All right, welcome back to the Buying Sandlot podcast. I'm Kyle Scott, founder of Buying Sandlot. On today's episode, I'm joined by Matt Mueller, the Chief Operating Officer at hudl. Matt discusses the company's mission to empower sports teams at all levels through innovative technology. HUDL serves over 300,000 teams worldwide, providing tools for video capture, analysis and sharing. Matt also discusses the evolving landscape of youth sports, focusing on coaching challenges, the integration of technology, and the monetization aspects of through sponsorships. We also explore the current state of high school athletics, the impact of macro trends like investment and professionalization of youth sports, and we make some predictions about the future of sports, particularly the rise of flag football and the need for structural changes in youth soccer. We we were also able to touch on Huddle's recent acquisition of Athletic Data Innovations and the rumors that they may go public. So stay tuned for my interview with Matt. Before we get started, I want to take a second and plug our two day Buying Sandlot Youth Sports Business Conference, which is which will be next April in Philly. We aim to bring together everybody in the youth sports space, from club league event admins to tech founders, investors, service providers and more. We're going big on this one, so make sure you stay tuned to buying sandlot.com and subscribe to our newsletter for all the latest details. Our newsletter goes out Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I promise you, if you're subscribed, you will hear about our event. So stay tuned to Buying Sandlot for those details. Now onto my interview with Matt. All right, Matt, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks, Kyle. Thanks for having me.

So why don't you give your background a little bit? I know you've been at Huddle for a long time and then describe how do you describe people to Huddle who don't really know all that you guys do because you guys do so much. And I've always found it hard to kind of describe it in just a couple of sentences or a paragraph.

Yeah, sure. So, you know, again, I'm Matt. I'm the CEO. I've been at Huddle for 18 years. I've done. When you join as a startup, I've done just about every job at Huddle, but in the coo, one of the best parts of my job is I get to try and describe our company to people all the time and talk about all the different areas that we work across. So in short, Huddle is the software platform that is powering every level of sport. People often have an experience with us based on Whatever they come into it. So maybe it's via a youth sports team or a high school team, or on the other side, maybe it's via a professional team. But we serve over 300,000 teams around the world, really serving the most important workflows that they go through every day. So think of the biggest teams in the world, from the NBA to the English Premier League, all the way down through colleges and high schools into, you know, the youth sports team that plays on the field, pitch or court, you know, just around the corner from your house. And what we do is help them capture video, analyze it, find the key moments fast and, and then share and communicate around that. And so it scales up and down depending on the level of team. Right. So a youth team that's maybe an eight year old, you know, football team, they just need a great way to capture video and share highlights of some really cool things that happened in the moment or have a live stream. But if you get up to, you know, the most elite levels, they want to use positional data and build game plans and scout best, the best athletes to build their best team. And so we provide a tool set that scales up and down and serves every Persona across multiple workflows across the entire ecosystem.

How do you guys sort of differentiate between maybe the, the recreational part of streaming and live content that might be more for parents and consumption versus that, that analytic side for coaches and serious athletes, maybe at the closer to the high school level and above, obviously.

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think one of our special, you know, secret powers, maybe the way we talk about it is the, that we want the same tool to serve multiple workflows. And when you think about a coach for a youth team or a high school team, they often have other jobs in the community, they're not a full time coach and they don't have a full time video staff helping them with these things. And so we've got to make it really easy for them. So we wanted to build a tool to actually serve both those needs at one time. And so when we designed our cameras to be out there and serve that live streaming capacity, we, we actually start with the coach first. How can we deliver amazing coaching tools that help the coaches, that help the athletes, you know, find those key moments, find the key coaching points, help your athletes get recruited. And we know if we can deliver that across our platform, then it actually makes it really easy for us to take a step back and say, okay, we have this video stream, let's make it accessible for parents and Fans, you know, for a parent who's traveling or, you know, I go through this with people all the time with my own kids, you know, they're 12 and 16. It happens this weekend. My daughter's got a game at one time in Lincoln and my son's got a game in another, basically the same time in Omaha, and he can't be at both. And so having that ability to watch the stream on your phone, knowing that, hey, this quality of film is going to be what is necessary for coaches and athletes, that's great. And maybe it's not a full 10 camera production like you'd get on an NFL or NBA game, but that's okay. That's not what we need at the youth sports level. I just need to be able to stay engaged and watch it. And so we think about using that same content and serving multiple workflows. Being able to do that at a really high level at scale is a key part of what we want to do.

You guys have been around for a while, streaming camera, Internet tech in general, right? It's come a very long way in what, 20, 20 ish years or so. What is AI today enabling for you guys that it wasn't maybe even just three to five years ago. And then what in your view is coming that will further enhance the capabilities you guys have right now?

