they all had in common was an accurate read of the map. The runner’s journey was a business, not a marketing funnel, and the event company that owned it would compound value in ways the pure registration model never could.

The industry, and its owners, were not quite ready to hear that yet.

What the 2026 Data Actually Shows

A decade later, reframe the RunSignup numbers using the same journey map, and they no longer look like a pricing story. They start to resemble the ownership story we were trying to write.

Revenue growth outpacing participation is what happens when the converted runner is finally asked to spend on more than the entry fee: merchandise, hospitality, deferrals, insurance, add-ons, premium experiences, photos, team fees. The gap between 9.9% and 5.9% is where the middle of the funnel is finally showing up on the P&L.

More price steps per race is what happens when organizers stop treating registration as a single transaction and start treating it as a designed pricing ladder. It is not a punishment for late buyers. It is a recognition that the early buyer and the late buyer are different customers with different jobs to be done.

Earlier registration is the most important structural shift of all. When a marathoner books more than four months out, the organizer inherits a long, high-intent engagement window that used to belong entirely to third parties. That is the exact stretch of the sketch, from Registration through Preparation, Training, and Milestones, where the industry historically had no product. Now it has time, permission, and a mobile checkout waiting.

Large events pulling ahead is what “sense of belonging / community” from the bottom of the napkin looks like when it hits the top line. Scale, brand, and identity are once again worth paying more for. Runners are not buying a course. They are buying a place to belong.

Mobile and Apple Pay are the connective tissue. The connected journey was always going to require a device the runner carried through every stage. Now she does, and she pays with a glance.

None of this is being announced. It is happening inside the pricing pages and product roadmaps of every large event company in the country, and the data has finally caught up.

What Is Still Missing

Staring at the sketch ten-plus years later, I see that the industry is finally monetizing about half of it. The other half still has holes.

• Preparation and training are still overwhelmingly owned by third parties: Strava, TrainingPeaks, Runna, coaches, YouTube. Events have the intent data and the goal date. Very few have a training product runners actually use.

• Sponsor activation at milestones, the “sponsor incentives” box on the sketch, still consists mostly of banner ads and expo tables. Useful, contextual, journey-aware sponsor product is largely unbuilt.

• The spectator is still, for most events, a free user. Live tracking exists. A spectator product does not.

• Post-event glow and re-engagement is the highest-intent moment in the entire calendar year, and most events waste it with a “save the date” email and a discount code.

• The handoff back to the next goal, the loop from Post-Event Glow back to Decision, is the weakest link in almost every portfolio. Retention still leaks to the next shiny race and the next third-party platform.

Each of those is a business, not a feature. Each is a place where an organizer who understands the journey can build durable margin and, more importantly, a durable relationship.

The Standard the Sketch Sets

There is a version of this shift that is just yield management with better branding: squeeze the procrastinator, charge more for the same t-shirt, and call it a tiered experience. If that is where the industry lands, the runner will notice, and eventually so will the churn number.

The sketch, for all its scribbles and dated thoughts, still sets a higher standard. Everyone is on some type of journey. Weight loss. Personal best. Team building. Altruism. Vanity. Belonging. The job of an event company, and the actual product, is to help the runner complete their journey, not to extract from it.

The 2026 data shows the industry now has permission and the tools to build for the whole map. Earlier commitment, mobile-native checkout, tiered pricing, higher revenue per runner, healthier large events, low churn. That is the enabling environment we would have paid real money for at Competitor. It is also, arguably, what let CGI sell to Calera Capital for close to $250 million in December 2012, on the back of a five-year revenue CAGR of 26% and an adjusted EBITDA CAGR of 39%, even though the connected journey we were sketching would take another decade, two more owners, and a mobile checkout to arrive at scale.

The question for the next five years is whether the industry uses this new environment to comfort the afflicted, the runner who has already said yes and is waiting for us to show up for the rest of her journey, or whether we go back to afflicting the comfortable by buying strangers into the top of a funnel we still do not own.

The sketch, drawn a decade too early, still points the way.

In my career, I have had a front-row seat to much of the growth and trends in the endurance and participatory sports industry, from Rodale’s publications Runner’s World, Bicycling, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Backpacker to the build and explosive growth of the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon Series. I’ve worked on building event marketing platforms, from media empires to leading an endurance event portfolio, to become the world’s largest endurance sports platform, all tapping into destination experiences, charity platforms, and cultural moments.

The lessons have never been about more miles.

The lessons have been about people wanting a reason to train, a reason to travel, a reason to gather with friends and family, a reason to support a cause, and a reason to believe they were capable of more than they thought.

I’m viewing HYROX as the fourth wave of this movement, which is gaining attention and serious consideration for significant capital investment.

It is easy to call HYROX the next big fitness trend. Many would say we are well beyond it being a trend. HYROX may be the most visible early expression of the fourth wave of mass-participation fitness: a standardized, global, hybrid sport built around year-round training, shared experiences, destination travel, measurable progress, and repeat participation.

But I see an inherent warning embedded in its rise.

The opportunity is enormous. So is the risk of becoming culturally “cringe” before the brand becomes emotionally durable.

The Waves That Built the Market

The first wave was the original running-and-endurance boom. Beginning in the 1970s, running became accessible to ordinary people on a large scale. Local 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, marathons, and early triathlons gave people a clear challenge and a finish line.

