Private Equity’s New Venture: Youth Sports
Backed by Wall Street, the company Black Bear Sports Group is tightening its grip on youth sports. In a scheme only private equity could dream up, parents now can’t record their kids’ games — but they can pay a steep price to watch corporate recordings.
Private equity firms are deploying the same playbook in youth sports as they have in other domains. (Ben Jackson / NHLI via Getty Images)
There’s an ironclad truism in youth sports: every parent turns into an ESPN 30 for 30 documentarian as soon as they have a video recording device in hand and their kid is in the game.
Some record the games and post them online so family members and friends who can’t attend in person can watch their kids play. Sometimes they do so to attract the attention of college scouts or help players hone their craft. Some people just want to preserve the memories.
But in the world of corporatized youth sports, even this simple pleasure is being banned and monetized by Wall Street to extract as much profit as possible from players and parents, no matter how many kids get sidelined because they can’t afford the sport’s rising costs.
As the $40 billion youth sports industry comes under private equity control, corporate-owned facilities and leagues — from hockey rinks to cheerleading arenas — have begun prohibiting parents from recording their own kids’ sports games.
Instead, parents are forced to subscribe to these companies’ exclusive recording and streaming service, which can cost many times more than the streaming costs for professional sporting events. Meanwhile, the firms’ exclusive contracts have prohibited alternative video services from being made available.
In some instances, parents have been threatened that if they choose to defy the rules and record the game, they may end up on a blacklist that punishes their kids’ teams. Those threats were even reportedly made to a sitting US senator.
“I was told this past weekend that if I livestreamed my child’s hockey game, my kid’s team will be penalized and lose a place in the standings,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) at a public event earlier this year. “Why is that? Because a private equity company has bought up the rinks.”
Murphy did not name the company in question, though the restrictive streaming practices he described have become widespread across youth hockey.
Black Bear Sports Group, an emerging youth hockey empire and the largest owner-operator of hockey rinks in the country, is among the private equity–backed companies that are amassing a chokehold on recording and streaming youth sports. At Black Bear–owned ice rinks, parents cannot record, post, or livestream their kids’ hockey games online “per official company policy,” according to staff at those venues. Some rink attendants said they will confiscate attendees’ recording devices if they find them.
Some specialized sports training consultants have agreements with Black Bear that allow them to record games and practices, but only for internal use.
According to a spokesperson, Black Bear claims the policy is to mitigate “significant safety risks to players,” such as players being filmed without their consent. The spokesperson failed to answer a follow-up question about what penalties attendees might face if they try to record the games themselves.
Black Bear’s streaming service costs between $25 and $50 a month, depending on the package and additional fees. The company’s aggressive expansion of the program has even triggered a lawsuit from a former streaming partner alleging breach of contract and trade secret theft.
In addition to its recording rules and associated costs, Black Bear is starting to add a $50 “registration and insurance” fee per player for some leagues. That’s on top of what players already spend on expensive equipment, team registration, and membership to USA Hockey, the sport’s national governing body.
“Black Bear Sports Group does not have a good reputation in the hockey world and is known for predatory practices of its customers like price gouging,” reads a recently launched petition protesting the new registration and insurance charges.
The fees and streaming restrictions reveal how private equity firms are deploying the same playbook in youth sports as they have in other domains, from dentistry to bowling: degrade the quality of service while juicing returns for investors.
“Black Bear [is] following the exact same model as we’ve seen elsewhere in the industry,” said Katie Van Dyck, an antitrust attorney and senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. “It’s not about investing to enrich our children’s lives.”
“The New Sport of Kings”
The new fees tacked on by Black Bear contribute to the already rising costs of participating in youth and recreational sports like hockey.
Across the board, youth sports have become an increasingly expensive budget item for American families, thanks to costs ranging from equipment to team memberships and travel.
According to a recent study from the Aspen Institute, households now spend an average of $1,016 a year on their child’s primary sport, a 46 percent increase since 2019.
The professionalization of youth sports has further driven up costs. Some parents now pay for personal trainers and even sports psychologists to give their kids a competitive edge in the hopes of them reaching the collegiate or professional level.
