Volume 20. Let’s get it.

Last week, I (finally) took the mask off and announced who’s behind No Huddle. The response has been unreal - the support, inbounds, deal flow and companies coming my way. Genuinely grateful for every one of you. This is just the beginning.

Good luck to everybody as the Madness tips off. Injuries and all, I’m rocking with the Dukies this year. Scheyer and Boozer.

If you want to be featured, connect with founders in the No Huddle family, or have ideas on how to grow this thing, just reply to this email or reach out directly to me at [email protected].

Let’s keep it rollin’! 🤘

How I am seeing the field across sports, media, entertainment, wellness and CPG

Remember the days of showing up to a Little League game and batting in order of your jersey number? Or the older sibling who “did the book” with a pencil while sitting on a BP bucket flipped upside down (that was me as I watched my younger brothers win championships). Or sharing the bag of gear that was assigned to your team? Or the really good player who played soccer too so had to miss half of the games?

While I hope Little League baseball remains the backbone of youth sports in America, you’d be hard pressed to find any of those in youth sports today. Look no further than this year's LLWS - every player was dripped out with arm sleeves, glasses, elbow guards and hundreds of travel games under their belts. 

We've built an ecosystem that tells twelve-year-olds they need to pick a sport, commit to a travel team, work with a personal trainer, and have a highlight tape before they've set foot in a high school. Parents are a key part of this equation. Many want nothing more than to support their kid's passion - and those parents deserve tons of credit. But the ones who force it and treat a Saturday morning rec game like a scouting combine are doing real damage.

What’s the result? Youth athletes aren’t developing real skills and becoming well-rounded athletes. They are playing for viral moments, not for development. They sometimes play 6+ games in a weekend and don’t listen to pitch count rules because they want to win so badly.  The American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine estimates that overuse injuries now account for nearly half of all sports injuries in middle and high school athletes. Burnout rates among youth athletes who specialize in a single sport before the age of 12 are well-documented and climbing. We are optimizing for the highlight reel and ignoring everything underneath it.

What really bothers me is that this has been hidden in plain sight for years. I recently read The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom and it reshaped how I think about development, identity, and what we actually owe young people as adults. The reminder that a full life isn't lived in one lane (physical, mental, relational) hit differently when I thought about what we're asking twelve-year-olds to sacrifice to earn a scholarship that, statistically, almost never comes.

I wrote about the future of sports business education and the argument I made then applies here too. The sports industry has been extraordinarily good at building products and platforms around the business of sport, but it has been far less deliberate about the people inside it. The athletes, the families, the communities that show up every night after work, every weekend with a Dunkin’ coffee in hand. 

The best athletes in the world have sports psychologists, dietitians, and mental performance coaches in their corner. That support system has always existed at the top. For decades, the distance between what a professional athlete has access to and what a fourteen-year-old club soccer player has access to has been enormous. And it has never made it downstream… until now.

A mini investment memo on the stars of tomorrow

The Company: Koomba

The Business in a tweet: An AI-powered health and performance platform for young athletes connecting athletes and families with sport psychologists, nutritionists, and performance coaches with an intelligence layer that turns coaching conversations into predictive health and development insights.

The 101: 

Founding Team/Current Leadership: 

The Koomba differentiator: Most mental health tools are built for everyone… which really means they’re built for no one in particular. Koomba is the only platform combining sport-specific coaching across nutrition, mental performance and injury recovery with credentialed professionals and organization-level performance tracking under one roof. 

The closest comp in the athlete-specific lane is Athlete to Athlete, a peer-to-peer mentorship platform. They get the identity piece right, but Koomba takes that foundation and raises it: credentialed health professionals, a B2B2C distribution engine and a data layer that gets smarter with every session. The result isn’t just a mental health tool - it’s a health ecosystem built around the athlete.

📶The Signal (No Huddle’s Take):

Athlete performance has historically been defined by the physical: training, gameday, recovery. But we’ve watched the best athletes in the world become increasingly vocal about how much they spend on their body, and more athletes opening up about their recovery, nutrition and mental health. That raises the obvious question: if the elite care this much about it, why has none of it made it downstream? 

No Huddle sees Koomba as a bet on these trends converging at once. With real traction, top-tier partnerships, and a clear roadmap, Koomba is on a path to be the health infrastructure layer for the next generation of athletes.

The youth sports investment boom is real and continues to accelerate. For more on the landscape, check out this deep dive from our friends over at The 4th Quarter. Youth sports club infrastructure is growing at a pace we have never seen, and every operator is thinking creatively about how to improve the athlete experience and justify the premium pricing points they are charging. Koomba fits that mold as a credentialed, clinically-grounded health layer that organizations cannot build themselves. The True Sports Group partnership unlocked 30,000 athletes overnight and is just the tip of the iceberg as proof that this distribution model works.

The data angle is the story most people are missing. Every coaching session - whether that is with a dietitian, performance coach or sports psychologist - feeds Koomba’s AI layer with behavioral, emotional and performance data on athletes over time. That is a moat. At scale, Koomba is building the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset on youth athlete health and performance that has ever existed. The applications of such data compound quickly: burnout prevention, smarter coach matching, team-wellness tracking, and more. The data flywheel is what makes Koomba defensible against the inevitable competitors who show up late.  

Lastly, the consumer LTV math is more interesting than napkin math would suggest. Parents paying $200/month for a service that reduces performance anxiety and builds kids’ confidence really isn’t a hard sell to the right market. Kids are already wearing $105 batting gloves (though they are sweet), $125 Mahomes-like sunglasses and traveling all over the country for tournaments! If Koomba can retain customers for 8-12 months (and the 94 NPS suggests they can), the LTV:CAC ratio becomes very compelling.

One thing that I love that the founding team did before building a single bit of the business was that they listened. As CEO Greg Milnarik put it after months of listening tours with youth clubs, “athletes wanted someone who understands the athlete identity, and parents don't want more advice — they want more tools”. That insight is baked into everything Koomba has built since. 

There’s more to the athlete experience than just what happens on the field and in the weight room. Koomba is building the infrastructure to support the rest of it, and the business case is just as compelling as the mission. 

🚨If you are interested in learning more about Koomba or want to speak directly with the management team, please respond to this email or reach out directly to [email protected]🚨