IRONMAN emerged from that era, with its first race held in Hawaii in 1978. The brand transformed an extreme endurance test into one of the most powerful achievement identities in sport. It taught the industry that hard could be aspirational. A participant did not simply sign up for a triathlon. They committed to a transformation that involved training, equipment, coaches, travel, sacrifice, and a finish-line moment that changed how they saw themselves.

Mike Reily’s iconic voice proclaiming “…you are an IRONMAN” became more powerful than “I finished a triathlon.”

The second wave came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when participation events became branded, global, destination-led experience series.

Rock ’n’ Roll was part of that movement, with the first Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego in 1998, bringing music, running, and community together for nearly 20,000 participants. It was not just a marathon with bands. It was an effort to make the entire experience bigger than the race itself.

Crossing the finish line and the athletic accomplishment still resonated. But the event expanded to include live entertainment, sponsor experiences, spectator energy, charity, medals, city identity, travel, and a reason for friends and family to become part of the weekend.

At the front of the race were elite athletes like Ryan Hall, Kara Goucher, Shalane Flanagan, and Meb Keflezighi. They brought legitimacy, aspiration, and real competitive drama.

At the back were “jolly joggers” and walkers stopping at mile after mile to dance to the bands, smiling and soaking in the full experience.

That was not a contradiction. That was the product.

A Rock ’n’ Roll race could be a personal-best attempt, a first-half-marathon breakthrough, a charity fundraiser, a destination weekend, and a citywide celebration, all on the same course.

The third wave took fitness into physical gyms, the community, and spectacle.

CrossFit transformed training into identity. It created coaches, local tribes, benchmark workouts, measurable progress, and the feeling that the gym was a sport.

Obstacle course racing, through Tough Mudder, Spartan, Rugged Maniac, Color Run, and others, made physical challenge social. The proposition was simple: recruit friends, get dirty, overcome obstacles, take photos, and celebrate together for social currency.

CrossFit built a powerful, cult-like training culture. OCR built powerful shared moments.

But each had limits. CrossFit could feel technical, intense, and culturally intimidating. OCR relied heavily on novelty, expensive outdoor operations, complicated logistics, and uneven repeat participation.

HYROX has the opportunity to combine all the strengths from the prior phases.

Why HYROX Is a Fourth-Wave Platform

HYROX gives people a clear, repeatable test: running combined with functional workout stations, in a standardized order, against a clock.

That standardization is not boring or easy. It is the operating system.

A marathon is meaningful because 26.2 miles means something. A half marathon is meaningful because 13.1 miles means something. The city, the crowd, the weather, the course, and the memories may change, but the distance remains recognizable.

That common standard enables training plans, personal records, qualifications, coaching, clubs, content, and lifelong participation.

HYROX brings that same logic to hybrid fitness.

A participant knows what they are training for. Coaches know how to prepare them. Gyms can organize programming around the race. Friends can train together. Athletes can compare performances across cities.

Similar test. Different story.

That has made a powerful foundation for a global participation platform.

The fourth wave will be defined by brands that connect local training behavior to global experience. People will train at their neighborhood gym with friends and coaches, then travel to compete in a recognizable sport with a meaningful score, a global community, and a destination worth remembering.

HYROX is well positioned to lead that wave if it builds the system around the race, not just the race itself.

Race in the Front, Party in the Back

The mass-participation formula has not changed.

The front of the field needs to be credible. HYROX needs elite athletes, consistent standards, transparent judging, meaningful rankings, a championship pathway, and stories that make the best athletes worth following.

Elite competition gives a sport aspiration.

But the back of the field must feel welcomed, not tolerated.

The first-time participant should not feel like an extra in an influencer’s highlight reel. They should see a place for themselves from the moment they register. Doubles and team formats must remain central. Gym groups should feel like a place where they belong. A parent returning to fitness, a runner learning to lift, a former athlete rebuilding confidence, or two friends making a shared commitment should all see themselves in the event.

The best HYROX participant may never contend for a podium.

But they may train for months, race with a friend, bring family, travel to another city, raise money for a cause, share their result, recruit others, and register again next year.

That is the real participation flywheel.

Charity Can Deepen the Meaning

Rock ’n’ Roll became more powerful because it was never only about running.

Nonprofits used the series as a platform to support participants and raise millions of dollars for causes that mattered. Runners did not merely buy an entry. They publicly committed to something bigger than themselves.

Choose a cause. Set a goal. Ask people to support you. Train through the hard weeks. Cross the finish line knowing that your effort created an impact beyond your own accomplishment.

HYROX has a natural opportunity to build this into its culture.

The physical challenge is real. That gives people a powerful reason to connect their effort to a mission, a person, a community, or a cause. A meaningful charity strategy could create an on-ramp for new participants, deepen emotional commitment, bring nonprofits into the ecosystem, and create stories that are more human than another personal-record graphic.

“I am racing HYROX” says something about fitness.

“I am racing HYROX for this cause” invites a community into the story.

Destination, Not Just Location

Rock ’n’ Roll participants did not simply travel to a race.

They traveled to a destination for a race weekend.