Sure, yeah. We've been using AI on our platform for, gosh, more than 10 years at this point. I think maybe in 2013 we released our first AI solution for video to help trim down video. So if you think of an American football game or football game, teams will often start and stop the camera in between plays because there's just so much dead time. Right. And you don't need to film the 30 seconds of dead time before between snaps. And so what we actually did was teams would start recording early so they didn't miss the snap. And we actually found a moment on the video where you could tell when the snap happened. We call it snap detection. You know, we're really good at branding and we released snap detection and it was actually a way to auto trim film down and save coaches as they're watching film. You know, take 10 to 20 seconds of just watching dead time. And that was really, you know, we were looking at other ways to do things. So you fast forward to where we're at today. And now we're able to use AI to start tagging events and data that's happening in the game. So when we talk about events, it's who shot the ball from where what happened on the field, pitching court at any given moment. We're really excited with, you know, bringing ball time in and really layering it into our platform. We've released our first end to end AI tagging platform for volleyball and we really see that coming here over the course of the next few years. Next year, excuse me, into football, basketball, soccer, ice hockey as well, where we have this end to end tagging platform and we can deliver data back to coaches very quickly. Now the accuracy is really challenging, right? If an athlete has long hair and it's hanging in front of their jersey, it can be challenging to identify who they are. If, you know, in a football field, if all the linemen smash together on the field, it's really challenging to tell who that left tackle was at the, you know, on the given camera. And so we use a human in the loop to clean that piece up. And so we're excited about what we can do there. But if you think about over the future, you know, not just providing data so you can find those key moments so you can auto generate highlights so you can, you know, pull out, hey, I just want to see every time that, you know, player number 12 rushed the ball, move forward five years and think about where this is heading. The tailwinds, AI are really strong and so we've just seen just this massive tailwind. And we've got millions and millions and millions of games on our platform that are already tagged with data. So we can use that to train models really quickly. And we're excited about what this means for the future for athletes to help them automate coaching. We've rolled out our first automated assistant coach for soccer this year. But we're excited to bring that to other sports where it gives individual coaching advice to players based on how they performed in the game. But now being able to do that at scale and say based on this across your entire season, across the last three years, here are great fits for you for college. Here are maybe some training programs that you should go to or you should work on increasing your top speed or you should work on your endurance or maybe you should do something else. And the insights we're going to be able to provide at scale, going back to the point I made earlier, because coaches just don't have that time to get down to that detail for every athlete because they have a full time job, right? That's often not coaching. And so we can say like, hey, you've got 18 players on your team or 15 players on your team and we can help, right? Like we can tee up all of this beautiful level of information to help you coach your athletes to make them better. And then you as a coach, you can go in and review that and say, like, I don't really agree with this, but these two points are right. And here it's linked to video and I can show my athlete right away. That's really exciting. And to be able to provide that level of detail, detailed coaching at scale, the kind of thing you get at an elite, you know, level at a professional team, the kind of thing that you get at a Division 1 college. But to bring that down into youth sports at scale, that's going to be incredibly exciting and, and something we're. We're really hoping to unlock here over the next few years.

You mentioned it's. It's ball time, right?

Yeah, ball time.

So you mentioned, obviously specialty in volleyball. Volleyball super hot right now. But then you kind of went on to other sports. A lot of people I've talked to in youth sports in general, but certainly in kind of the tech streaming AI space have talked about the unique challenges of individual sports. Football versus hockey versus basketball versus Volleyball. So many differences, especially when it comes to identifying plays. Like you said, snap detection. Love the branding, by the way. Apple, very good at this. Right? You guys are doing a good job there. But talk about the challenges that you guys are overcoming. What still is maybe a hurdle that technology can't fully address yet, because I know that is such as so much money is pouring into youth sports across the board, there seems to be this prevailing thought that consolidation is going to happen and a couple of companies are going to own everything. And then everyone I talked to have been in the space for a long time. They're like, yeah, but this sport's different, or this pocket of the country is different. Or this level youth versus high school is different. There's all these, like little edge cases that have to be ironed out, but especially in kind of AI identification. So talk about that tagging piece and how you guys are overcoming it.

Yeah, I think. And you nailed it. Every sport's got its own unique challenges to overcome. But I think in, you know, I had a computer science degree and then I always joke that I started huddle as an engineer and then our CTO fired me and pushed me over to the customer side. I don't know that he would always say that, but we always joke about it that way, at least. And the way I frame it is we are doing a great job of building models that can help us get a large chunk of the way there that are sport agnostic, right? We can identify athletes on a field pitching court, we can do great things with that. But you do have to have the nuance of the sport at the end of the day. And I think one of our biggest challenges at huddle is we do want to be truly sport agnostic. We want to solve things. And so it might take us a little longer to get to a volleyball model versus a soccer model. But as we build those things out, we are really thinking about how we can do this to scale, right? How can we serve every athlete? And what makes us unique is we want to have the depth of data that is needed for a professional organization, but deliver it at scale and a cost that works for a youth team. And so we challenge ourselves to really overcome things in that way and it puts us, you know, really unique constraints on our team that we found great ways to solve. But you know, there's a, you know, to, to give you real examples of this volleyball. If you talk to volleyball coaches and you watch club volleyball, the angle that most teams want is not what you watch on tv, right? It's not that sideline camera that floats back and forth they actually want on a baseline, right? And an iPhone can serve that need, actually, or a cell phone can serve that need really effectively for teams. So we can say like, okay, great, this is awesome. Let's build a solution that pulls this in. And if you've been to a club volleyball tournament, I'm sure you have one of the showcases in an arena where there's 60 courts or 100 courts and. And it's wild and there's all these different matches going and the courts are all staggered. You can't have a fixed camera really that serves that need, right. You've got to have something that's a little more portable and solves that. You contrast that with maybe club soccer and you might play on a really nice facility that's maybe out of high school or college and it's got a stadium and a fixed camera and it's awesome. And then the next match you might be on a really nice manicured grass field that doesn't even have bleachers and parents have to bring their pop up chairs and sit there on the sides and you need a camera that can go out and film that from an angle that makes sense and do that. And so you have to build models and solutions that do that. And that's. We've challenged our team and we have an incredibly talented engineering team, product team that listens to our Users finds, what do they need, what data they need and how we can serve them. And so that's really core to our strategy is how do we build something that scales and serves all these different needs and what models can we reuse across multiple sports and then how do we take it that next tier and customize it to each sport as we roll it out into, you know, to serve all of these different, these different use cases.

