If you've ever driven six hours to watch your kid play two baseball games on a Saturday in Georgia, you already understand why a gas station sponsoring youth baseball makes perfect sense.
RaceTrac, one of the largest privately held companies in the United States with over 800 retail locations, just expanded its partnership with Perfect Game to become the Official Convenience Store of Perfect Game in Georgia and Florida. The deal puts RaceTrac's brand across two of the biggest youth baseball markets in the country, in front of one of the most travel-heavy audiences in all of youth sports.
What's in the Deal
The expanded partnership includes on-site signage across all eight fields at Perfect Game's flagship East Cobb Complex in Georgia. RaceTrac will also run up to four on-site activations per year at both East Cobb and the Boombah Sports Complex in Sanford, Florida, with sampling and promotions designed to connect directly with tournament families.
On the digital side, RaceTrac gets co-branded social media content, targeted email campaigns to Perfect Game's national audience, and banner advertising across PerfectGame.org.
And there's a direct consumer incentive baked in. Through the RaceTrac app, Perfect Game families can redeem a promo code from the "Know Before You Go" tournament email for $0.25 off per gallon of fuel at select events. It's a small discount, but it's the kind of tactical activation that creates a real transaction between the sponsor and the audience.
"RaceTrac is a natural fit for Perfect Game's community," said Perfect Game CEO Rob Ponger. "Their clean stores, fresh food options and fast service make them an ideal partner."
Why RaceTrac Is Betting on Youth Sports
RaceTrac has spent over a decade sponsoring the Atlanta Braves. That's a proven playbook for a Georgia-headquartered brand. But the expansion into youth sports signals something different.
Youth baseball families are a uniquely valuable audience for a convenience store and fuel brand. They travel constantly. Weekend tournaments mean highway miles, multiple fill-ups, and stops for snacks, drinks, and quick meals. The Southeast tournament circuit, especially Georgia and Florida, is one of the densest in the country.
RaceTrac isn't buying awareness with this deal. It's buying proximity. Every Perfect Game tournament weekend puts thousands of families on the road, passing through RaceTrac's core geographic footprint. The sponsorship connects the brand to those families at the exact moment they're making purchasing decisions: on the way to the field, between games, and on the drive home.
The fuel discount through the app is the mechanism that closes the loop. It turns a sponsorship impression into a trackable transaction, which gives RaceTrac data on how effectively the partnership drives actual store visits.
Perfect Game's Scale
Perfect Game is the world's largest youth baseball and softball platform. The numbers are staggering. Nearly 10,000 events per year. Hundreds of thousands of games and showcases. Over 2,383 alumni who have played in Major League Baseball. Since 2003, 15,797 Perfect Game alumni have been selected in the MLB Draft. In the 2025 Draft, 92% of all players selected had played in Perfect Game events, and every player taken on the first day was a Perfect Game alum.
That track record gives Perfect Game an audience that no other youth baseball organization can match: families who are seriously invested in their child's development and willing to spend significant money on travel, training, and exposure. For a sponsor, that's a highly engaged, high-spending demographic with clear behavioral patterns (they drive to tournaments) and geographic concentration (Southeast corridor).
The Youth Sports Sponsorship Shift
This deal fits a broader pattern we've been tracking. Corporate sponsors are increasingly looking past professional sports and into youth sports as a high-value, high-trust marketing channel.
The SPIRE Academy x Vensure deal ($6M) showed that B2B companies see youth sports as a legitimate audience play. The Fanatics x DICK'S qualifier partnership showed that retail activations inside youth sports events drive real engagement. And now RaceTrac is proving that even convenience and fuel brands can find a natural fit if their customer journey overlaps with the youth sports travel pattern.
The common thread across all of these deals is specificity. These aren't generic sponsorships. They're built around the actual behavior of youth sports families: where they drive, where they stop, what they buy, and when they're most receptive to brand messaging. RaceTrac isn't just slapping its logo on a field. It's offering fuel discounts through an app at the moment families are filling up the minivan for a tournament weekend.
That level of targeting is what's making youth sports sponsorship increasingly attractive to brands that wouldn't have considered the space five years ago.
The partnership is live now, with the first activated tournaments running in March at East Cobb and Boombah.