They came with friends, family, training partners, and fundraising teams. They chose cities they wanted to experience. They explored neighborhoods, booked restaurants, planned celebrations, and turned a personal athletic goal into a shared cultural moment.

The race was the anchor.

The destination created the story.

That distinction matters for HYROX. A race can be transactional: register, arrive, compete, leave. A global experience series gives participants a reason to choose the city, coordinate a group, stay longer, train together, celebrate together, and leave with a memory that lasts beyond the result.

Rock ’n’ Roll used city-specific medals and multi-event rewards to make this behavior visible. Participants collected locations, earned recognition across the series, and turned a race calendar into a personal quest.

Which city is next?

HYROX can build the same loyalty behavior. City-specific achievements, regional circuits, global challenges, travel programs for gym communities, and rewards that feel earned can turn an event schedule into a map of personal achievement.

A medal should not be a promotional trinket.

It should be proof of commitment, travel, friendship, and accomplishment.

The Residency Opportunity

HYROX’s residency concept could become one of the most consequential ideas in the category.

Traditional mass-participation events create a powerful but compressed weekend spike. Flights fill up. Hotels become expensive. Restaurants, roads, venues, and airports are strained. Everyone arrives, races, and leaves in the same narrow window.

That can create energy. It can also create friction.

A residency creates a different relationship with a host city.

Rather than forcing every athlete, spectator, sponsor, and activation into a single weekend, HYROX can spread participation over a longer period. Athletes can arrive and depart at different times. They can train in local gyms. They can attend community workouts. They can explore the city, eat in local restaurants, recover locally, and build a real trip around their race slot.

The city becomes part of the experience, not just the backdrop.

This creates a more sustained impact:

• Participants have more flexibility and a richer destination experience.

• Friends and family can enjoy the city without navigating it on an overcrowded weekend.

• Local gyms, studios, coaches, hotels, restaurants, and retailers gain more ways to participate.

• Sponsors have more meaningful touchpoints than a single expo activation.

• Host locations benefit from a more distributed visitor economy.

• HYROX develops a deeper, more authentic local connection.

Done right, a residency is not an operational workaround.

It is a new kind of destination product.

Scale Without Losing Exclusivity

The hardest challenge for every successful participation brand is preserving the feeling that created demand as it grows.

Growth can become a trap.

Registration turns into a frantic scramble. Prices rise. Race waves become crowded. Hospitality becomes a transaction. The event feels less personal. The participant feels less like a member of a community and more like a unit of volume.

That is how a differentiated brand becomes a commodity.

The residency model can provide an answer. It allows HYROX to expand access while protecting the quality of race waves, athlete services, local programming, hospitality, and community moments.

Scale does not mean simply adding more people.

Scale means preserving the quality of the experience while creating more ways to belong.

Premium does not have to mean exclusionary.

A first-time doubles team can choose a standard race slot and a community workout. A returning athlete can earn earlier access, location rewards, or a limited-capacity training experience. A gym group can build a complete travel package centered on racing, local programming, hospitality, and celebration.

Everyone takes the same core test.

But everyone has a path to a deeper relationship with the brand.

HYROX’s Cringe Problem

Here is the risk.

HYROX’s greatest near-term threat may not be a competing race series. It may be cultural overexposure.

Every fast-growing participation brand develops a language, aesthetic, and set of rituals. Those can create belonging. But they can also become a shortcut to parody when the brand takes itself too seriously.

HYROX is already exposed to that risk.

The name itself, commonly interpreted as “Hybrid Rockstars,” carries a high level of built-in self-regard. The social feed often amplifies the most performative version of the category: shirtless selfies, dramatic finish-line collapses, cold plunges, protein stacks, cinematic training edits, and declarations of warrior-like transformation.

To critics, the event can become an expensive indoor workout staged in a convention center and presented as an epic heroic odyssey.

The low-skill, repetitive movement profile creates another opening. CrossFit purists may dismiss it as watered-down functional fitness. Endurance purists may see it as fitness theater. Others may read the entire category as first-world manual labor: paying to push sleds, drag weights, and carry sandbags indoors.

Those reactions should not be ignored.

The parody reel around “HYBRID ROCKSTAR” is a small but useful warning. The community already recognizes that the language can tip into comedy.

This does not mean HYROX is failing. In fact, brands only become targets of parody once they have entered the culture.

But the internet is fast. A status marker can quickly become a cliché. Ironman’s M-Dot tattoo is both a meaningful symbol of a major accomplishment and a familiar target for cultural jokes. HYROX needs to understand that dynamic before its own symbols get defined by outsiders.

Take the Race Seriously, Not Yourself

Gen Z and younger consumers do not reject ambition.

They reject unearned gravitas.

They want brands that understand two things can be true at once:

This is hard.

And this is also a little ridiculous.

That is the shift HYROX needs to make quickly.

The brand should move from “Hybrid Rockstars” toward a more grounded proposition: train, show up, do the work, laugh at the chaos, and come back better.

The tone should be more self-aware and more human.

Less cinematic self-mythology.

More honest truth.

The content should celebrate:

• The athlete who underestimated the sled.

• The doubles partner who disappeared during wall balls.

• The post-race limp down the hotel stairs.

• The person who said they were “just doing it for fun” and then immediately checked the rankings.

• The family member who still cannot explain what a SkiErg is.

