❓ Problem

Youth sports have quietly become one of the biggest line items in the family budget. The average US sports family spent $1,016 on their child's primary sport in 2024, up 46% since 2019, which is twice the rate of inflation over the same period. Add in the same child's other teams and the average family paid nearly $1,500 a year. Nationally, families spend an estimated $30 to $40 billion a year on their kids' sport, more than any professional league brings in.

And what's driving it? Team registrations, travel, camps and private coaching. In other words, parents are paying more and more specifically to make their kid better. Yet ask how anyone knows it's working and the answer is vibes. A coach's opinion. A good game last weekend. There's no report card. Meanwhile the average kid quits a sport by age 11, mostly because it's stopped being fun.

The pros solved measurement decades ago with the combine. The youth versions that exist are mostly recruiting machines for teenagers chasing a scholarship: one Perfect Game showcase charged $649 for exposure to college coaches. The nine-year-old spending every Saturday at a soccer tournament has nothing. No benchmark, no progress tracker, no reason to believe the $1,500 is doing anything.

✅ Solution

Kickstart runs pop-up athletic testing days for kids aged roughly 8 to 14, at the clubs and tournaments where families already spend their weekends.

• Kids rotate through timed stations. A short sprint, vertical and broad jumps, an agility shuttle, maybe a reaction test. Electronic timing, so the numbers are real and nobody's dad is on the stopwatch.
• Everyone leaves with a digital scorecard. Raw results, an age-group comparison where the data is reliable, and one clear "work on this next" tip. Plus swag and pro photos worthy of their imaginary Nike sponsorship.
• Progress is the product. The tests never change, so a kid who tests in August can come back in spring and beat their own score. Their profile keeps the full history, so parents finally get the before-and-after they've been paying for.
• Clubs get a team view. Coaches see where the squad is quick, where it's weak, and who's improved most across a season.

The wedge is deliberately small: one testing day at one club. The platform underneath, a standardised dataset of how kids actually develop, is what turns into benchmarks, club dashboards and a trusted "athletic SAT" over time.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• There are 50 million US kids aged 6 to 17, and about 27.3 million of them play sport.
• TAM: if every one of those kids tested twice a year at $79, that's roughly $4.3 billion a year. Unrealistic, but it shows the ceiling.
• SAM: Shaan Puri's original thread took the top 2% who genuinely compete (travel teams, AAU, private trainers) as about 1M kids. Two tests a year at $79 puts that serious-competitor core at ~$158M, before counting the much bigger pool of regular club players.
• Proof parents pay for this category: Perfect Game grew into a $30 million business largely from baseball tournaments and showcases alone.

ARR potential

• One event: 150 kids at $79 is ~$11.9k, before photos and merch.
• One metro: four events a month is ~$570k a year from entry fees.