A Florida travel baseball organization joined a youth baseball platform on April 21. The press release framed it as a partnership. The structure tells you it's something else entirely.
CURVE Sports added Power Baseball to its platform, with Power keeping its brand, its leadership, and its day-to-day operations intact. CURVE provides shared infrastructure, performance testing, and operational support. Weatherford Capital, the Ogg Family, and Matthew Scattarella provide the long-term backing. If that arrangement sounds familiar, it should. It's the same model that built Banyan Software and Constellation Software and a generation of home services platforms. It's now being aimed at youth baseball.
What CURVE Sports Actually Is
CURVE Sports launched on February 5, 2026 as a unified entity combining Diamond Allegiance, a national network of over 70 independent youth baseball clubs representing more than 15,000 players, and CURVE Test Centers, a sport-specific athlete testing operation. Both came together under a long-term partnership with Weatherford Capital, the Ogg Family, and entrepreneur Matthew Scattarella. Weatherford Capital, founded by brothers Drew, Sam, and Will Weatherford in 2015, manages over $1 billion in capital and has made 26 platform investments to date. The firm explicitly lists sports among its target sectors, alongside technology, financial services, and the public sector. That's a meaningful detail for anyone tracking which categories of investor are entering youth sports right now.
The CURVE pitch to travel ball operators is clean. Keep running your program your way. We give you performance testing systems, player development data, operational tools, recruiting support, and travel and hotel savings programs. You preserve your culture and brand. We provide the back-end infrastructure and the long-term capital.
Power Baseball is the latest organization to take that deal. Founded in 2016 by high school head coaches Eric Lassiter and Jesse Marlo, alongside training facility owner Brian Dempsey, the program has expanded from its Florida headquarters into South Carolina, North Carolina, New York, and the Gulf South. Dempsey stays in charge. The Power Baseball brand stays on the jerseys. CURVE handles the back-end.
Why the Structure Matters More Than the Deal
The phrase to watch in CEO Sandy Ogg's framing of the deal is "without centralized control." That's the operating principle, and it's a meaningful departure from how youth sports consolidation has typically worked.
Here's the issue with most consolidation in this category. The value of a regional travel ball program lives almost entirely in the local coach, the local community, and the local reputation. Strip those out and the program is worth dramatically less than what the buyer paid for it. That's a real risk for any roll-up trying to standardize operations across acquired brands.
he decentralized model treats the local brand and leadership as the asset rather than as something to be absorbed. CURVE brings aligned operators onto the platform, leaves leadership in place, and provides the parts of the business that don't differentiate: testing software, data infrastructure, vendor contracts, administrative back-office. The local coach gets cheaper hotels, better data on his players, and capital to grow. The platform gets a larger network of aligned programs that can make its infrastructure, vendor relationships, and data layer more valuable over time.
This is the same model Banyan Software runs in vertical software. Banyan, founded in 2016, follows what it openly calls a "buy-and-hold-for-life" strategy with a decentralized operating model and a permanent capital base. It now owns 39+ acquired software companies, each running independently under its existing leadership. Constellation Software, the publicly traded Canadian software conglomerate, has been running a version of the same playbook since the 1990s and is now valued in the tens of billions of dollars.
Drew Weatherford, who co-founded Collegiate Athletic Solutions in addition to running Weatherford Capital, has called youth baseball "incredibly fragmented." That's the most important framing in the announcement. For a long-term capital platform, fragmentation is the entire opportunity.
The Investor Read on Youth Baseball Consolidation
Youth baseball has been waiting for this moment. The sport has thousands of independently operated travel ball programs, training facilities, tournament operators, and showcase circuits, and almost none of them have access to professional-grade performance testing, recruiting data, or operational tooling. The economics of running a single program don't justify building any of that in-house. The economics of running a network of them can.
What's distinctive about the CURVE model is who's running it. Sandy Ogg spent eight years as Chief Human Resources Officer at Unilever, where he overhauled the company's operating framework, then served as an operating partner at Blackstone for nearly 100 portfolio companies, then founded Diamond Allegiance, the youth sports network that became one half of CURVE. The Weatherford brothers built and exited multiple companies before launching their fund, including the OpenGov sale that returned capital to their investors in 2024. Drew Weatherford also serves on the IMG Academy board, which gives the firm a real youth sports operating credential beyond the deal experience. That's a leadership group with operating experience, not just deal experience, and operating experience tends to behave differently in roll-up environments than financial-only experience does.
What Investors Should Take From This
Youth Baseball Is Now in Roll-Up Mode
The CURVE x Power Baseball deal is a signal flare. Expect more regional travel ball programs to be approached by platform plays in the next 12 months, and expect at least one competing platform to emerge with a similar argument but a different capital structure.
Long-Term Capital May Beat Closed-End Funds for Operator-Led Verticals
Closed-end funds need exits, which means consolidation pressure, which means the local culture eventually gets sanded down. A platform structured around long-term holding can keep operators in place indefinitely. In categories where local relationships are the entire asset, that structural difference is what may make the model viable.
The Platform Is Where the Pricing Power Eventually Lives
Once CURVE has enough programs on the platform, it controls real distribution to vendors. Hotel partners, equipment manufacturers, performance technology providers, and recruiting services all have to negotiate against an aggregated buyer. That's where the platform actually makes money over time, not on the operating margin of any single club.
The Test Center Is the Strategic Piece
The CURVE Test Center component is the unsexy part of this announcement, and it may be the most important. Objective player performance data is what justifies the platform existing in the first place. More programs may have a reason to plug into it if CURVE's testing data becomes a trusted standard.
