Perfect Game is Leading a New Era of Youth Sports

Baseball’s roots are burrowed deeply across the country. Nearly everybody you come across will have played some version when they were young, even if they didn’t make it past the tee-ball stage. For many, it is a central aspect of the fabric of American life. It is simple to learn and easy to play, accessible to all ages and skill levels. It instills social skills and teamwork, teaches the joy of winning and how to cope with defeat.

For some, that’s all baseball is — a learning ground from their formative years. For others, it becomes a career. A life. Such longevity isn’t in the cards for everyone, of course. Of the millions of kids who suit up for Little League every year, the smallest fraction of a percentage will play past the high school level, and an even smaller fraction will end up signing a contract with a professional organization. Smaller still is the group who makes it to the big leagues.

Regardless of where they end up, though, everyone starts at the same place. The grassroots level, as it’s called, is where the game grows and where its future is realized. It’s also where baseball has suffered the most over the last few decades, with popularity waning in comparison to other sports. Major League Baseball has tried to fix that in recent years, going so far as to introduce new rules to invite more interest. But top-down changes alone will not solve these issues.

Enter Perfect Game, a youth sports company focused on making an impact at that grassroots level. With the tagline “the world’s largest and most comprehensive scouting organization” featured on its website, PG is building to be more than that. It hosts massive youth baseball tournaments all over the country, giving baseball an infrastructure to provide as many opportunities as possible for kids of all ages to reach their potential. The company’s partnerships with many current and former MLB players give youths a glimpse of a possible future and insight into the highest level of technique. All in pursuit of developing baseball at the youth level — because that is what matters most.

“What we’re trying to do is, we want to make baseball cool again,” President and Chairman Rick Thurman told The Big Lead. ” Where do you start doing that? You do it at the grassroots level. You grow the game at the very bottom.”

Perfect Game was founded in 1995 and spent the following decades establishing itself as one of the top youth baseball companies in the space. Operating in the 14-18 age range, players participated in PG tournaments and had statistics logged in the company’s database. That database was used by scouts in MLB organizations across the country to identify high school talent, an incredibly valuable resource. There are thousands of young players for these scouts to sift through. PG presented a uniform system to utilize, and their showcases attracted the best players in the country.

In 2018, Thurman took control of the company along with his partner Rob Ponger, now the CEO of PG. Thurman is a baseball lifer; he played in the Los Angeles Dodgers system before founding the Beverly Hills Sports Council, where he represented over 4,000 professional athletes starting in 1983. He knows the game inside and out. He and Ponger felt Perfect Game was unique in the youth travel sports system, and there was an opportunity to make it even bigger than it already was. Thurman said the “secret sauce” of the enterprise was the scouting profiles already in place, but there were plenty of other areas of growth that could make a positive impact.

“We also thought we could do other things with the brand that could make it better or cooler,” he said. “One of those things was, why are we only in 14-18? So many kids play baseball from 8-13. The problem is a lot of kids quit by the time they hit 14. But the reality is that sports, high school sports, youth sports, team sports teach you things that school doesn’t always teach you. You learn leadership skills, you learn how to work really hard, you learn how to work with groups of people, you learn competitiveness. It’s stuff you may not learn in the classroom and there’s a lot of life lessons that come along with it.

“Let’s acquire other youth events companies, attach them to PG, and then you have a pipeline going up.”

Nearly six years later, that pipeline is thriving. According to Thurman, the company has 100,000 baseball teams in its ecosystem and an astounding two million youth participants. Their website is littered with quotes from big MLB names like Brian Cashman and Mike Trout, praising the PG operation and the benefits that come with being part of it. If a young baseball player is serious about doing everything they can to get on the radars of decision-makers at all levels of the game, Perfect Game is, well, the perfect place to do it.

It’s not just the exposure that’s valuable, though. Perhaps the most impactful aspect of PG is giving the kids…