No rest in this household, and no time for the towels to dry. We went straight from the last water polo game of the season into high school swim practice, which started bright and early Monday. This weekend we jump right back into racing, with YMCA Tsunamis club meet through the weekend. Now it’s time to set some benchmark times, see where we are, hopefully get a few college coaches to notice, and build toward the championships in March. You can find me in my happy place this weekend!
The sports business never rests, and apparently neither does this aquatics family.
If you follow the industry, you already know where everyone was looking this week. ESPN locked up the expanded 24-team College Football Playoff for roughly $1.7 billion over five years, which also wipes out the Power Four conference championship games, according to Barrett Media. Washington set the college naming-rights record with a 10-year, $70 million deal that turns Husky Stadium into Columbia Bank Stadium, per Sports Business Journal. Fox closed its $22 billion Roku acquisition, 1892 Holdings agreed to put more than £2 billion into Liverpool, and Gotham FC raised $100 million at a $350 million valuation, according to The 4th Quarter. The NHL is lining up its next media negotiation, per CNBC. Those stories will get plenty of airtime elsewhere. This week I’m pivoting to the ones that won’t lead the business shows but will shape who gets paid, who gets protected, and who gets a seat at the table: a players’ term sheet in Knoxville, a Team USA capital raise that leaves the athletes’ question open, a pro league buying the youth tournaments kids grow up on, and a youth market that keeps getting priced. Some of it makes the experience better for the athlete; most of it makes it more expensive; and we all try to read the leaves to tell which way is up before the press release hits the wire.
That’s the beat. Welcome to Issue 011
The Cap Table
1. Tennessee players put a labor contract on paper ·
College Sports · NIL
Tennessee’s men’s basketball players and Athletes.org released what CBS Sports describes as the first collective bargaining term sheet in college sports. It proposes one athletic services agreement in place of revenue sharing and school-affiliated NIL, a bargained cap with a spending floor, guaranteed minimum pay, full guaranteed pay for injured players, a 15-day transfer window, and agent fees capped at 5%. It is not a contract, and Tennessee’s administration has not agreed to the terms, although athletic director Danny White backed the concept.
That caveat matters less than the document itself. For three years, college sports has been run on settlements, workarounds, and collectives, with everyone insisting the athletes are not employees while paying them like free agents. Three elected players sat down with their own department and wrote the thing nobody in Indianapolis or Washington would write: what the job actually is, what it pays, and what happens when you get hurt. The football team has privately voted to have Athletes.org represent it too. Whether the Protect College Sports Act gets there first is the open question. Either way, the people doing the work just showed up to the negotiation with a draft. That is usually how leverage starts.
2. Team USA goes looking for investors. Who’s the athletes’ union? ·
Olympic Sports · NIL
The USOPC is standing up a new commercial company, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Ventures (OMG, Vik Singh - 100dayskier - is so GOOD!), to hold Team USA’s sponsorship, licensing, content, and direct-to-consumer business after LA28, and chief executive Sarah Hirshland told Sportico that private equity, institutional capital, and sovereign wealth are all on the table. Sky News reported the committee is working with The Raine Group, that the deal could take the form of a stake sale or a debt raise, and that the rights could be valued in the billions. Hirshland’s pitch is that this is “about growing the overall revenue pie for the constituencies that we serve.”
Fair enough. So here is the critical question: when the pie gets bigger, who gets a contract? Put the Tennessee term sheet next to this story, and the gap is hard to miss. College athletes, who were amateurs five years ago, are now negotiating caps, floors, and injury guarantees. Olympians, whose names and faces are the asset an investor would be buying, still have no collective seat at that table. The Games keep getting more professional on the commercial side. The athletes are still mostly treated as participants. If Team USA is going to have a cap table, the people on the podium will eventually want to know where they sit on it.
My bet is that the first Team USA players’ association shows up before LA28 does, and that someone will have to explain to an investor why it wasn’t in the model.
3. A pro wrestling league buys the youth tournaments ·
Youth Sports · Events
Real American Freestyle, the pro freestyle league co-founded in 2025 by Eric Bischoff and the late Hulk Hogan, agreed to acquire World of Wrestling, the family-owned company behind the Tulsa Nationals, Reno Worlds, and the Kickoff Classic, according to Wrestling Inc. and MMA News. If you grew up in a wrestling family, those names are the calendar. This is a full-pathway play: own the events where kids compete, and you own the funnel, the data, and the relationship with the families long before anyone turns pro. It’s the same logic private equity has applied to travel baseball and club volleyball, only this time the buyer is a league, not a fund.
Done well, it brings production, prize money, and visibility to a sport that has run on volunteers, folding mats, and gas station coffee. Done badly, it turns a family tradition into an entry fee schedule. The tell will be what happens to pricing and access in year two.
4. Athlete To Athlete raises $8 million to pay college athletes to mentor kids ·
Youth Sports · College Sports
Santa Monica-based Athlete To Athlete closed an $8 million Series A led by Rally Ventures, with Newbound VC, Scrum Ventures, and UpHonest Capital participating, per Ministry of Sport. Founded in 2023 by former UCLA athletes Anthony Waller and Zach Maisus, it pairs youth athletes with verified college athletes for 12- and 24-week virtual programs across more than 300 universities, and expects over 100,000 sessions this year. The investor bench tells you the thesis: Rally’s team includes the former CEO of NCSA’s parent and the co-founder of SportsEngine.