As a result, many children from lower-income families are being priced out of youth sports.
“We have this affordability crisis, and youth sports are one of those things that’s becoming an activity only for the wealthy,” said Van Dyck. “It’s not something that is accessible to people who make less than six figures a year.”
This trend line has been particularly pronounced in hockey, which, according to some metrics, is the most expensive youth sport, with an average cost of $2,583. Skate prices can top $1,000, and sticks can often cost several hundred.
“It’s the new sport of kings,” said Joseph Kolodziej, who runs a consultancy helping parents and athletes navigate the world of youth hockey. “I’ve been hearing for over twenty years that prices are forcing people out of the sport and that teams are losing gifted athletes because they can’t afford to play.”
The rapid commercialization of youth sports has become big business. One recent estimate put the total valuation of the youth sports market at $40 billion. Youth hockey alone could reach over $300 million by the end of the decade.
Those sky-high revenues have attracted Wall Street investors looking to charge more money from a wealthier customer base willing to pay more for their kids.
And now, virtually every corner of the youth sports industry is coming under corporate ownership.
A company called Unrivaled Sports, run by two veterans of Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm, is rapidly consolidating baseball camps, flag football, and other leagues. The operation even bought the iconic baseball megacomplex in Cooperstown, New York, considered the birthplace of the sport, where summer tournaments draw teams from around the country.
Bain Capital–backed Varsity Brands, meanwhile, has cannibalized the competitive cheerleading arena and now acts as the gatekeeper controlling access to the sport.
All of this outside investment has raised concerns that the financial firms rolling up the market may further increase costs for families.
From health care to retail, private equity firms purchase companies, load them up with debt, slash costs, and extract as much profit as possible for investors before selling the operations or filing for bankruptcy.
“When youth sports become an investment vehicle, rather than a development vehicle for children, there [are] all kinds of financial predation that can arise from vulture companies that don’t have the sport’s long-term interest in mind,” said Van Dyck at the American Economic Liberties Project.
Varsity Brands, for example, faced a class-action antitrust lawsuit for alleged anticompetitive practices that pushed out cheerleading rivals while squeezing profits from participants, such as forcing teams to purchase Varsity’s own apparel and equipment. In 2024, Varsity, which was also mired in a sex abuse scandal, settled the suit for $82 million.
In addition to controlling venues, uniforms, and the tournaments for competitive cheerleading, Varsity expanded into entertainment streaming services with Varsity TV, which has the exclusive right to livestream the company’s competitions. It’s lorded that arrangement not just over parents but also tech giants. During the 2020 Netflix docuseries Cheer, which follows a cheerleading team competing across the country, Varsity wouldn’t allow the series’ crew to film inside the venue they owned in Daytona, Florida.
The Texas attorney general is probing similar anticompetitive practices by the Dallas Stars, a professional National Hockey League team, following an explosive USA Today investigation into its youth hockey operations. According to the report, the team bought up dozens of Texas’s recreational rinks. It then allegedly used its market power to jack up fees on youth players, underinvested in rink maintenance, and retaliated against clubs that tried to oppose them.
Now, legal experts say Black Bear Sports is replicating a similar model for youth hockey teams along the East Coast and beyond.
The Only Game in Town
Hockey has grown in popularity across the United States, with USA Hockey membership reaching an all-time high of 577,900 in 2025. But it’s become increasingly difficult for small operations to meet the growing demand.
For example, rinks require immense amounts of energy for air conditioning to reach freezing temperatures, and electric utility bills have skyrocketed over the past decade. And while many local rinks used to be municipally run or publicly funded, such support has been slashed in recent decades in favor of government privatization.
In 2015, the Maryland-based Black Bear Sports entered the scene. The company, owned by the private equity firm Blackstreet Capital, began buying up struggling ice rinks, some of which were on the verge of closing. According to the company’s sales pitch, it would invest the capital to retrofit and renovate the rinks, making them serviceable.
