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…
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 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.
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.
Read the original article
Comments
Anywhere there is money, making an everyday man some money, these pests creep in. I generally dislike what has become of recreational sports and how the parents are either forced to spend for things that really don't matter, when learning to play. But learning Private Equity is eyeing this give me creeps. There must be some guy who observed how families are spending and decided it would be the next destination for PE.
By SoftTalker 2025-11-2118:391 reply They have only discovered what lots of small operators in youth sports already knew. Parents will pay stupid money to have their kids participate.
My kids played some travel sports, the tournament organizers were all in it for profit, they also had deals with local hotels and parents were required to stay at the "tournament approved" hotels. They were inevitably rather premium hotels such as Marriott brands and the room rates were high. The tournament organizer got a kickback on every room sold.
Hockey is particularly expensive because the costs to operate a hockey rink are high. Costs to run and maintain chillers are high, especially if you are open in the summertime, and you need trained staff who can drive a Zamboni and otherwise maintain the surface, and you can't just switch that off if nobody's using it. Usually a community-owned ice rink runs at quite a loss to the municipality. A privately-owned rink will have to charge hundreds of dollars an hour for ice time and they often are barely profitable. There's no way to scale beyond about 12-16 hours a day where anyone wants to use the ice, and often 5pm-midnight is the only ice you can sell.
Then there are the "academies" for the parents who think their kid is the next NHL or NBA superstar. They are private schools, operated at or near the sports facility, where kids go to school as well as play/practice their sport. The tuition rates are what you might expect: exclusive, to say the least.
By sam_lowry_ 2025-11-2119:271 reply If you think hockey is expensive, you are lucky to have sons, otherwise you'd experience the wrath of ice skating.
Not only it is individual sport unlike hockey, it is also elitist especially because it is completely shut off youtube because... not cp, no. Music!
By 7thaccount 2025-11-2119:381 reply Ice skating varies. The skates for someone into it range from $500-$1500. Those typically last several years unless you're skating like 4 hours a day and doing tons of jumps. It costs $20 to sharpen skates and that needs to happen every few weeks for competitive skaters I think. I like mine slightly dull and usually go a few months at a time. Lessons are like $200+ per month for group or $40+/hour for private. Travel + recitals + outfits + music, would be another thing too, but we don't do the competitive stuff. As a result, I pay a lot more for hockey for my kid. I could see figure skating being a little more expensive overall if we were competitive and did more private lessons. They're both super expensive in general though.
By SoftTalker 2025-11-2119:47 When my kids played hockey the team bought a skate sharpener. Saved a lot of money over the years not paying for sharpening at the rinks (and often the rinks would do a poor job at it, depending on whether the person knew what they were doing).
By acessoproibido 2025-11-2117:131 reply The problem is mostly how unregulated gambling is in 2025. If you couldn't bet on everything I think sport would be much less infested by money.
One more "great" use case that cryptocurrencies enable
Youth sports have been moving in this direction since long before sports gambling was a meaningful economic force in the US at least. I attended both a high school and a college that started football programs while I was a student because the leadership thought it was necessary to maintain enrollment.
By Tangurena2 2025-11-2119:05 We were discussing cheerleading at a break in one of the office meetings this morning. Varsity Brands, owned by Bain Capital, controls the "sport" of cheerleading in the US. If you want to compete, you must purchase current year's uniforms, pay to enter contests run by VB, stay at hotels that VB decides. A teenager involved in competition cheerleading can easily spend $5k-25k/year. This "sport" injures more teens each year than football does - and that's a high-contact sport with significant protective gear.
>I traced Varsity’s market power to three basic maneuvers. The first was buying up most of the cheerleading competitions in the country, so that entering a competition meant dealing with Varsity. The second was secretly creating and running the nonprofits that govern the sport, such as the U.S. All Star Federation, which gave Varsity the power to write rules for and organize competitions, scheduling, camps, and ancillary services like insurance. And the third was cutting deals with gyms to block rivals. Gyms are where teams of cheerleaders train, and gym coaches tend to have control over what uniforms athletes must buy. The company gave gyms who bought their uniforms from Varsity preferential treatment and special rebates.
