At Cooperstown All Star Village in Oneonta, New York.
Photographer: Caroline Tompkins for Bloomberg BusinessweekPrivate Equity Is Coming for Youth Sports
Kids’ sports have become an expensive, high-pressure affair. An industry famous for squeezing out value claims it will make the experience better.
Cooperstown All Star Village sits on a southwest-facing slope in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in Oneonta, New York. It’s about a 20-mile drive south of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown proper. Like many businesses in the area, the All Star Village indulges in a bit of geographical imprecision to borrow the Cooperstown name, which has become synonymous with the hall of fame. On a muggy Wednesday morning in July, Rick Abbott, chief executive officer of CASV, stops his golf cart to show me the view from the top of the hill. “Our topography is unbelievable,” Abbott says as we look down on 12 baseball fields flanked by the woods of the neighboring Oneonta Country Club golf course.
Over the course of the summer, thousands of kids will arrive from across the US to play baseball on this patch of hillside. CASV hosts 14 consecutive tournaments, with a new crop of about 70 teams, made up mostly of 12-year-old boys, coming through every six days. Last year, the site hosted a record 12,000 players from 763 teams, a mark it will surpass this summer.