• The friend group that turns a race into a weekend they will talk about for years.

The message should be simple:

Take the test seriously. Do not take yourself too seriously.

That is not a retreat from elite sport, premium experience, or high performance. It is what makes those things believable and sustainable.

Build a Sporting Life, Not a Personal Brand

The early adopter “hybrid athlete” has helped HYROX grow. That influencer archetype will not be enough to sustain it.

The durable hero is not always the person with the perfect physique, sponsor code, and dramatic finish-line collapse.

It is the person who trains with a sibling. The gym community that travels together. The parent returning to fitness. The former runner learning to lift. The former lifter learning to run. The first-time doubles team. The athlete raising money for a cause. The participant who misses their target, laughs, and enters again.

Rock ’n’ Roll worked because it could hold elite legitimacy and mass inclusivity on the same course.

HYROX should aim for the same thing.

At the front, sport.

Throughout the field, humanity.

The Real Opportunity

The commercial opportunity far outweighs the entry fees.

The fourth wave will be built around the full participant journey: training, coaching, gyms, apparel, footwear, equipment, recovery, nutrition, charity, travel, hospitality, content, community, recognition, and repeat participation.

HYROX athletes live in several consumer categories at once. They run. They strength train. They attend group classes. They buy performance products. They follow coaches. They use health data. They travel for events. They share their journey publicly.

A HYROX athlete does not simply need generic running gear or gym apparel with an event logo. They need products that work through running, sled pushes, burpees, carries, lunges, and wall balls. Apparel must manage sweat, stay in place, resist abrasion, and allow full movement under fatigue.

That is not merchandise.

That is a real product category.

The brands that win will not simply sponsor the race. They will make preparation, race day, recovery, travel, and the decision to come back better.

The Test Is Retention

Every participation boom has a first finish line.

The durable ones create a second, third, and tenth.

IRONMAN proved that hard can become an identity. Rock ’n’ Roll proved that a race can become a destination, a charity engine, a city celebration, and a global experience series. CrossFit proved the retention power of local training community. OCR proved the appeal of shared challenge and social adventure.

HYROX has the chance to bring those lessons together.

The key measure is not first-time registrations.

It is whether people return.

Do they train between races? Do they improve? Do they bring friends? Do they fundraise? Do they travel to another city? Do they collect meaningful achievements? Do they build a relationship with a local gym community? Do they laugh at themselves along the way?

If the answer is yes, HYROX will become more than a fitness boom.

It will define the fourth wave of mass participation fitness: a global platform where people train with purpose, race with friends, travel for experiences, support causes, earn meaningful recognition, and come back for the next story.

Randy Levine’s recent opinion piece in the Sports Business Journal, “Trump council’s Randy Levine: Congress must act to fix college sports,” got me thinking and sent me back to two articles I wrote earlier this year:

“An Executive Order Won’t Save College Sports. Here’s What Might.” and “The Broken Pipeline: How the Collapse of College Sports Threatens U.S. Olympic Dominance.”

Levine is right: Congress needs to get involved.

The current system is a mess. NIL rules vary by state. The courts keep changing the operating environment. The transfer portal has become a full-time roster-management issue. Revenue sharing is here, but nobody has confidence that the current structure will hold. Meanwhile, the gap between the schools that can spend at the top of the market and everyone trying to keep up continues to widen.

Nobody is operating with real certainty. Athletes do not know what rules will apply from one year to the next. Schools are trying to make decisions about rosters, scholarships, staffing, and sports sponsorship without knowing what the rules will look like in six months. Conferences are caught in the middle, trying to create standards they may not have the legal authority to enforce.

The people most likely to feel the consequences are often the ones with the least leverage: women’s and Olympic sports, especially at schools where football and men’s basketball consume the resources and attention required to compete at the top of the market.

So yes, Congress should act.

But before it does, we need to be clear about what we are trying to save.

Are we trying to build a modern college-sports system that recognizes where the market, the law, and athlete expectations have already gone? Or are we trying to put the old system back together with a federal seal of approval?

Those are not the same thing.

An Executive Order Won’t Fix This

The White House can make college sports a priority. It can direct agencies, push for coordination, and elevate issues such as athlete safety, transfers, eligibility, women’s sports, and Olympic-sport opportunities. That matters, and the recent executive actions did exactly that.

But an executive order is not a durable solution.

It cannot resolve the antitrust questions now at the center of the college-sports business model. It cannot create a national NIL system that survives the next administration or the next court ruling. It cannot fully resolve the conflict between state laws. And it cannot answer the basic question that keeps coming back: what rights should athletes have in an enterprise that depends on their performance, their identities, and their ability to draw an audience?

That requires Congress.

The new revenue-sharing model only reinforces the point. Direct payments have begun, but the system is still provisional, with unresolved questions around compensation limits, NIL enforcement, Title IX, and long-term athlete protections. As Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione put it, the current arrangement is “not, in its current form, a long-term solution.” That is why Congress should not treat the settlement framework as an endpoint. It is a bridge to whatever comes next.

The danger is that Congress sees the chaos and tries to solve it by giving schools, conferences, and the NCAA a version of the authority they once had, without confronting why that authority stopped working in the first place.

That would create order. It would not necessarily create a better system.