You touched on the equipment a little bit there. That kind of fixed install versus the portable sort of phone enabled install. Where do you see that balance today? I know you know historically lots of fixed installs, especially in indoor facilities, but you know we're seeing more and more of these kind of consumer level pricing sub thousand dollar price points where you can use a phone or a smaller camera and it's portable. What's that balance look like for you guys today and where do you think it's going today?

It's probably, you know, I don't have the exact numbers but for the sake of this, you know, spitballing a number AU, it's probably 60, 40. Fixed versus portable. The portable need is just there. We know it's there for all the things I just told you, right? You've got to be able to solve a portable use case long term. I don't think long term. I think fixed cameras will be the solution. Automated capture is the wave of the future. Even these portable cameras. I'm a soccer dad and I have lived years carrying the camera out to the field, setting it up for the team, putting it up on a pole and it's big, right? You've got a giant tripod that you're carrying out. You probably have wind ropes you need to put in because I'm in Nebraska and heaven forbid there's ever a soccer game without a 30 mile an hour wind. And you're putting those up and you got this camera way up in the air and you configure it and we do it and there's a lot of other teams that do it. But I think it would be much better if you just didn't have to think about it. You just walked onto the field, pitcher court and you just played. And so it might take us 10 years to get there. But I think the fixed portal, the fixed solution will be the dominant solution in the future. Will it be all the way there? Probably not. But will it be 90% of the capture? For sure. And then I think there's going to need to be a really cost effective solution to meet the needs. Otherwise Right. And, and there's a lot of great people, you know, a lot of great innovation in the space. I'm sure you get it. I get it. On my Instagram feeds every day I'm targeted with a new camera, automated camera for sports that does this or put your phone in here and do this. And you know, there's great players in the space and there's new people coming all the time, and that's awesome. I think that's a, it's a great way for us to learn and see what works out there in the space and, you know, figure out how we can continue to help every athlete find the, you know, that opportunity that they deserve via video and data.

Yeah, you guys have certainly been one of the beneficiaries of capital flowing into the space for good reason. I know you took some pretty big investment from Bain and when they invest in you guys. One of the comments, and I forget who wasn't made the comment, but he called Huddle mission critical software. And this actually echoes. I was just up at the League Apps NextUp event in New York and Rob Palumbo from Excel, KKR is one of their investors. Called League Apps mission critical. Right. So I'm identifying a trend here that there's this long tail of software and tech startups in sports in general, certainly in youth sports. What makes you guys mission critical and what do you think separates mission critical software from maybe all of these? This long tail of ideas, some of which may get adoption and some of which may not?

Yeah, I think the base of everything we do is it comes back to video and data. And we just help teams handle video and data at scale so smoothly. And you know, I give you free examples of this. My son, he's a decent soccer player, but when he was nine, he decided to try to do something unique with his throw ins. And he would do this, he kind of bend his body around and throw it in a unique way. And what it caused him to do was drag his back foot off the ground. And so it was an illegal throw in. And you can imagine telling your 9 year old, the reason you're doing this wrong or the reason you're getting called for illegal throw ins is you're lifting your foot because you're twisting your body. And he's like, no, dad, this is it. This is. I'm getting so much more power and spin. It's great. And we were fortunate enough to have a huddle camera up. And so I just pulled up the film and I was like, okay, let's watch you know, five throw ins. I made a quick playlist, showed him, and he was like, oh, wow, I'm lifting my foot like these. They're not picking on me. I'm just doing an illegal throw. And I was like, yeah, this is why. And instantly stopped. I don't think since he's nine, he's had an illegal throw in since then. Right? Like, it's just. Video is so powerful. It doesn't lie. It is the best coaching tool. There's lots of great other ways to educate and connect with your kids, but sometimes just showing them and showing them what they're doing on film, that can help so much. And I think that's when people talk about huddle being mission critical is if you want to connect, you know, coach your athletes. If you want to help them get the most out of their opportunity, you're going to have to coach them through things. This is where you should be on the position, on the field. This, this is how your hand should be. This is how you should receive the ball. This is how you should scan, you know, this is what you should do before you step up. And it's so hard in the moment. These kids, they're great athletes and they're not trying to be jerks, right? It's just hard to understand sometimes and say, like, yeah, coach, I hear you, I'm doing that. But to show them on film and coach, that that is really the way you can max out their performance on field, pitching court. And so when you talk to teams about how video is so important, you talk to coaches and they're like, hey, this is the best way to teach your kids. And what we do is make it so easy for you to get that video and data, find those key moments and coach your players and make it easy and accessible to them on their phones, on their iPads and their computers. And then we give you all these other auxiliary benefits. That's why you hear huddle as mission critical. Because if you want to give your athletes the best opportunity, winning games matters. But honestly, a lot of times it's just coaching them to be better. And if you want to do that, huddle's the best way to do it.

So funny you mentioned the throne example. My son is 7, playing travel soccer, and there was a game a couple of weeks ago where his team and the other team, like, literally seven calls for the back foot coming off the ground. But the ref didn't tell the official, didn't tell any of the kids what they were doing wrong. And it was like, okay, listen, I like, I know this is, you know, competitive, but they're seven. Like maybe, maybe tell one of the kids what they're doing wrong. Would have been nice to have a camera because the kids were like, what is going on right now?

Yeah. Then they just think the ref's dumb. You the stuff that comes out of kids mouths, right?

And it's like, it's, it's such a good example. How are you guys able to supplement the video? Maybe it's a nice segue here. I know you guys, you acquired Titan Sports, is that correct?

Yeah.

You got for tracking and then I saw your LinkedIn post yesterday about athletic data innovations, which I, I'm less familiar with. But it seems like there's an, there's an element of that there. So why don't you maybe talk about that to start and then how can you sort of supplement with player tracking and GPS data to marry that with video and, and expand the offering?

