Youth Sports Are a $40 Billion Business. Private Equity Is Taking Notice.

New York Times

09-07-2025

Like many youth sports fathers, Jon Bash can summon his son's early baseball career on his phone. There are video clips of Jesse as a boy at summer camps and on a road trip to Cooperstown to play in a tournament in the shadow of the Hall of Fame. They show Jesse's towering home runs in high school, as well as his many hours in the batting cage.
One of Mr. Bash's most cherished clips is a video of Aaron Judge's swing coach extolling Jesse's work ethic to his own social media followers. His son has averaged 70 games a year over the past decade between school and travel teams. To keep playing, Jesse, 19, took a postgraduate year at a Florida sports academy.
The costs of all the training sessions, tournaments and equipment have added up for Mr. Bash, but he has no regrets spending money chasing his son's baseball dreams.
'He's my only child, and like most parents, you want to do anything you can for your kid,' said Mr. Bash, who runs a diner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
It's no wonder that sports dads like Mr. Bash have caught the attention of Wall Street investors.
The private equity titans Josh Harris and David Blitzer are among those who see a big opportunity. Over the past three years, Mr. Harris and Mr. Blitzer used money from their family foundations to start Unrivaled Sports, which has been buying baseball camps, flag football fields and youth leagues to assemble one of the largest collections of youth sports properties in the country. One of their acquisitions is a baseball complex in Cooperstown where 12-year old ball players flock every summer, as a sort of rite of passage.
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