We Have Been Here Before

The closest comparison may be the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act.

The original Amateur Sports Act of 1978 brought order to a fragmented Olympic system. It created the governance structure for the U.S. Olympic movement, empowered national governing bodies, and gave the U.S. Olympic Committee a central role. At the time, that was important and necessary.

But the Act was built around an amateur model just as the business of the Olympics was changing. Television rights were becoming more valuable. Sponsorship was becoming more sophisticated. Professional athletes were entering the Games. Athlete endorsements and commercial opportunities were growing. The Olympics were becoming a global media and commercial enterprise, while much of the governance language and institutional thinking still reflected an amateur-era model.

The law eventually had to catch up.

The 1998 amendments removed amateurism as a formal eligibility requirement and more fully integrated the Paralympic movement. Congress later passed the Empowering Olympic, Paralympic, and Amateur Athletes Act in 2020, strengthening oversight, safety, and athlete representation. Athletes now hold at least one-third of voting power on USOPC and NGB boards, including representation from recent competitors.

Those changes were meaningful. They also came after the world around the system had already changed.

That is the point college sports should take seriously.

The Ted Stevens Act was not a mistake because it created structure. The problem was that the structure was built for an economic reality that did not last. By the time the law adjusted, the market had already moved well ahead of it.

Congress should learn from that.

Do not write a law for the version of college sports people wish still existed.

The Business of College Sports Has Changed

There is still a tendency to talk about NIL, revenue sharing, the transfer portal, and athlete marketing as if they are temporary distortions of a stable amateur model.

They are not temporary.

They are the market catching up with the value athletes have been creating for decades.

Football and men’s basketball are not simply campus activities. They are major media and entertainment businesses. Their economics drive conference realignment, coaching salaries, facilities, donor behavior, recruiting, scheduling, and increasingly the entire strategic direction of athletic departments.

NIL has made athlete marketing a legitimate part of the landscape. Revenue sharing has made it even harder to maintain the fiction that athletes are not central economic participants. The transfer portal has exposed what many people were reluctant to call a labor market, even though athletes have been making labor-market decisions all along.

They look at playing time. They look at coaching stability. They look at the roster. They look at money, academic fit, location, brand opportunity, and what each decision means for their future.

That is not going away because coaches, administrators, or fans are tired of it.

The Olympic movement went through a similar shift. The IOC generated $7.6 billion in revenue during the 2017–2020/21 cycle, a reminder that the Olympics stopped being a pure amateur enterprise long ago.

College sports is now in their own version of that transition.

The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About

The biggest problem with the current debate is that it tends to start and end with football and men’s basketball.

That is understandable. They drive the money. They are the reason Congress is being pushed to act. They determine which conferences grow, which schools get left behind, and how the industry thinks about revenue sharing.

But they are not the entire system.

For swimming, track and field, gymnastics, wrestling, rowing, volleyball, water polo, fencing, skiing, and many other Olympic sports, college athletics is still the main pathway between youth competition and elite international sport.

There is no deep professional system waiting to take its place.

A handful of professional teams, prize purses, clubs, training centers, and sponsors cannot replace the number of roster spots, scholarships, coaches, facilities, competition opportunities, and academic support that colleges provide.

This is no longer a forecast. It is the operating model. Schools that opted into the House settlement can distribute up to $20.5 million per year directly to athletes, but that amount covers all sports in the department. Early allocation plans for a number of major programs have indicated that football will receive roughly 75 percent of available direct-payment pools, with much of the remainder flowing to men’s and women’s basketball. The exact allocations will vary by school, but the direction is clear: everyone else is competing for the margin.

We can call this revenue sharing, market correction, or modernization. But the math does not change. Unless a school finds new money, every new dollar committed to the revenue engine increases pressure on sports that lack their own media leverage.

When a school cuts a swim team, a wrestling program, a gymnastics team, or a track program, it is not just cleaning up a budget.

It is taking capacity out of the American athlete-development system.

That reduction moves through the entire pipeline. Fewer college opportunities affect recruiting. They affect club teams and coaches. They affect the choices families make when they are deciding whether to invest time and money in a sport. They affect whether a talented athlete can keep developing after high school.

Then, years later, they affect the national-team pool.

This is the hard truth: a school may be making a perfectly rational decision when it sends more money toward football, men’s basketball, facilities, coaches, and revenue-sharing obligations. But when every school makes the same rational decision, the result is a much weaker Olympic-development system.

The damage will not always show up in next year’s budget. It will show up years later, when fewer athletes enter the system, and the national-team depth that once looked automatic is no longer there.

That is what I meant by the broken pipeline.

What Congress Should Actually Do

The Protect College Sports Act has useful components. It attempts to establish national NIL standards, reduce conflict among state laws, and provide limited antitrust protection in defined areas.

That is a start. It is not the end of the conversation.

A law that gives institutions more control, limits athlete mobility, and protects schools from legal exposure may make athletic departments feel more stable. But it will not create a durable solution if athletes have no real say in the system, if Olympic-sport protections are just language on a page, and if schools receive legal protection without clear obligations in return.

If Congress gives college sports national preemption or limited antitrust protection, it should receive enforceable commitments in return, not aspirational language, advisory committees, or promises that disappear when the budget tightens.

