Youth Sports Were Already Intense—Now AI Tools Are Supercharging the Competition

Ashley Brown used to watch her daughter’s club volleyball games through the screen of her phone, afraid to put it down and miss out on footage of a set or kill that would catch the eye of a college recruiter. And as the coach of her daughter’s high school volleyball team in Caledonia, Michigan, Brown’s attention was constantly split between watching the games and tallying each player’s statistics by hand.

But this year, her daughter’s traveling club team purchased an artificial intelligence service called Balltime for all players aged 12 to 18. A single phone or tablet placed behind the court’s endline records a game and uploads it to the company’s platform, which uses body and object recognition algorithms to track each player so that their every ball contact and movement on the court can be cataloged and datafied.

By the time a player has gotten home from a game and showered, the service can prepare personalized stat reports and social media-ready highlight packages. It also gives coaches a bevy of data that was previously only available to professional and elite college volleyball programs. Balltime automatically measures how high in the air players make contact with the ball, their kill and error percentages, ball trajectories, serve speeds, and which rotations of players score the most.

It’s part of a growing sports technology industry selling computer vision algorithms, wearable biometric sensors, and predictive analytics services to youth clubs and high school athletics departments, opening up a new world of video and data analysis that—for better or worse—is changing the way young athletes and their families experience sports.

Without needing to spend hours cutting together videos themselves, teams can gather comprehensive video evidence to show, rather than tell, young players what they did right and wrong. And coaches and college recruiters say platforms like Balltime and Darkhorse AI, which provides a similar player-tracking service for soccer, are allowing them to make more data-driven decisions about rosters and playing time.

“It has helped me already this season with some of the difficult conversations I’ve had to have with players and parents,” Brown said. “[I can tell them] it’s not because I don’t like your kid, this is a computer system and software system that are rating these things based on these parameters.”

As valuable as they can be to help players learn and improve, some coaches worry the data and highlight packages produced by AI analytics services also supercharge unhealthy competition among young athletes vying for attention from recruiters and on social media.

“There’s this mad rush right now to use these tools to self promote and there’s this pit of loneliness that can happen when you don’t get that attention,” said Ben Bahr, a former college coach and data analyst who now works as director of coaching for Adrenaline Volleyball in Iowa, which uses Balltime. “With the rise of AI and sharing of data, the thing that’s come out of this the most is that it’s become much easier to compare yourself with what someone else is doing.”

Big money in young sports

The push for advanced data analytics is part of the growing monetization of children’s sports. A report frequently cited by sports technology investors estimates that the youth sports market had a global value of $37.5 billion in 2022 that will grow to $69.4 billion by 2030, rivaling some of the world’s most popular professional leagues.

Private equity firms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy youth sports complexes and teenagers are now competing not just for spots on college rosters but also for life-changing money from name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals, thanks to a 2021 Supreme Court case that opened the door to private sponsorships for college athletes.

“There is definitely a downward move toward more professionalized youth sports,” Dan Banon, Balltime’s CEO, told Gizmodo. He and chief technology officer Tom Raz began building the platform with adults in mind but soon realized the biggest potential for growth was in traveling club teams and high schools. Over the past year, he said, the company has seen more signups from junior varsity teams and even middle school programs. Their data shows that some players spend seven hours a month reviewing footage on Balltime.

At $25 per month for a player, Balltime’s recruiting package isn’t for everyone. But with the average household spending $883 a year on a single child’s primary sport, according to a parent survey from the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, the additional cost is also well within many families’ sports budgets.

Responding to pressure from families who want their children to have every advantage, some elite clubs are looking for even more ways to combine, collect, and analyze player data.

Mustang Soccer League, based in Danville, California is in the process of building out a data analytics department and some players can expect to spend an additional $250 a year on technology subscriptions, said Fred Wilson, the club’s executive director.

Mustang recently introduced Darkhorse AI for its 12 to 18-year-old teams and is beginning to discuss high-level analytics with players as young as 10. Like Balltime, Darkhorse uses object recognition algorithms to track players during games, automatically cataloging various stats and curating highlight reels. Some Mustang teams also link that information with biometric data like heart rate and running speed captured by Beyond Pulse wearable sensors.

“I don’t know how much learning we’re going to do with 10-year-olds, but I’m trying to instill a habit so that when they’re 14 or 15 they’re paying attention to these things … make it just second nature for players to understand,” Wilson said.

The club boasts several former players who are now professionals and dozens more at top college programs. “This whole AI piece takes us to that next level to be able to do that,” Wilson said. “I take 200 calls a year [from sports technology vendors] to find the gem.” Most of them are “out trying to make a quick buck,” he added, but some are offering real value.

Karin Pfeiffer, director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, said that even at the college level, where wearable biometric sensors and data analytics have been common for some time, programs are still struggling to figure out what data is actually useful for athletes and coaches.

“Collegiate level coaches are approached all the time with these technology things, I imagine that’s going to bleed down to high school too if it hasn’t already,” she said. “You can get so much information out of it, but the question is what’s relevant, what’s actually tied to performance, what’s tied to future success.”

‘Insane pressure’ to hit metrics

Coaches and company executives told Gizmodo that the biggest driver of the AI analytics boom in youth sports is the prospect that the tools can help athletes make the jump to college, where a spot on a roster can translate into tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships and, at the highest levels, hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorship deals.

Some products, like SwimIntel, focus purely on recruiting rather than coaching. The platform collects competition data on swimmers as young as 15 and uses it to rank them as recruits and train models that predict how they will fare in different collegiate swim programs. For $40 a month, swimmers can receive 60-plus page analytics reports that project how their times will improve, or worsen, at different colleges. Schools that contract with SwimIntel receive similar predictions in reverse based on how other athletes from the same youth swim club have performed once in college.

“We let college coaches play moneyball using AI,” said Jamie Bailey, the founder of SwimIntel. “We let student athletes use AI to find best fits. And in the end, what we’re trying to do is reduce that dropout rate. One out of six college swimmers don’t come back their sophomore year.”

Bahr, the former college volleyball coach and data analyst, said that when he worked at programs like Baylor University and Southern Methodist University the volleyball staff would sometimes receive 600 emails a day from prospective recruits. If a player didn’t catch the recruiter’s eye in the first 30 seconds of their highlight reel, they were often passed over.

Now with Balltime, more players have access to more video footage than they ever had before and the measurement algorithms have changed the way college programs assess highlight reels. “I don’t even need to watch the film,” Bahr said, recruiters can just look at Balltime’s video analytics to see “are you touching the ball at a height that’s at a better height than our competition? Are you touching the ball over 10 feet or not? We’re already in this insane pressure of hitting these metrics and these tools certainly haven’t helped with that”

At the same time, several coaches who spoke to Gizmodo were optimistic that AI video tools will also increase competition in a positive way—by allowing athletes who don’t play for the biggest youth teams to improve their skills and get noticed by recruiters.

“Having that video, having those stats, those are real educational tools,” said Pfeiffer, from Michigan State University. “It all comes down to how the athlete is receiving that and making sure appropriate supports are in place. I don’t think these things should be unchecked, they should come with guidance from parents and coaches. But sometimes parents and coaches are overzealous”