Unrivaled Sports Makes a Splash on Youth Sports Scene
The Josh Harris and David Blitzer company aims to take the industry to the next level
Posted On: August 12, 2024 By :When Josh Harris and David Blitzer created Unrivaled Sports, it wasn’t just a catchy name.
The duo founded Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment in September 2017. HBSE now owns and operates the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, the Prudential Cente, the esports organization Dignitas and holds a minority stake in the Joe Gibbs Racing NASCAR team. The company was valued at nearly $12 billion in 2024 and is using some of that money to create a youth sports megabrand.
Some eyebrows in the industry raised in early 2023 when Harris and Blitzer completed a strategic investment in Ripken Baseball, one of the most recognizable names in youth sports. In March 2024, Unrivaled Sports was officially created by the HBSE owners, with a strategic investment from the Chernin Group as part of the ownership structure. Within a month it announced the acquisition of YTH Sports, adding a soccer organization to the company’s growing portfolio. Three weeks later, Unrivaled acquired Under the Lights Powered by Under Armour, the second-largest youth flag football operator in the United States.
“I think that Josh and David saw that the youth sports industry was highly fragmented,” said Amanda Shank, executive vice president of Unrivaled Sports. “There was an opportunity to unify the best-in-class operators, venues, experiences and create something for athletes and their families that felt really special.”
Shank is one of many former employees at Ripken Baseball who has taken on a larger role with the new parent company. She spent the past six years as vice president of business development at Ripken Baseball after 11 years at the NFL Players Association. While Shank has been in the youth sports space for many years, Wade Martin has had plenty of adjusting to do in his first few months; Martin was hired by Ripken Baseball as its chief executive officer in February and now holds the same position for the baseball division of Unrivaled Sports.
This is Martin’s first foray into the youth sports space after a decade in extreme sports, working at Powdr and the Bouldering Project.
“The sport of baseball, inside the diamond, is foreign to me,” Martin said. “The part that’s really comfortable is overseeing a multi-unit, multi-brand business. I did that when I was in the action sports world many years ago.”
Enhancing the Youth Sports Experience
When two billionaires procure many of the largest youth sports organizations in the country, it’s fair to ponder what exactly is the plan and is a monopoly in the industry?
Shank and Martin point out what Harris’ and Blitzer’s intentions are.
“This is as close to a passion project or a legacy project as you could get,” Shank said of the owners. “Everyone on the staff has felt how impactful youth sports was on their own development. So this is not ‘let’s roll up an industry.’ This is making strategic investments in what are going to be the next generation of leaders and citizens through our programming. So it’s definitely a long-range plan.”
“This is a really big industry, so the idea that we’re gobbling up the industry is not our plan, nor is it realistic,” Martin added. “There’s just so many parts and pieces. But hopefully the parts that we are involved with, we can invest our people and resources and make them better.”
With millions of youth athletes competing around the country each year, there’s little uniformity when it comes to the sanctioning of tournaments or how events are produced. The ability within Ripken Baseball to execute massive events with a high level of hospitality for many years is the kind of experience that Unrivaled will look to spread across all its sports.
“From the consumer side of things, ultimately what families want is to go to an event, have it be seamless and expect the customer service and venues to be at a really high level,” Shank said. “That’s what we already do in our core properties and what we’ll deliver to them across anything new that we’ve brought in.”
“Today we’re largely an aggregation of different businesses and we haven’t been around long enough to be much more than that,” Martin added. “But over time, I believe we’re going to get really good at this. And we already see that in certain areas where we’re good at running baseball tournaments, whether it be at Ripken Experiences or Cooperstown.”
Additionally, Unrivaled Sports has acquired multiple venues in the youth sports space, including Cooperstown All Star Village and the Ripken Experience Facilities. It also operates Sports Force Parks at Cedar Point Sports Center in Sandusky, Ohio; Diamond Nation in Flemington, New Jersey, and the ForeverLawn Sports Complex in Canton, Ohio, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame Village. Diversifying the venue portfolio are the We Are Camp and Snobahn facilities specific for skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding and mountain biking.
“When you go to Cooperstown All Star Village, it’s grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles,” Shank said. “It’s just this unifying moment for families that we need now more than ever — this creation of community. And sports does that for people in a way that not much else does. The vast majority of this business is about creating better family memories.”
All Hands on Deck
The business plan for Unrivaled Sports is that each entity will continue using its established name and produce events across baseball, softball, flag football and soccer: “Events are still going to happen under the names of the different consumer facing brands, like Ripken Baseball and Cooperstown. That’s not going to change. Unrivaled is the connective thread bringing these businesses together,” Martin said.
Shank says a lot of the employees from the various organizations have stayed through the transition and the founders and owners of an acquired company have remained involved in some way, either in a minority position or a full-time role.
“All those people have carried over because they’re best in class operators and they’re crucial to the businesses themselves,” Shank said. “I think it’s exciting for our staff to be able to work on other sports in part because we have a lot of baseball experts, but we also just have a lot of former athletes who can share their expertise.”
Martin — who’s learning on the job when it comes to the ins and outs of baseball — says the structure of keeping the owners/founders involved has been crucial in the initial months of Unrivaled’s existence, specifically Cal and Bill Ripken.
“These are all people that help us shape our strategy and we lean on them,” Martin said. “For me, being an outsider in the world of baseball, it’s nice to have someone like Bill Ripken on speed dial to be able to answer questions and get to hear his thoughts about it. So they still play an incredibly big part in that as owners and as advisors to the business.”
Ripken Baseball had already created a shared service structure for back of house finance, HR and legal; as well as front of house sales, marketing, sponsorship and retail. Now, all of the organizations under the Unrivaled umbrella enjoy those benefits.
“A lot of the opportunity is in those key functions serving all of these smaller businesses that might not have had the same resources in HR, finance or legal when they were standalone businesses themselves,” Shank said.
The New Frontier of Youth Sports
Unrivaled Sports is currently projecting about 635,000 athletes will compete at its 15 venues this year, with 1.4 million visitors attending those events. Shank says Unrivaled is starting to see an impact as it shares best practices and resources internally across the different brands.
“Within the industry, it’s been overwhelmingly positive feedback,” she said. “And if anything, the sentiment has been, ‘well, it’s about time.’ Especially from the destination side of things, I think that community wants to work with fewer, better partners. From their side, the business side, they’re going to also have an expectation of the quality of the events that are coming, the consistency of the staffing and the fact that we’ll deliver upon our promises in terms of visitation and impact and things like that.”
Martin envisions the company enhancing many aspects of its event offerings, starting with expansion in the softball division as the sport continues to gain in popularity and participation.
“It’s a big advantage for a company to not just (be) well capitalized, which it is, but that also has really smart, sophisticated people in this space that are passionate about it, that want to be in it for the right reasons and are excited about all the things that we’ve got going on,” Martin said. “It’s David and Josh, but it’s also the Chernin Group, which is the third leg of the stool, if you will. And there’s just so much wisdom and resources within that portfolio of ownership. They’re all very heavily involved in the business and know what’s going on at a day-to-day level.”
Shank says to expect more acquisitions on the horizon, as Unrivaled adds to its portfolio.
“It’s always evolving and we’re only a few months in, so who knows where we’ll be in a few years,” Shank said. “I think this is going to be a positive for a lot of stakeholders in terms of CVBs and DMOs and other groups, that ideally these events are going to bring about great partnerships with local communities where there’s this combination of local access, economic impact, sports charters all rolled up into one. This is going to be national, but it does have a real impact for the communities that some of these venues sit in.”
Posted in: Main Feature, Youth Sports