That should include:

• Clear national NIL rules, including contract disclosure, agent standards, education, and protection from bad deals.

• A real athlete voice in governance, with voting power rather than another advisory group.

• Narrow antitrust protection tied to measurable obligations, not broad immunity.

• Scholarships, medical care, insurance, mental-health support, and degree-completion protections that do not disappear because an athlete transfers, gets hurt, loses a coach, or is caught in a roster cut.

• Sport-by-sport transparency on spending, roster opportunities, scholarships, and program cuts.

• Real enforcement around women’s and Olympic sport participation, not another promise that disappears when budgets tighten.

• A serious funding strategy for athlete development as more of the money concentrates at the top of college sports.

The U.S. cannot keep asking colleges, national governing bodies, and nonprofit sports organizations to carry out a national athlete-development mission without ensuring economic support for it. The Olympic system has lived with that tension for decades: a public-facing national responsibility carried largely by private organizations with uneven resources and uneven commercial leverage.

The new system is already testing the limits of institutional rulemaking. The College Sports Commission is intended to enforce the direct-payment framework, while the Deloitte-operated NIL Go clearinghouse is designed to review certain third-party NIL arrangements for valid business purpose and market comparability. Challenges to compensation restrictions, NIL enforcement, and Title IX allocation decisions are already part of the landscape. That is not a side issue. It is evidence that the current model is an interim structure, not a durable settlement.

The Question Congress Has to Answer

The most important question is not whether the biggest athletic departments feel more stable after a new federal law passes.

The question is whether the system still works for the athletes and sports that do not have the same media leverage.

Will a young swimmer still have a path to college? Will a wrestler have meaningful opportunities outside a shrinking number of programs? Will a gymnast, rower, skier, volleyball player, track athlete, or water polo player still have a bridge from youth sport to elite competition?

Will athletes have real influence over the rules that affect their health, compensation, eligibility, and careers?

And will schools that receive legal protection be required to uphold their side of the bargain?

Those are the questions Congress should answer.

Levine is right that Congress needs to act. But Congress should not pass a 1978-style answer for a 2026 sports economy, protecting the revenue engine while the athlete-development pipeline beneath it slowly disappears.

College sports needs a national framework. It needs rules, accountability, a sustainable funding model, and a governance structure built for the market we actually have, not the amateur model we keep pretending is still there.

This is about more than the future of intercollegiate athletics. It is about the broader infrastructure underneath it: the physical-education teacher introducing a child to movement, the school program that makes sport accessible, the unstructured play that builds confidence and curiosity, the community coach, the local club, and the young athlete who discovers a sport before anyone tells them there is a business model behind it.

College sports sits in the middle of that system. It gives young people something to pursue, creates a bridge from youth participation to high-level competition, and supplies a critical part of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic pipeline. If we hollow it out in the name of protecting the revenue engine, the damage will not be confined to the college campus. It will travel backward through the entire system and eventually show up in the athletes who give us a reason to cheer for Team USA every two years.

Not the kind you see from the stands. Not the highlight-reel version of the Instagram posts I made during the event, where everyone is smiling, crushing their starts and swims, and the athlete is holding a ribbon at the end.

I mean the real version.

The early alarms. The pullout couches. The meal planning. The warm-up schedules. The recovery gear. The checking and rechecking of heat sheets. The drop-off, the time, the anticipation before the first race. The pride welling up into tears as you see them in “the zone” with headphones on, looking like Michael Phelps staring down the competition. The quiet moments before a race, when you are trying to look calm while your heart is doing something entirely different

A week at Nats in Ocala, Florida, with my son was good for the soul.

Somewhere between my early morning miles and his hotel-room recovery routine, I was reminded of something important about sports parenting.

Our job is not to carry the pressure for them.

It is to create enough calm around them so they can learn and grow to carry their own.

The Parent’s Race

Parents have their own version of competition week.

We feel the nerves before they do. We replay the possibilities. We look at the meet schedule one more time, even though we already know exactly when the session begins.

We worry about sleep, nutrition, hydration, recovery, traffic, lane assignments, goggles, suits, weather, and whether the athlete is really as relaxed as they say they are.

We want to help. Of course we do. And, many of us want to race!

But there is a fine line between being prepared and making the experience heavier than it needs to be.

The young athlete already knows what is at stake. They have put in the work. They have shown up for the early practices, the hard sets, the dryland sessions, the missed weekends with friends, and the long season that brought them to one week in Florida.

They do not need us to add another layer of anxiety.

They need stability. They need a wingman.

That does not mean indifference. It means being attentive without becoming overbearing. It means having the snacks packed, the ride ready, and the recovery tools available, then letting the athlete decide whether to read, rest, watch bad television, or sit quietly in the hotel room before a race.

Let Them Own It

My son’s morning routine was different from mine because it should be.

I needed a run to settle into the day. He needed stillness. Summer reading. Texting friends and social media silliness. Compression boots. Shoulder recovery. A little mindless TV.

His approach was not a lack of seriousness. It was his way of preparing.

That is one of the harder lessons in youth sports. Parents can confuse their own preferred routine with the athlete’s best routine.

The truth is that young athletes need room to discover what works for them.

