When looking at the world of athletics, youth travel ball organizations represent a significant piece of the sports ecosystem. With specialized training, competitive tournaments being hosted every weekend around the country, and the vast amount of exposure to elite level of play, these organizations have changed the way young athletes interact with athletics in their developmental stages of life.
Technology, data, statistical evidence, and analysis of all three have redefined all aspects of how athletes interact with sports today. Everywhere you go and every social media platform you are on will be loaded with sports updates, highlights, and marketing campaigns. Even when you do not follow sports very closely. As technology has advanced, the preference of interacting with sports content has increased immensely. Data analytics drives decision making in the world as a whole. Fans and sports consumers can follow sports without having to even turn their TV’s on. More than ever before, athletes have an opportunity to choose from a wide variety of sports and excel in those sports if capable of leveraging the data along with having athletic ability. Not only do the players need to understand and keep up with these advances, but so will the coaches and managers of these organizations. Technology once only available to professional elite athletes, is now available to any athlete, at any age. In the last twenty years, we have seen the transformation from paper to digital and VHS tapes to share film to now just with a click of a button you can send multiple videos at a time. An article written by the Sports Business Journal stated that, registration platforms, video analytics and streaming, wearables and biometrics, and social media and NIL are where the technological advances will be happening for youth athletics.
View this link from the Sports Business Journal to learn more about these technological demands becoming more prominent in youth athletics.
https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/SB-Blogs/OpEds/2023/06/08-Frintzilas.aspx