I like the model more than most in this category. It gives college athletes NIL income that comes from what they know rather than what they post, and it gives a 14-year-old someone who was recently in their shoes. My question is the one I’d ask any family-paid product: is it filling a gap the coach and the school should be filling, or helping a coach who can’t be everywhere? The good version is the second one. The company says some of the money goes to child-protection protocols, which is exactly where it should go first.
5. Local TV builds a high school network on someone else’s cameras ·
Youth Sports · Sports Tech
KSTP-TV and 45TV formed the Minnesota Prep Sports Network with LiveBarn, streaming 50 high school games this school year across football, boys and girls hockey, and boys and girls basketball, with girls hockey on the schedule this week. The broadcaster supplies the audience and the app. LiveBarn supplies the automated cameras already hanging in the rinks. That is a cheap, smart way for a local station to own high school sports again, and it gives a girls hockey game the same shelf space as Friday night football.
Fumbles & Vaporware
Pro-style, age 17. A new Futures Basketball League launched this week with 12 regional teams and 120 high school players, billed as a pro-style league for top under-18 boys. Maybe it’s well run. But “pro-style” is the phrase I’d want explained before my kid signed anything, because professional structure sounds like my bank account draining, and a youth sports system without professional value proposition or protections is just a long season with better jerseys.
Scarcity, traded for inventory. The one mainstream story I’ll touch on: college football just gave up its conference championship games to make room for a bigger playoff. Taking away one of the few Saturdays that already mattered is a strange way to make November matter more.
“My question is why are we associated with conferences anymore if we’re not playing for a conference championship? If the point now is just to be playing into a sea of 24, are we just doing it for scheduling affiliation?” - Eli Drinkwitz (Missouri Tigers Head Coach)
Signal Check
57%. That is the share of WHOOP members who already belong to at least one WHOOP Team, according to the company’s WHOOP Humans announcement this week. WHOOP says more than three million members open the app more than eight times a day. The wearable is the entry ticket. The group is what keeps people wearing it. Every endurance event director already knows this: people sign up for the race, and they come back for the crew.
Who’s Building
A3 Performance, Dan Meinholz. Disclosure: I reached out to Dan this week to bring A3 on for our high school team’s suits, caps, and apparel, so I’m now a customer as well as a fan.
I’ve been watching this brand for years, and when you live on the pool deck, you see EVERYTHING. Dan and Amy Meinholz started All-American Aquatics as a swim team dealer in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in 1995, and launched A3 as their own brand in 2004. Both swam in the Big Ten at Wisconsin, and Dan still runs the company as CEO. That is the part I admire most. They started as the dealer, learned what teams actually needed, and then built a challenger brand in a category dominated by a few giants, one goggle, one cap, and one team at a time. From what I’ve seen so far, this family is doing everything right, and every person I’ve dealt with has been an absolute pleasure to work with. Fair warning to the rest of the league: our Tigers are going to be the best-kitted team in the water, with the best-dressed parents in the stands.
Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Our team’s job is to win.
Sonar Health, Byron Cordes and Uri Meirovich. Disclosure first: I’ve had numerous conversations with this group over the last few weeks.
Byron founded Sonar in New York to pull wearables, health apps, sleep, nutrition, and biomarkers into one place, and the company says it has more than 250,000 users in more than 170 countries. The consumer app is the front door. The more interesting build is underneath it: a coaching platform and an API that let a coach or a performance business see an athlete’s Garmin, Oura, and Whoop data together without asking anyone to switch devices. I keep coming back to the same idea in this newsletter: the interface is getting cheap, and permissioned, interoperable data plugged into a real coaching workflow is still hard. Byron and Uri are building the hard part by pulling together all the fragmentation. Every athlete who has worn and used three devices and syncs none of them because they don’t understand the data and what it all means connected together has experienced the problem.
11th St. Workshop. The experiential design firm behind custom environments at events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup took a majority investment from Bluestone Equity Partners (Bobby Sharma), the first buyout from Bluestone’s $350 million fund, according to The 4th Quarter. Nobody buys a ticket to see the build crew. But the fan zone, the sponsor activation, and the space people photograph on the way in are where the memory gets made, and someone has to build them on deadline in a parking lot. I’ve written before that physical experience is where sports keeps its premium. Capital is starting to agree.
Overheard
“The question is whether profit always needs to be the primary purpose. For those of us entrusted with serving young athletes, the answer should be no.”
- Jonathan Schindel, The Armory Foundation, in Youth Today
This is the right question, coming from someone who runs an operation. Read it next to this week’s deals, and the line runs straight through the middle of the youth market. Capital is not the problem. A mentorship platform, a junior tour, and a wrestling championship can all get better with real investment. The problem is when the exit timeline sets the price for the family. The builders who win in youth sports will be the ones who can show what the family got for the money, not just what the fund got.
Build Accordingly.
BOUKER POOL · Managing Partner, Weck Enterprises
Got a tip, a fumble, or a build worth covering? Reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn.
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.
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