>One key result of Varsity’s scheme is inflated prices to the end consumer, which is why Bain bought the corporation in the first place. If there was cash to grab, Varsity tried to grab it. For instance, Varsity makes it very hard for parents to watch videos of cheerleading competition except through the firm’s specific expensive streaming service. There was the practice of 'Stay-to-Play,’ where Varsity would force athletes to stay in a specific hotel if they wanted to enter a competition, with Varsity likely getting rebates from that hotel in the process. The net result is that today it can cost up to $10-20k a year to be an All-Star cheerleader.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-and-the-fall-of...
>I missed out on two anti-competitive practices in the industry. The first is called “Stay to Play.” For many cheerleading competitions, though not all, out-of-town contestants are required to stay at a specific area hotel or set of hotels, or they cannot enter the contest. This is yet another way to raise prices on cheerleaders, and parents hate it. The second is that Varsity tends to be very aggressive about takedown notices for cheer contest video. If you film your kid at an event and put it up on Facebook or YouTube, Varsity is likely to ask you to take it down because it’s competitive with their VarsityTV streaming app. As one parent told me, it’s basically Varsity preventing you from sharing your memories publicly with your family or friends.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/what-a-cheerleading-monop...
By lotsofpulp 2025-11-2117:373 reply The way the term private equity is used is meaningless. It’s just business, and the same thing happens anytime a business is sold, because the new owners have paid a 5x or more multiple, and the reason they would is if they think they can cut costs and increase prices.
One should expect lower quality and higher prices anytime a business is sold.
>Really, one should expect lower quality and higher prices anytime a business is sold.
They really shouldn’t. And the fact this is treated as common knowledge kind of speaks to everything that’s currently broken in our country.
By margalabargala 2025-11-2118:081 reply You're using the same words to talk about different things.
You're right, in the world we would like to live in, this wouldn't be a thing. People shouldn't expect that a business sale means a quality drop. That would be a good reality.
However, next to that good reality is the one we live in. Where people should expect quality to drop on a business sale, because that's the structure of the world we live in. Wishing the world were different isn't sufficient to make it so.
But it both hasn’t always been the case and still isn’t in large swaths of the country and the world. The 5x + enshittification phenomenon is both recent and a result of PE and “activist investors”.
“We” collectively should demand better. You act as if government is some omnipresent being that makes its own decisions. If citizens start demanding the government act in their best interests by enforcing things like anti-trust laws, it will.
By adi_kurian 2025-11-224:15 Lina Khan, the only anti-trust believer of note and with influence, in my lifetime, got thrown out like a bad habit.
Enshittification is shit, though one can imagine bigger scarier issues slapping us in the face and fast.
By wahnfrieden 2025-11-2117:501 reply What’s the argument? Sounds like you’re sour on it
The assumption that "the new owners have paid a 5x or more multiple, and the reason they would is if they think they can cut costs and increase prices", is not universal and in many cases quite new. There are many new owners and buyers for which this is not the case. Your local bar, restaurant, hobby shop, gym, bookstore, daycare and others often transfer without the new owner looking to pay a 5x premium and maximize profits. It's only recently that doctors, dentist, veterinarian offices and other high margin social businesses are getting converted to PE.
It's the enshitification of all the existing third places and extraction of social value for profit, because people will tolerate it due to lack of choice and social need.
By surgical_fire 2025-11-2121:111 reply > It's only recently that doctors, dentist, veterinarian offices and other high margin social businesses are getting converted to PE
And this is the only logical consequence of unregulated capitalism.
Line must go up, always. No matter the damage it causes. Price will always go up, and costs are always cut down.
It sucks because it is supposed to, as long as profits increase.
By bmm6o 2025-11-2210:09 Right, it's pretty inevitable given the incentives. I think it's made worse by PE for a few reasons. They are investing with relatively short time horizons because they will need to sell to pay profits. So the long term health of the business is of no interest. If the reputation of the business suffers, that's someone else's problem. Compared to an individual investor who is looking long term, they need to retain customers and reputation.