They need to learn how to prepare when the stakes rise. They need to learn how to manage nerves, recover after a disappointing swim, and reset before the next opportunity.

Those are not just athletic skills. They are life skills.

The goal is not to create a perfect performance environment. The goal is to give them enough space and support to figure out how to perform when things are not perfect.

At a meet like Y Nats, everything can feel bigger and heavier.

The pool deck is bigger. The arena is larger. College coaches are walking around in their school gear. There are more fans, and the cheering is louder. The competition is deeper. The margins are smaller.

A great swim can bring exhilaration. A missed goal can bring frustration.

Both are part of the experience.

The athlete who learns how to navigate those moments is building something more durable than a time on a scoreboard.

The Moments Between Races

The best parts of a trip like this are not always the races.

Sometimes it is the early quiet in a hotel room before the day begins. Sometimes it is the drive to the pool. Sometimes it is the post-race meal, when the conversation has nothing to do with a split, a place, or what comes next.

Those moments matter because time and youth sports move fast.

Seasons overlap. Training schedules fill up. Travel becomes routine. It is easy to let the calendar turn the whole experience into a transaction: effort in, result out.

But that is not why most of us got into this.

We want our kids to find something that challenges them. Something that teaches leadership, sportsmanship, competitiveness, and humility. Something that gives them friends, structure, confidence, resilience, and a relationship with hard work.

We want them to experience the satisfaction of doing something difficult well, as well as the humility of falling short and coming back for another try.

The podium, the time, the cut, and the ranking can all be meaningful.

But they are not the whole story.

The whole story is the shared experience: the early alarms, the hotel breakfasts, the forgotten snacks, the recovery gear spread across the room, the nervous energy, the proud moments, and the simple privilege of being there.

Good for the Soul

A week in Ocala reminded me that sports parenting is not about trying to make every moment perfect.

It is about being present.

Be prepared, but do not project your anxiety.

Offer support, but do not take ownership of the performance.

Celebrate the work, the teammates, the experience, and not just the outcome.

And remember that, eventually, they will not remember every heat, every split, or every place. They may remember the hotel room, the terrible television, the smoothies, the early morning quiet, and the fact that you were there.

That is good for the soul.

Last week, I spent five days in the chlorine tank at the FAST Aquatic Center in Ocala, Florida, where thousands of parents and families, coaches, volunteers, and officials gathered to support young athletes from over 95 YMCAs competing at the YMCA National Long Course Championships.

It was exhausting. It was emotional. It was extraordinary.

And I would do it again tomorrow.

This was a big one for him. Five days of long-course racing at the end of a summer he had worked so hard to qualify for and be ready to represent his new team. So, in true Pool family fashion, we overprepared.

We packed one entire bag for the trip with Hyperice gear (the massage gun, the X2 shoulder system, his Normatec Elite compression boots), a Magic Bullet blender, and his specific nutrition preferences (Skratch Labs drink mix, Clif Bloks, Honey Stinger Waffles, and assorted other items). He recovered from a big injury earlier in the year and put in the hours upon hours of work, so if we were going to Ocala for five days of championship swimming, we were going to treat it as it should be treated: FIVE DAYS OF CHAMPIONSHIP SWIMMING!

We arrived at the Courtyard Marriott on Monday and set up camp to be ready for the first events Tuesday morning.

He got “the big bed.” I got the pullout couch.

We unpacked, hit the nearby Publix for the other essentials, and then I set up an athlete’s table in the room with all the essentials for the week. It looked less like a hotel room and more like a small performance lab for a healthy NIL athlete run by someone with no sleep and no budget discipline.

Every morning, I was up at 5:00 a.m. I would tiptoe to the bathroom, get my running gear on, guzzle down my IM8, grab a bar, and slip out unnoticed for a run.

That was my time to clear my head, catch up with mom back home, and run out the butterflies.

Then I came back, made smoothies, got breakfast together, packed snacks, checked the schedule, checked it again, and started getting him ready for the day.

He had a better plan.

He would sit on the bed, work through his summer reading, watch terrible TV, and cycle through the Normatec boots and the X2 shoulder system.

Monday evening, we arrived at FAST for a team warm-up session. I walked towards the stairs up to the stands and saw something that stopped me.

This is cool. Is this part of the facility, or is it here for the meet?

Then, at the top of the stairs, on the concourse under the stands. There it was.

Hyperice had set up a full recovery station on the concourse.

Row of chairs. Normatec boots. Products to try. Products to buy. A legitimate recovery experience in the middle of the YMCA National swim meet.

Not a professional event. Not a college championship. A youth swim meet with athletes 18 and under, and Hyperice was treating it like the big time.

The photo I took of the empty chairs was the last time I saw them empty. For the rest of the meet, the recovery space was full. Athletes were in line. Coaches were using it. Officials were using it. Parents were using it. I watched people walk away carrying newly purchased Hyperice gear.

That is what good event activation looks like.

It is not a logo on a banner or someone handing out a free sticker. It is showing up with something people need, in the moment they need it.

I caught up with Grant Geisler, who was running the Hyperice program, and we had a great conversation. We also shared some appreciation for Jess Miller, who recently left the company and, I’m sure, played a role in deciding that this was a great place for Hyperice to have a presence.

