Jeremy Goldberg
In his day, Jeremy Goldberg was the Texas state high school debate champion. But he’ll tell you that playing quarterback on his middle-school football team was no less influential in shaping his identity and the contributions he came to believe he could make in the world. Not a great arm, but he quickly learned how to run an offense, drive for results, and iterate his way to success.
Today, the game he plays is program management software for youth sport organizations. Goldberg is president and co-founder with CEO Brian Litvack of LeagueApps, one of the several largest providers of such software. LeagueApps is a member of Project Play 2024, the Aspen Institute’s industry-focused roundtable that includes TeamSnap and Stack Sports, competitors who collaborate in our space.
The value of having software companies at our table is that, in the U.S., they are key players in the youth sport ecosystem. It’s a fragmented space lacking real governance or coordination. There’s not even a central registry of organizations serving youth. LeagueApps and their peers serve as aggregators, via their customer databases, creating opportunities to communicate, mobilize and advocate across silos.
Goldberg unpacked these opportunities in an interview with Tom Farrey, executive director of the Sports & Society Program at the Institute. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation, the latest installment in our Project Play 2024 Member Spotlight series that offers insights into the motivations and activities of the organizations we work most closely with to grow access to positive sport experiences for young people.
Tom: We met first back in 2013, right after we launched Project Play, when you agreed to lead one of our tech working groups. At that point, LeagueApps was still in startup mode. Why was it important for you to take part in Project Play? What do you remember from that first meeting?
Jeremy: I remember reaching out to you cold and chasing a little bit and saying, “Hey, I really want to get involved here. I think I could be helpful.” As for why I got involved, I think about it on two levels.
One is on a personal level. As a journalist, you were someone who had written on something and realized it wasn't sufficient just to cover it. You wanted to do something about it. It reminded me of someone I'd worked with, the journalist John Wallach, who had similarly founded a nonprofit called Seeds of Peace because he was reporting on terrorism and felt inspired to do something about.
I was always looking for opportunities to make an impact. When you intersect that with my role at LeagueApps, I saw an opportunity for us to make a bigger impact in this broader ecosystem of youth sports. I thought technology could play a big role. Then, to be in a room of like-minded people who care deeply and had so much to share? I knew that I found my tribe so to speak, and it's been a great journey ever since, almost 10 years later.
Tom: Tech, like sports, is a neutral thing. It is neither good nor bad, right? It's all what you do with it. So what made you optimistic that tech could be an asset?
Jeremy: Data. The role of data is something that I think is critical to understanding (how to make decisions that get and keep more kids playing). Technology can help level the playing field. Then there’s the idea of scale. When you're talking about an issue that is so complicated and systemic in nature, what is the way to think about solutions that are as big as the problems? Technology can help scale solutions.
We also provide a deep level of systemic insights that are very bottoms-up, from the grassroots. At the end of the day, youth sports is happening because there are organizations out there that are employing coaches and getting field space. They’re developing curriculum or events or games or leagues or clinics, and then they're delivering those programs. The more that we can understand the practical (challenges) of these kinds of organizations, the more we can understand what's working. And what's not.
Tom: In 2019, we named LeagueApps a Project Play Champion for your commitment to dedicate 1% of revenues to building capacity for youth sport organizations. You set a target of reaching 500,000 underserved kids playing youth sports by 2022. How’s that gone?
Jeremy: We actually had 550,000 youth sports opportunities that we created for kids in underserved communities by the end of 2022. But truly, the achievement is not ours. It's simply a reflection of all the amazing nonprofits that are actually doing the work in overcoming COVID, solving the obstacles to serve underserved communities. We're simply trying to support them through the software and the capacity building that we offer. We try to sustain a commitment and live up to the obligations we have as citizens of this country and people who care what's going on, but more importantly, the commitments we make as being part of Project Play and wanting to do our part. (Read LeagueApps’s 2022 Impact Report.)
Tom: You've been part of Project Play really since inception. But LeagueApps joined our industry roundtable, Project Play 2024, in 2020. How has being a member of PP2024 amplified your ability to make an impact?
Jeremy: We believe in collective action. As much as we believe in our own capabilities and reach and in what we're trying to do as a company, the problem in youth sports is too big. Being part of a community and getting a deeper understanding of insights, learning what we can from everybody, getting better ourselves, and sharing what we had contributed, was really compelling.
There's also some accountability if you join a group like this, which is, we're gonna do something. We want to inspire other people to do it. And we want to be inspired by the good work of other members.
