Art by Clark MillerMoneyball for Minors: Inside the Booming Business of Youth Sports Apps
There’s a bonanza of youth sports apps for streaming games, tracking stats and coordinating jam-packed club team schedules. Investors are circling, parents are wound up over the apps and kids are just trying to have some fun.
Lauren Drapp has a hectic job working as a gas scheduler for a private equity firm in Houston, triangulating natural gas between suppliers, pipelines and customers. But she’s arguably even busier as a mother of young athletes: Her two daughters, ages 12 and 13, play on club volleyball and softball teams, each traveling some eight times a year to face the best young talent in their sports across Texas and the southern U.S.
To stay on top of it all, Drapp maintains a folder on her smartphone with seven apps, each of which offers tools for tracking player statistics, streaming game videos and coordinating her kids’ sports schedules. Drapp is constantly flipping between bespoke apps like GameChanger to watch footage of her younger daughter’s softball games and Hudl for her older daughter’s volleyball tournaments.
“My biggest pet peeve,” Drapp told me, “is that every sport has multiple communication avenues. You might watch the game in one app, then you’re gonna get team messages in a different app.”