By underlipton 2025-11-2118:192 reply But it's not just that a business was sold; it's that it (usually) was sold in such a way (leveraged buy-out) as to weaken the business and make it more desperate from jump. Doctor's practices et al. used to change hands all the time without much trouble; it's only now that PE is allowed to buy them with massive amounts of debt that they're allowed to use aggressive tactics to pay off (and pay themselves) in just a few years that we've started to have these troubles.
When you buy a house, the mortgage is associated with the buyer, not the house, and you can't just dismantle the house and sell it for parts to cover payments. Could you imagine if we could, though? Pretty soon, we'd have a lot of on-paper debt associated with empty lots that mortgage holders could simply walk away from (perhaps after a nominal sale). Then, the house declares bankruptcy and the bank is just out all that money. It's preposterous, they'd never let that happen. So, why with businesses?
By lotsofpulp 2025-11-2118:253 reply >When you buy a house, the mortgage is associated with the buyer, not the house
In the US, this depends which state you are in:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/nonrecourse-loan...
The non recourse states are Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington.
>and you can't just dismantle the house and sell it for parts to cover payments
You can do this in every state, at least with a conventional mortgage. If you default, they can pursue your other assets, except in non recourse states.
>we'd have a lot of on-paper debt associated with empty lots that mortgage holders could simply walk away from (perhaps after a nominal sale)
I don't know what "after a nominal sale" means, because if you sell a property with a lien on it, then the lien holder gets paid first. And underwriting would not let people who have a history of dismantling a house and defaulting borrow money over and over, and people need a place to live, so I'm not sure why anyone would take out a mortgage to dismantle a house. The scenario makes no sense, as raw materials are cheap, and labor costs are expensive.
> It's preposterous, they'd never let that happen. So, why with businesses?
Because the lender agreed to those terms. No one forces a lender to lend money without a personal guarantee.
By dragonwriter 2025-11-222:07 > > and you can't just dismantle the house and sell it for parts to cover payments
> You can do this in every state, at least with a conventional mortgage.
Legally, you generally can't, because the terms of the mortgage will prohibit it. Practically, you probably can get away with it, as long as you actually make the payments, unless the dismantling requires recorded paperwork that comes to the lenders attention, because how will they know? But if you fail to make payments, then the lender is likely to care about the condition of the property, and then, in addition to collecting your debt on the mortgage itself, the lender will have a cause of action against you for breach of contract. (And such breaches of duties under the mortgage also will often be within the scope of "recourse carve-outs" in loans in non-recourse states.)
By sarchertech 2025-11-221:55 >>and you can't just dismantle the house and sell it for parts to cover payments
>You can do this in every state, at least with a conventional mortgage.
No you can’t. Mortgages require you to keep the property in good repair. Your lender won’t let you start taking the house apart to sell pieces of it because that lowers the overall value of the property.
By htrp 2025-11-2118:52 extending the example, for PE, the mortgage is actually in the name of the house and you can take out additional loans in the name of the house to pay yourself the down payment that you used to purchase the house (while simultaneously stripping everything of value inside of it)
By tylergetsay 2025-11-2312:52 Believe it or not, most buyers aren't interested in weakening the asset they just paid 5x for
By sarchertech 2025-11-2117:551 reply Well a lot of times these “businesses” were sold to existing employees or family members who were going to run it themselves and it usually wasn’t for a huge multiple.
In many cases they weren’t sold at all just passed down to heirs. The differentiator is that PE has figured out that they can offer enough to bypass the traditional methods of business continuation.
By lotsofpulp 2025-11-2117:592 reply I would frame it differently. Due to advances in communication and automation with the use of software, business owners can market the business to a far larger group of buyers, and business buyers can buy from a much larger pool of businesses.
Everybody likes seeing those 10%+ annual returns in their 401K (or their local government's taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plan), but no one likes how the sausage is made.
Most PE roll ups are not in your 401k - that’s what private equity means.
While some may eventually find enough success to IPO and subsequently enter a big index, the past few decades of VOO / buy-the-market growth owes far more to tech stocks than what’s being discussed here.