I was already a Hyperice customer. I swear by the products. My son swears by the products. But seeing the company show up in Ocala at YMCA Nationals and give young athletes the same kind of recovery experience typically reserved for professionals or more well-known events gave me a new level of respect for the brand.

The swim meet is over. We made it home (a whole other story about a brand - goes by AA - that is on the opposite side of the brand respect spectrum). The pullout couch is behind me.

My ‘Sports Parent Rehab Program’ is very much underway, wearing MY Normatec compression boots!

A lot of the conversation around artificial intelligence feels obsessed with catching people using it. In some places, that makes sense. In education, in publishing, anywhere originality and honesty matter, there should be standards. There should be accountability. There should be a line between doing the work and outsourcing the thinking.

But all AI use is not the same.

Some people use it because they have no original thoughts of their own and want to repurpose other people’s work until it looks like theirs. That is not creativity. That is not insight. That is substitution (and stealing), and it deserves to be called out for what it is. The same goes for using automation to flood feeds and market communications with volume over value, churning out endless posts, summaries, and hot takes designed to make someone look smarter or more authoritative in a particular industry than they really are.

I was having a conversation with a tech executive recently who sees another side of this problem in the hiring process. Kids right out of college are applying for engineering jobs with huge salaries, but they cannot actually write code without AI doing the heavy lifting. They do not have the technical foundation; they cannot explain what they built, and they often return code with major security risks baked in. That kind of dependence on AI, without real problem-solving ability or practical know-how, is becoming more common. What worries me is that our system is not teaching enough students the proper foundation. AI should be a resource, not the definitive source of the work and output.

But there is another kind of AI use that is very different. For some of us, it is not a shortcut around thought. It is a bridge to thought. A way to get past the friction that keeps ideas trapped in your head, especially when the wiring is not always cooperative. Mild ADHD. Dyslexia. The familiar gap between knowing what you want to say and getting it cleanly onto the page. AI, used well, can help close that gap.

That is the part people miss.

The real unlock is not simply speed. It is not productivity for productivity’s sake. It is reclaimed time. Time to think more deliberately. Time to slow down instead of rushing through the mess. Time to be more intentional with the process and thought instead of getting stuck inside it.

That has changed the way I work. It has changed the way I write. It has changed the way I think.

And in a way, it has changed how I parent.

My son and I have found ourselves enjoying something old and mechanical again: driving a manual “four-on-the-floor” car. No automation. No noise (well, to be honest, “Swamp Thing” is one loud automobile). No hurry. Just the road, the music, the conversation, and the simple pleasure of staying engaged with what is happening right in front of us. We joke about people “camping” in the left lane as we pass on the right, but there is something real in that. It is about resisting the constant pull to accelerate everything to get to the next.

That has started to show up elsewhere too.

I see it in the way he studies. I see it in how he approaches swim training, stroke technique, and race preparation. There is more care there now. More intention. Less drift.

Of course, it is not perfect. He is a 17-year-old boy living in a world packed with distractions, media, and noise. And I am a type A athlete who still wants the next rep, the next milestone, the next finish line. We are both still learning how to slow down enough to see what is actually in front of us.

This summer, after his swim season ended and he shifted into training on his own for the school year and the Air Force Academy CFA, I built him a simple web app to manage swim, dryland, and test prep. I used AI, and in a short time I had something practical that helps keep him on track without me having to write it all out on paper or monitor the workouts. That saves time, reduces the stress of figuring it all out manually, and gives us more room to spend our energy where it matters most: working out, staying focused, and being more deliberate and intentional about the moment.

It is a small example, but to me it says a lot. AI is not the point. What it gives back to us is the point. If it helps remove friction, create clarity, and free up time for actual work, actual thinking, and actual presence, then it is doing something valuable.

The younger generation may actually be better at detecting AI than the rest of us, and that filter will get more interesting as AI becomes harder to spot. I saw that firsthand recently. I was digging through music for a project and came across an artist named Tracey Moore with a song called “Legends Are Made.” It had a fun feel to it, catchy music, lyrics that worked. I played it for my son while we were driving, and within a minute he said, “That’s AI.”

I asked if he had heard it before. He hadn’t. He just knew.

So I had him look it up, and sure enough, it was 100 percent AI.

I was floored. And honestly, impressed. I asked him how he knew, and he just shrugged and said, “I just did.”

That moment stuck with me. Innate AI detection was not something I had really considered before. But now I am fascinated by it. As AI gets better and less obviously machine-made, that human instinct may become even more valuable. Not because it will be perfect. Not because it will always be right. But because it may tell us something important about authenticity, pattern, lived experiences, and feel.

That is why I do not see this technology as a simple moral binary.

Not all technology is good. Not all of it is bad. Most of it depends on how it is used, and by whom, and for what purpose. When AI is used to deceive, manipulate, or fake something that should have been earned, that is a problem. When it is used as an unlock, a way to overcome roadblocks, sharpen focus, and help someone become more fully themselves, that is something else entirely.

That has been my experience.

AI has not made me less thoughtful. It has made me more deliberate. It has helped me slow down, clear the static, and spend more time on what matters. And that reclaimed space has had a ripple effect: in my work, my writing, my parenting, and the way I move through the world.

The real question is not whether AI is used.

The real question is whether it is used to avoid thought or to unlock it.