Yeah, so you nailed it. One of the interesting things that we've done as we built out Huddle, right, It started as just upload your video to us and here's video, put your data on it. And then we started providing data. Now we've got automated capture. We're doing all these other things and the things clubs came back to us and said is just like, hey, can you help us train our athletes more effectively? Right. If you've got a travel soccer kid, you know, seven, maybe it's a little young to feel this, but you know, my son's 16 and one of the things I worked with him on is when, when do you have wasted runs? Right? You might run nine miles in a match and I could put a track on you and see these nine miles that you've run. But you get tired later in the game. That's just obvious, right? Like you're going to be tired if you run nine miles. So when should you run? When is the effective time for you run? And after the game, how should you train to be more effective at doing that? Like what are the ways that you're doing it? Are you over training during the week? So you're tired in the game? Are you under training and you just don't have the gas to go? And so what are the insights that we can give you? And really that kind of data, you know, just that, that piece and I'll give you other examples in a second, that's been limited to really the elite athletes, you know, professional teams for so long. And one of the things we're really excited about with Titan was being able to bring that human performance insight down into athletes. And so the huddle signal platform that we built over the course of this next year, you'll see Titan feed into that, which allows you to then say, hey, here's all your sprints that you've made in a game. Here's all the times that you accelerated in this unique way. And then that actually ties right to video. So if I want to see every one of Braylon's sprints, I can click on, boom, sprints, and boom, here they are. Now I'm watching the video as a playlist with that, and that allows me to coach him or his coach to coach him and say, like, hey, these are the times where it was a good sprint. This was a time where you sprinted and the ball was on the other side of the pitch and it was never going to come back to you. So why, you know, what was in your brain, what was going on here? Like, let's talk about this and see what would have been a better opportunity for you to save maybe some of that energy so that later in the game, when you needed to, you had all of the juice. And so you can start to think about bringing this human performance and insight, insight to every athlete. That's really what we're excited to do. Like, we see it at the elite level. We service this with FC Barcelona, we service this with, you know, professional organizations around the world. And now we're bringing it down into the youth space and we're really excited about what that means for us. Obviously, it will help our data be more effective. You can start to say, this is where players are at on the pitch. You think about combining this human performance data with our AI data, and now your tracking data becomes even more effective. You can be more accurate, you can deliver more insights right away. And I can give you an email right after the game, or push notice on your phone that says, you ran this far, here's the recovery you should do, and here's the link to all that on your video. And let's have a talk about the number of sprints you had. And so we're really excited about that. Adi, the way that Andrew conceptualizes and the model he has for thinking about player load is really unique. Oftentimes with data so far is that it's all linear, right? So how far did you run straight? How fast? Like, what does that look like on your body? But maybe if you ran in a circle, the trackers just don't know how to process that information in the same unique Way. It actually came from one of our conversations with Real Madrid and they showed us this algorithm. They're like, this is how we actually talk about player load. Like how hard are we working our players in a match? And what's unique about it is all really about the angular motion. So think of if you run in a circle and I'll save you the physics of it because they'll get out in front of my skis as well.

But now we can nerd out. Go ahead.

Hey, look, I love it. I had this video and I was like, whoa. When they were showing me this algorithm. And essentially the way that they use this data is a new way to think about how you run. So you might run in a circle at a slower rate and it might look like you've had a lower load during a match, but actually you're putting as much or more pressure on your body. You know, if you're a midfielder running around, then maybe for an outside back sprinting up and down the pitch. And so being able to use that as a different way to look at load as a different way to keep athletes healthy, to help them train more effectively and to provide this insight back to coaches is something we're really excited about. And so constantly at huddle, we're looking at what are the elite teams doing and how can we take that and be a part of that and how can we bring that insight down to, you know, a coach who's, you know, maybe a dad helping out with their team for the first time, or mom or, you know, to a coach who has a full time job doing something else in the community and doesn't have a background in sports science and how can we help him or her educate their team more effectively? And that's something we get really passionate about.

That's a, it's a great flex being able to say, I was talking to Real Madrid, here's how they do it. We had, I don't think it's gone live yet, but we had Jon Stewart from Fast Break on. And I know it sounds like they have a similar philosophy in that they started working at the pro level and they're now bringing those learnings down to the youth level because there's just a longer tail of opportunity there. They're obviously much newer than you guys are. I think they're only a few years old. But talk about maybe just at a high level then I have a follow up question on the coaching, but talk about at a high level, because kind of working with pro where there's sort of this, it's a large but capped market size. But you could take those learnings and just apply it to this long tail of sports all the way down to, you know, seven and eight year olds.