This approach follows a familiar pattern for Black Bear Sports’ founder, Murry Gunty, a longtime hockey aficionado who got his start at Blackstone before launching his own private equity firm, Blackstreet Capital. Blackstreet is known for buying up small- to medium-sized distressed companies for cheap, then making the businesses leaner before selling them off. While slashing costs to bring in returns for the firm’s investors, the private equity fund managers charge massive fees to pad their own bottom lines.
Shortly after founding Black Bear in 2015, Gunty was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for charging investors high fees without being licensed as a broker. Blackstreet settled the charges for $3.1 million.
Today Black Bear owns forty-two rinks across eleven states across the Northeast, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic coast. In some areas, those venues are the only game in town. With its network of rinks, Black Bear controls the basic infrastructure that other clubs, leagues, and tournaments need to access.
Along with rinks, Black Bear also manages four national and regional youth hockey associations, a handful of junior-level sports teams, such as the Maryland Black Bears, and organizes major youth hockey tournaments on the East Coast. Gunty acts as the commissioner of the United States Premier Hockey League, one of the largest top-level junior leagues with seventy-five teams nationwide, offering a direct pathway for young athletes to play at the college level. Black Bear’s vice president, Tony Zasowski, is the league commissioner for the Tier 1 Hockey Federation and the Atlantic Hockey Federation, top-level hockey leagues.
Those organizations set the rules for the league, dictate playing schedules, and require paid dues, among other costs. They also determine where leagues and tournaments will be held — such as Black Bear’s own rinks.
The conglomerate also launched its own online hockey ratings system, used to determine team rankings and players’ status.
Among the company’s newest ventures is a streaming site, Black Bear TV. In September 2024, the company put out a public notice that “all games played inside the Black Bear venues and certain partner venues will be streamed exclusively on Black Bear TV.”
That exclusive arrangement also includes all games played within the leagues run by Black Bear, even if they aren’t occurring at their own arenas. Shortly after Gunty became commissioner of the United States Premier Hockey League in 2024, the organization inked a deal to make Black Bear TV the exclusive provider for all its games.
Previously, Black Bear had an exclusive agreement with the sports broadcaster LiveBarn to livestream the games, and the two split the revenues.
But Black Bear wanted to assume full control over streaming services and profits, according to a lawsuit LiveBarn filed this year, which claims Black Bear stole LiveBarn’s business and then used inside information about its prices and terms to convince other rinks to sign deals with Black Bear.
Black Bear TV isn’t cheap. Each individual game on its online platform costs $14.99 to watch. For the service’s full suite of features, including the ability to clip plays, packages range between $26 and $36 a month and can total roughly $440 a year. Certain premier leagues controlled by Black Bear are subject to additional fees, driving up prices to $50 a month.
For comparison, an $11.99 monthly subscription to ESPN TV would include access to nearly every Division 1 college game, most National Hockey League games, professional soccer matches, PGA Tour golf tournaments, and other major sporting events.
A Black Bear spokesperson says its prices reflect the high-quality service it provides to customers. “With Black Bear TV, we are no longer limited by a fixed, center-ice camera connected to [a] rink wireless connection that often faces delays and low-quality picture,” said the spokesperson.
But user reviews for Black Bear TV complain about the service’s streaming quality and spotty coverage. The company gets to pick and choose which games it features on the service.
Starting this year, Black Bear is introducing another fee: a separate registration and insurance charge for adult leagues to access its ice rinks.
The new $50 annual charge, which could become a model for youth leagues under Black Bears’ control, triggered a public petition in September demanding the company reduce its fees.
Black Bear contends that the new fee is a slightly lower-cost alternative to USA Hockey’s $52 adult registration cost, which is required to participate in the organization’s sanctioned leagues.
But according to the petition, certain recreational leagues weren’t previously paying any fees at Black Bear rinks, and some players may now have to pay both registration fees if they also play in leagues unrelated to Black Bear.
The additional fees could be another hurdle denying some players the joys of participating in the sport altogether.
“Adding an additional fee is unnecessary and makes an already hard-to-access sport even more difficult, especially for new players . . . [it] risks killing our league as it has already shrunken from previous years,” say petition organizers.