By lotsofpulp 2025-11-2211:19 There are a few big ones like Blackstone/KKR/Goldman, but the point is all these investors have to beat SP500 for taking on the risk, and so if SP500 is getting 10% for no risk, then the only way the PE deals make sense is if over leverage and it inevitably results in changes that adversely affect customers, for any business that can’t scale with technology.
By sarchertech 2025-11-220:56 Most of the businesses people are complaining about are inherently local. Doctors, dentists, sports teams, plumbers, electricians.
When PE buys them in the majority of cases they continue to market them like local business and in most cases they go out of their way to lake them look like local businesses.
What you’re talking about happened decades ago when Walmart, McDonalds etc… ran a huge chunk of the mom and pops out of business. This is the next round where they go after businesses that don’t benefit as much from nation wide advertising and branding.
People don’t tend to pick their dentist based on nationwide advertising/brand recognition.
By potato3732842 2025-11-2117:34 Youth sports isn't like driving for Uber on the side. It's a giant money fire for the consumers that partake. I'm surprised it took PE this long to say "hey, there's a bunch of money on fire over here let's go get some"
By wahnfrieden 2025-11-2117:122 reply Just the free market at work
edit: Would like to understand from downvoters how this does not meet free market principles?
By psadauskas 2025-11-2120:391 reply A "free market" is one in which all the participants of the market have perfect information and act completely rationally. This is, of course, an academic ideal, similar to solving a physics problem that tells you to ignore friction.
What we have here is a "capitalist market", where those with more power (capital) within the market leverage it to exploit the other participants. Private Equity uses their money to extract as much money as possible from a segment of the market, usually destroying it in the process. But for a beautiful moment in time they created a lot of value for shareholders!
By surgical_fire 2025-11-2121:13 > A "free market" is one in which all the participants of the market have perfect information and act completely rationally.
So, a fairy tale.
By Libidinalecon 2025-11-2312:42 It is a good example of neoliberalism gone completely insane and your comment is a good example of the religion of neoliberalism.
It is this deluded idea that "the market is always right" so naturally to not let market forces at work in children's sports is equivalent to a type of moral wrong.
The real insanity of neoliberalism is in convincing people like you that this is some kind of natural law like gravity, so to object is like objecting to the law of gravity to the point you can't even understand why you are being down voted.
It is actually a form of scientism and the misapplication of the efficient market hypothesis to unwarranted situations.
Convenient cover for ripping people off.
> 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.
> Black Bear’s streaming service costs between $25 and $50 a month, depending on the package and additional fees. 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.
Feeling bad for the folks having a hard time pulling the plug on scams like these and going back to a more sensible and sustainable way of life.
It really doesn't get more sensible and sustainable than kids playing team sports and parents witnessing this part of their lives. The blame here is squarely on PEs like black bear nickel and dimming parents. How do you pull the plug on that? It's so gross.
By barbazoo 2025-11-2118:21 Sure you're right, if that's their thing, having their kids perform the sport and watching them doing it then this is a good solution. The streaming makes it so they can even stay in the car and watch from there.
By underlipton 2025-11-2118:241 reply Don't sign up for it next year? Boycott and maybe spin up your own league.
By cutemonster 2025-11-2215:02 You can't, the PE companies buy the hockey rinks
By etempleton 2025-11-2117:201 reply A private equity company has purchased every sports league, indoor sports complex, pool, and summer camp in my area. They then drop prices to destroy the local competition and then buy them too. After that they raise prices.
By terminalshort 2025-11-2117:272 reply Have they raised prices yet?
By 7thaccount 2025-11-2120:01 They always do....that's partly how private equity works.
Example, buy out a well-known software product with a lot of customers. Then offshore development to cut costs. Then raise prices to milk customers that are too slow to migrate. Eventually the software dies off.
By etempleton 2025-11-220:00 Depends on what it is and if there is any competition left. Some things have gone up in price where they have a local monopoly. I think their real play is the underlying land value. They are often able to buy distressed businesses with a lot of land cheaply.