Sure. Yeah. I think the, the biggest thing is always is trying to find the unique insights that will apply to 7 and 8 year olds. Right. So if you're in coaching, you know, an elite athlete, they are professional, right. And they, they think about their body in unique ways. I'm not sure if you watched Hard Knocks this last time with Josh Allen and they were talking about the weight distribution of his body as he's making throws and like fine tuning his footwork to nail that. You know, that's great. Seven year olds probably don't need that level of sophistication in terms of the way they shift their body when they're trying to make a touchdown pass. But there are ways that you can say like, hey, here's how Josh Allen reads a defense. Like, let's bring this up, here's what he looks at before for the snap. How can we bring that down and how can we automate that and deliver that in a manner that makes sense for athletes at every level and to the same point? On human performance, there are easy metrics that we can talk about. There are things like we talk to teams and they'll say, hey, we make our players run at top speed once a week. And I'll ask questions like why? Just explain it to me, I don't have a sports science degree. And they'll say, well here's the thing, if your athlete, when they're on the field, pitcher, court, and the adrenaline's pumping and imagine you're a wide receiver and you're running and this ball gets thrown over the top and they are full sprinting to go get it. The number one cause of hamstring pulls is not stretching, it's overexerting your body in a way that you hadn't trained for. And so you actually outrun your body and you get to the ball and then you pull your hamstring. And I can say like, Look, I'm a 42 year old dad and I remember playing soccer just two years ago and somebody kicked me a perfect ball over the top and I go into a full sprint and I pulled my hamstring and I'm like, I can relate to this. I felt this happen. And so now we can say, ah, okay, this is a simple insight. Have your athletes do top speed training and let's bring this and say like now you can go do this for a 7 year old team or you know, they're not going to pull their hamstring but high school kids will, right? And so high school club team, have your kids do preseason training, set a baseline and let's figure out what, what that baseline is for them. And then every week, if they haven't hit that top speed, keep them after practice on Thursday and have them run sprints until they hit it or you know, get close. Not as a punishment but as a way to keep them healthy from having a hamstring pull. That's what elite teams do, right? They'll say like, hey these, this guy hasn't hit top speed all week in practice. We're going to have him stay after practice on Thursday and run, you know, sprint to hit that top speed and then we're good. And now we know they've trained to hit it and we're set. And you have to find those insights that make sense. That one makes a lot of sense down to, to, you know, youth athletes. It's the same thing for tactics, it's the same thing for like Here, here's a 2, 3 zone. Here's how you should pass it around the zone. Do we need to think about, you know, hey, if you watch basketball last night, I don't know what you can do with Victor 1 Byama, but I'm a Spurs fan so I'm win on it. But we don't need to think about stopping the lobs on the backside for a 10 year old basketball game. But we do need to think about how you box out, how would you do that correctly and what kind of insights can you take from elite organizations and how they coach what drills they run and bring that down and share that to everyone. Because often there's a lot of great coaches at the youth level. They just don't have the insight or the time to dig into it in the same way that professional coaches have. And we're really fortunate to be able to bring them that insight.

I'm a Sixers fan. I'm very excited about Vijay Edgecombe.

What a night.

37 last night I wasn't even, I watched like half of it because I'm just spinning. No, the, and the hamstring example hits home. We're the same age. I go to Florida every year and do a fantasy camp with the Phillies and it's a bunch of old guys showing up to play baseball. Like literally half the camp after day four will have, will have pulled a hamstring. Yeah, it's, you know, And I'm on, you know, young, early 40s is like the young side there. So anyone over 50, like they busted out, they say, do not bust it out of the box. You're going to pull a hamstring. And like without fail, first day, just guys dropping like flies.

Well, hey, I'm telling you, just go do some sprint training for a couple weeks leading up to it, get yourself ready and then you won't pull the hamstring.

I'm still in.

That feels like I avoided the hamstring.

I broke my rib one year, which is a different story, but I avoided the hamstring. But yeah, I'm going to do some sprints now. On the coach piece, it seems to me like there has to be. You're, you're giving them the tools, right? What is the education like for coaches? Because you said a lot of, a lot of these guys and girls have, have different jobs, right. They're working full time and they're doing this on the side or part time. How do you sort of train and hold their hand to say, hey, these tools are now available to you? Because that, to me feel, that feels like such a big part of it. The tools may be there, but I know people who can barely operate their email on their phone, let alone navigating that. So how do you guys think about that?

Yeah, it is arguably one of the most challenging things that we have to do here at Huddle, right? Is communicate and educate our users. And especially, you know, youth coaches, they work a full time job and then so they can't, they can't do a training at 2pm in the afternoon, right? Like, that's when they're working. So it's like, okay, hey, we're going to set a team up, we're going to do zoom calls at night, we're going to pull your whole group together. And oftentimes we work through club directors to try and get, you know, training in mass. We're really fortunate to have an amazing training team and implementation team that can do those things upfront. We do a lot of great in product marketing and in product training. We have, you know, AI bots on the web that will walk you through things or point you to tutorials. And we have all those things available. But we're constantly looking for ways to connect with coaches where they are. Right. So can we do it for you? Can we have a, you know, a trade show or, you know, a clinic, whatever they call them? Right. You know, can we be at these conferences and help you understand how to use it can we get to, you know, the bigger events where maybe people are out and train them on those things. And we're constantly looking for great ways. But if you or your listeners have any ideas, feel free to send them my way because we're constantly looking for ways to help educate, you know, people with, with the right insights and push them to the next level.

Sounds like you guys be perfect attendee for our buying sandlot conference next spring.

Here we go.

Free plug there. We will have lots of, lots of coaches and league club operators there, hopefully. Let me, let me ask you this. So I've read about you guys. You guys say I think that you touch in some capacity 99% of high schools, I believe high school athletic departments. We've run some surveys of facilities and leagues folks in our audience and I've seen some others streaming video tech, for lack of a better description. Adoption is still relatively low, especially as you go younger in youth sports, travel age and below. So how do you guys sort of define that 99% and then what opportunities do you see for expansion at the high school level and below? Like what are the kind of the top priorities there?