Tom: What have you seen in terms of trends since the pandemic? How much has youth sports roared back? Or not roared back?
Jeremy: What the pandemic has done is it simply made what was true, more true, and accelerated the trends. Bigger organizations are getting bigger, and smaller organizations are having more challenges. More consolidation is happening in the space. The youth sports organizations that succeeded through COVID, and then really thrived afterwards, were often that organizations that were larger, that had the most capacity, that adapted digitally in different ways, and figured it out.
I had anticipated that maybe families would not want to travel as much and there would be new models of competitions. There are some exceptions but for the most part people have gone back to the way that sports was experienced before. So whatever challenges existed before, they're bigger. And whatever opportunities existed before to drive progress, those may be more compelling. There are still not enough kids playing sport. The reality is that the stratification between the haves and have nots based on income and race and maybe to some degree gender is more real than ever, and we just have to continue our commitment to making sure that every kid has access to great experiences.
Tom: Early in the pandemic, LeagueApps organized a coalition to seek funding to help keep local youth sports providers afloat. In support of that commitment, we named the PLAY Sports Coalition a Project Play Champion. What are the top priorities for PLAYS at this moment?
Jeremy: We went back to collective action and took inspiration from Project Play. What we found is that if you advocated properly, you could access government funding and direct those resources into youth programs. We saw the idea that Aspen had proposed to use proceeds from legalized sports gambling to support youth sports programs in need, and we mobilized to put that in place in New York state. That was the first test, and $5 million was allocated. We've now helped expand that opportunity to other states. In aggregate, about $26 million has been unlocked for youth sports organizations.
The other thing that we've done is, in states like Maryland and Massachusetts where government has allocated some funding for youth sports, PLAYS has served as a delivery mechanism to get the money to programs in communities. Where states don’t have existing grant makers, we have raised our hand and said, well, let's figure out how we'll do it on behalf of the states. Now, we’re looking at every state. How do we expand that? How do we advocate for more funds? How we support these efforts on the ground? Can we get $100 million flowing through those efforts and go beyond?
Then, at the federal level, what are the things we can do that can also unlock resources? We have two strategies. One is directed community project funding, also known as earmarks. We did a pilot project where we targeted six projects, six nonprofits that we advocated on their behalf. We were able to get awards of almost $2.3 million to go directly to those nonprofits to expand facilities and programs and spaces. We're saying, wait, if that can work in a few projects, could we scale that across every member of Congress? And really work with nonprofits with the technical assistance they need to be able to access those funds that can really help them invest in capital projects? There are tens of billions of dollars that are out there potential earmarks. What’s the potential for us to tap into that?
The other piece of this at the federal level is legislation that really tries to get more access to a specific fund for youth sports nonprofits. We just reintroduced the PLAYS Act, this time with bipartisan support. Colin Allred (D-TX) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) have joined together to push this bill forward that calls for a $75 million fund to be created. We're now attracting co-sponsors to it, and the idea is to really write into legislation that youth sports is not this optional thing.
So at the end of the day, I'd like to be able to tell you that we've unlocked a billion dollars more over the next five years through the efforts of the PLAY Sports Coalition working collectively. That will be a billion dollars more going directly to nonprofits and to access play spaces. We've got a way to go. But figuring out how to get to the first $25 million has inspired us. There's a big opportunity out there.
Tom: The thing I like about the PLAYS Act is it includes language drawn from the Children's Bill of Rights in Sports. It's not just, let's give people money. It's let's give money to the organizations abiding by best practices, that have their coaches trained, that respect the rights of kids, which I think is important because youth sports can be great -- but it also can be not-so-great if not delivered properly.
Jeremy: One thing the Aspen Institute has done is you’ve created the understanding of what's working and what's not. You’ve created things like the children’s rights framework around sports that we can use to get people to understand why this is important and incorporate that in legislation. And then there's the data and insights that support the advocacy of why this is important. We don't need to reinvent the wheel when we’re writing this legislation and duplicate the work of you all and the folks within the PP2024 network and other groups. All we're trying to do is be the tip of the spear and engage grassroots organizations, then integrate policymakers and leverage the good work that's happening.
Learn about the Project Play 2024 roundtable and find more interviews with leaders from member organizations here.
On Oct. 25-26 in New York City, LeagueApps hosts its NextUp Conference, a conference focused on professional development for youth sport program operators. Registration is open the public.