Sure, sure. You know, in the high schools we're in the high 90s. If not 99%, 98% right there. In terms of relationships with athletic departments, I think about 75% of them are on our athletic department wide package. It might be a little high there. It could be 70% directionally. Call that about accurate, that is, you know, fully equipped for all their different sports, most of them using our cameras to at least capture the coaching video, many of them streaming on our platform, but not all of them. And so when we think about high school space, we've done a great job of leaning in there. And I'll come back to expansion to your question in a second. But in the club space, we're really on the opposite end of that journey. We've got great relationships with often many of the top clubs across multiple sports, but we really haven't pushed downstream into every club yet. And so we're still early in our journey in terms of reaching every club and every team within that club. Right. We may have the top couple of teams, maybe the oldest ones, but maybe not the 7 and 8 year olds. And they haven't seen the value yet. And so we've got to figure that out. At the same time, club sports facilities are huge and we just haven't tapped that as effectively over the last few years. And so we're just starting our journey in the club Sports facility space. So there's huge opportunity for just new customers and new field pitching course to cover new teams to come on in the club space and in the facility space, just wholesale with huddles tools. And so we're excited about beginning our journey there and finding the right way to connect with them and bring our tool set to them. But across the whole market, even when we have users, whether it's high school or club, there's still so much more opportunity we can provide around the coaching tools. I talked about the additional insight, whether it's AI driven insight or just our data finding new ways to help them reach that next opportunity and whether that's, you know, getting recruited or you know, just making the varsity team at their high school, which is oftentimes, you know, what a lot of kids are playing club sports for. It's not necessarily to go play college, it's to be ready to play at their high school varsity team, which is going to be very competitive. And so we think there's a great way for us to bring these tool sets to them, whether it's human performance, additional coaching insights or lots of other opportunities that we can layer in over time. And we're really excited about what we're going to do from, from a growth there and then obviously from, you know, the fan side and helping organizations connect in their community. There's, there's big opportunities for us to, to use sports as a, as a great way to connect. You know, I love the, the quote from Nelson Mandela and I won't say it directly because I'll mess it up, but essentially it is, sports has a way, a unique way to bring together communities. Right. And you feel that in the Olympics you find yourself cheering for a swimmer or a track athlete that you've never heard of in your life with millions of other Americans voting, you know, and cheering on this athlete. And you see it with high school sports, you know, in your community when a team, especially small communities where these high schools make a run to the state title and you know, they've got the whole town out there giving them a parade, right. And coming through. And then you can see that into youth sports where, you know, if a team makes a run, there was a team from Nebraska that, from Lincoln that made a run to the national title last, in, in soccer last year. And it was amazing in club sports. And you know, there are people following it that, you know, there were Facebook posts and all kinds of stuff for this team that they did an amazing job. And so the communities rally around that. I Think there's huge opportunity, not even just with streaming, but to connect and find a better way for you to follow those opportunities and connect with it, not only as a parent, but as a grandparent far away or just a community member.

And.

And we're really excited about what that's gonna mean for our organizations at all levels in youth sports to find a better way to connect in their community.

What do you think about this? It goes into my area of interest, but what do you think about the monetization of those eyeballs? The sponsorship piece? Right. I'm looking on your guys website. There's a feature game right now. Lake Ridge High School versus Lake. I'm gonna screw this up. Lake Oswego High School men's varsity soccer. And before the play button, I see an ad for a local home builder, Bellagio's Pizza. A dentist.

Right.

How much do you guys think about those sponsorship opportunities and how much of that sort of funnels to you guys and gets down to the club or the rights holder? Because I know that's a big area of interest right now, but it's so hard to monetize this long tail of eyeballs where you have maybe a dozen or two dozen people watching a given game, but you guys have the scale to aggregate those eyeballs and talk about serious sponsorship with Fortune 500 type companies.

Yeah, I think from a sponsorship level or just maybe from a fan level, we have over 100 million fans coming to our platform already to watch highlights or watch live streams, buy tickets from us. So we've built the scale there that allows us to talk to big companies like a T Mobile that's running a Friday Night Lights campaign with us, or to talk to other brands that have been on or currently on our platform, like a Gatorade or Nike. Over time, they've been great partners for us that allow them to reach athletes and reach their fans in a endemic way. Right. If you're watching highlights or you're watching a live stream on Huddle, you. You are there to watch sports and engage with sports in a really unique way that you maybe don't get by just blasting Instagram ads out. Not that Instagram's platform is bad, it's actually really good. I think we all get targeted by Instagram all the time, or at least I do by very appropriate ads. I think there's a unique way that we can talk about engaging fans on our platform. And then what we do with our partners is if they charge for live streams, they get most of that revenue back to them. We're kicking, you know, 60 plus percent of that revenue back to our partners that charge livestream to charge to watch live streams. And so we've actually worked with high schools and clubs to actually have them bring on partners for advertising on our platform. And that money goes to them to help fund their programs and do things in really unique ways. And so we think of, you know, once these, these organizations really look at building their communities around them, there's a huge revenue opportunity back to them. And frankly, we're happy by taking a small cut of that revenue and using that to drive growth within our own organization. But we know that if we're putting money back in the pockets of those teams, it often means better opportunities for their athletes. And hopefully some of that money comes to us, but doesn't all have to in order for it to be, to be great for them. And so we're excited about what this means for, you know, for youth sports organizations to be able to find a new revenue stream, especially in a lot of organizations that are, you know, cash strapped or down to the dollar on what they, what they can spend for field space and you know, insurance and equipment.

You've been in space a while, Huddle's been in space a while. What are some of the things you're seeing at the macro level? There's a ton of interest right now in sports investment, youth and amateur sports investment in particular. Just as an industry. What are you seeing? Some of the macro trends, some of those conversations with potential partners like a T mobile that suddenly maybe suddenly or not realizes, hey, there's a lot of eyeballs here. This is a great way to spend marketing dollars. What are just some big picture things you guys are seeing today that maybe didn't exist? Call it pre Covid, you know, 2019 and earlier.

Yeah, I think, I mean maybe this has existed for a long time, but it's accelerated post Covid. If you think just starting at the elite level. I mean obviously rights fees have continued to grow for elite sports for forever, but that trickles into athletes salaries which then just makes it feel like a lotto ticket for youth sports parents. Right? Like how many people, even at seven or eight year old, you know, they walk around and they think their kid is going to be the next. Insert your athlete here, LeBron James, the next Lionel Messi, you know, the next, you know, Mia Ham. And it's just that that exists out there for parents that has always existed. But what I think has accelerated since COVID is a combo of nil and college and where they're seeing this paychecks come down earlier to more athletes, which I think is interesting. And then the continued professionalization of youth sports. Right. And so, you know, it's more competitive than it was when. I can't say everywhere, but at least for me growing up, you know, it's. I was a three sport, four sport athlete. I played the sport that was the season and I got to move to the next sport and I was really fortunate to get to do that. And now if you want to play college soccer, if you want to play even high school soccer in many places, you've got to play club, which means you're probably playing, you know, club soccer year round. If you want to play volleyball at the local high school here in Lincoln, Nebraska, you are playing club volleyball. And if you don't play club volleyball, there's a good chance you don't make the roster or at least don't play. And so now you start to think about like, what that means. Like, well, you've got to do this year round, you've got to invest in it. And you're just seeing this massive influx of, of parents spending more money on sports. Right. And I think there was an Aspen Institute report, I think that said parent spending is up 46% on youth sports over the last five years. And I believe it as a parent, I feel it. I talked to other parents at Huddle Ice Hockey. They got their 5 year olds on specific treadmill for training their 5 year old for ice hockey. And sometimes you shake your head and say this is wild, but I think it's just the reality of the world we live in. And so there's nothing, to me, there's nothing wrong with that. That is the macro trend. But then when parents spend more, they expect more, right? They expect better training, they expect better coaching. They expect, you know, hey, why is my kid not getting playtime? Or what can he do, he or she do to get to the next level? And that's where Huddle can actually step in and help a lot of these organizations serve that. And so we see, you know, a strong push around, you know, evidence based coaching, consistently pushing things to the next level around certifications that I think we've done a nice job of filling. But there's still lots of opportunity for growth. But that's where you see a lot of people consistently pushing in, into the space, is trying to find a new and unique way to help athletes in that, in that capacity.

Yeah, we, we did a thing a couple of months ago. I think it's like you know, just however many billion dollars I forget in direct payments to athletes, I mean, it's basically growing like a new MLS in terms of athlete compensation with NCAA forgetting like the over the top, nil stuff. That's just a direct payment piece. It's crazy. So that lottery ticket, your, your odds increase by some, some order of magnitude. There was an article, lots of articles about youth in high school sports lately from New York Times, Bloomberg, the information tech publication, had one this week titled Moneyball for Minors Inside the Booming Business of Youth Sports Apps. And every time we see one of these articles, we hear from a bunch of people in our audience. They sort of become like these, like these totem poles that people in the industry sort of hold up as like, you know, proof of this direction or that direction. And they tend to have a really big impact. They talk to you guys for the article and they, they hinted at the possibility the chatter of huddle going public and effectively being the first true, like youth sports, amateur sports, sports, tech, pure play to go public. I got to ask you about that rumor and then. Yeah, let me start by asking you about the rumor.

Sure, yeah.

The chatter.

It's a great compliment. We've been doing this for nearly 20 years and we've been building tools that keep helping move the sport forward. You can hear my passion about that as we talked. Right. Hopefully, at least over this last year, you know, 40 plus minutes. We're always open to finding opportunities that help us, you know, continue to, to deliver the ability for every athlete to get the shot they deserve. But we don't publicly comment on funding. That's just not what we do.

Do you see, let me try to ask you this way. Do you see more youth, you know, more of the companies in the space potentially exploring the public route and what might be the benefits and, or downsides to doing so? Because then there's also like the private equity route of, you know, consolidation that we're seeing kind of club and event level.

Yeah. You know, I think with any, any route that you take, there's pros and cons to it. You know, we've, we've found operating as a private company has been really helpful for us. We found great partners with our early investors who've been with us for, you know, almost the entirety of our company, and Bain, who's come in and, and helped us from a different route and bringing different perspectives that are out there. And so. But with every funding route or with every route you choose, there, there are pros and cons. Right. If you're a public company, there are constraints that come with doing that and there are, but there are, there are different ways you can use your capital. And as a private company, there are ways that you can, maybe you don't, you don't have to publicly report certain things that you want to do, which is helpful. But you know, it may be trickier to get capital or there may just be different ways that you have to explore it. And so, you know, there's pros and cons to everything. I think the reality is sports in general is a really attractive space. Right? People have a emotional attachment to sports, right? Because whether you played it yourself or whether you're a fan or whether your kids are playing it, you can feel why sports is really powerful. So I just, I don't see funding drying up in this space. I don't see investment drying up in this space. I think it's just going to continue to grow and you know, we'll see the effects of that over time. Whether it's consolidation or not, I'm not sure. But I do think funding will just continue to pour into this space as a really attractive space for people to invest.

From your guys standpoint, I know we talked about athletic data and titan and ball time, right? How do you think about acquisition for tuck ins that have a certain capability within a sport or within an area or a piece of tech that you guys covet? How do you think about that versus organic growth? Is you explore what you described earlier was kind of the breadth of opportunities, but then also the depth, particularly in high school. How do you guys approach that?

Yeah, it's a great question. We have an amazing R and D team and anytime we look at an acquisition, we run a really aggressive build versus buy model. And does it make sense for us to build this tech on its own and what would that path look like and does it make sense for us to buy this tech? And if we do buy it, we are really sober about the effort it's going to take to integrate the technology into our stack, to integrate the team into the way we operate and to blend those cultures together. We think we've built a really great corporate culture here at Huddle. We're not perfect, but we think that we've done a really nice job. And you know, anytime you're bringing people in via acquisition, it can be tricky too. So we're sober about all the different pieces that come with that when we do that assessment. But we're really always looking for the right opportunities for us to continue to bring value to Our customers. It's mostly customer driven. Right. Like, hey, this is the need we have. How would you all address it? And then we're taking a look at a build versus buy scenario. There more.

What are some of the. Some of, like your big picture outside of huddle specifically, but just some of your big picture predictions for youth sports or some of the sports that have the most momentum maybe between now and the end of the decade that you're seeing.

Gosh, this is a unique question, I think. Okay, maybe here's your hot takes.

Yeah, yeah, hot. Call it the hot takes.

Hot takes. Hot takes. I think flag football will become one of the most serious sports in youth sports over the course of the next 10 years. I just think such a huge opportunity. People love football in this country. I love football in this country. Right. And it's. It's fun to watch and it gives you the ability to extend football in a unique way into windows that. That don't exist. I don't know if you saw the video of like, Rashon Rondo as like one of the top quarterbacks in the United States right now for flag football.

No, I didn't.

An NBA player who's just retired from being a point guard and now is one of the top, you know, black football quarterbacks. I think that you can see it starting to come in like. I think flag football is coming fast.

Do you think it eats into tackle as not just a gateway to tackle, but also like its own standalone thing? I mean, obviously with Tom Brady, I think playing next year somewhere overseas, Dubai maybe, and then in the Olympics. Do you see it like being its own standalone?

I think. I don't know that it will eat in a tackle. I don't believe so. If the NFL believe that, I don't believe they would be supporting flag football as much as. As they are. So maybe that's the way to think about it. They're way smarter at looking at these trends than I am. But I would say I think it actually just brings in a new subset of fans. You know, I think girls flight football is one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest growing sport in youth sports and in high school sports in America right now. And that's going to bring a whole new wave of fans into the broader football ecosystem. And I think we're going to see that continue to perforate up and down. And so that's exciting for us. We love new sports and new opportunities for people. I think there's a huge opportunity there. I think, you know, it'll be. I Don't know who will win this space, but I think there is something that it will happen with soccer. Club soccer, I think, just has to evolve the way it is happening now. If you're watching, you've got ecnl, you've got Girls Academy, you've got mls and MLS next, you've got the MLS doing their own thing. Us, the people have tried again and again. I feel like every decade, like kind of the next. The next iteration of it comes out. But I think over the course of the next 10 years, I hope if the US wants to seriously compete at the international level, we're going to have to make some changes to the way our youth soccer system operates so that it's not just luck. I think to find the best athletes, I think there's going to need to be more structure around it. I. I don't know the who will win that space. I'm not smart enough to know that. But I do think that there is someone will emerge victorious and the best athletes will all gravitate in that direction and it will be a much more consistent process. Maybe those are my two hot takes. I'm happy to go further, but I think those would be my two hot takes. What do you got?

No, that was good. I know. I think I agree with you on flag, especially girls flag. And soccer, to me is so interesting. There's just so many facets of it. And I think next year with the World cup being here, you're going to see that discussion in the forefront. It's one of the areas I think we're having the most fun covering. Last one for you. I'd like to ask this to our bigger guests, who's another company or person outside of Huddle that you personally or as a company sort of admire or, or in the space, the way they go about things. Obviously not a competitor or anything, but who's. Who's out there? You're like, hey, I like what they're doing. And it's. I think it's. They're headed in the right direction.

And that's a really interesting question. I think there's so many people doing really great stuff in the space. Try to think through somebody that I wouldn't. You know, when you say not a competitor, I think there's competitors doing great stuff and really unique stuff. I'll give you an example of somebody I think is doing some. Some really cool things. There's a company called Skill Corner that's doing really good stuff at the elite level in terms of broadcast tracking and trying to find a way to generate player specific tracking data from just TV video. And they've moved from, they're doing it in global football or soccer, but they're also doing it in basketball and they're trying to find a way to bring this elite level analytics and continue to scale it downstream. And I really like their team. I've talked to their team quite a bit. I think they're doing really cool stuff and I would say that they are somebody I admire a lot. You know, I would have told you a year ago, I would have told you balltime. I loved what the balltime team is doing, which is probably indicative of what happened, you know, with our team, you know, and bringing them together. And Tom and Dan and their team have been amazing and awesome to bring onto our team and really push us on growth. So we're constantly out there looking for great people. There's just, there's so many cool opportunities, but maybe those are a couple that I'll give you that are, I mean balltime is cheat because they're already on a team. Skill corner is not. There's nothing in process. I just, I really respect Hugo and what he's, what he's built with his organization as somebody I admire in, in the space.

Awesome. No, I think that's a great one, Matt. I, I, I know we're at time here. I really appreciate your time. Why don't you quick plug away how I'm sure people can find Huddle but why don't you plug away how they can find you guys and, and you personally on LinkedIn if, if people want to follow you individually.

Yeah, well, Huddle's easy. It's H u D l dot com. You can follow us there. You know, we're active on Twitter or X, we're active on, on LinkedIn, we're active on Instagram. You can pretty much find us everywhere. If you're interested in a specific sport, it's huddle with the sport. Usually you can find us pretty Simply. I'm on LinkedIn. It's Matt Mueller, it's M U E L L E R. It's pretty straightforward. I'm pretty boring on, on social media so I don't have a lot to offer but happy to connect and you know, do whatever I can to help people grow in the space and you know, if you're a coach and you're looking for something great, I'm happy to, you know, point you to the right direction. We were really talented team that's happy to help you find the next level.

Awesome. Matt, thanks so much. Appreciate you joining.

Hey, Kyle, thanks so much for having me, man.