A Platform Built for the Ones Running Youth Sports
Signature Athletics is scaling what community sports programs have never been able to build on their own. See where the platform stands and how to participate before the round closes.
A municipal sports park is opening on June 20 in New Braunfels, Texas, one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. The fields and the funding numbers get most of the press attention. The vendor selection buried below them carries more weight for anyone trying to understand how a city actually turns youth sports fields into sponsorship money.
The City of New Braunfels has tapped SportsMan Solutions, a Waukee, Iowa-based sports-facility consulting and sponsorship firm whose sponsorship division has been described by the company as operating out of Sioux Falls, to sell sponsorship partnerships and powered-by naming rights across the new Zipp Family Sports Park. The selection followed a formal RFP in which three firms submitted proposals and a five-member selection committee scored them; per a SportsMan Solutions press release, the firm received the highest overall score. Ryan Patrick, the firm's vice president, was named Community Advancement Advisor and will run local partnership outreach.
That is the public-facing summary. What it leaves out is that New Braunfels is at least the sixth city sponsorship contract SportsMan Solutions has won under its own banner over roughly two years, plus Norwalk Central, where public announcements named SportsMan Solutions and Great Plains Sponsorships together starting in 2023 before the two firms separately announced a 2024 strategic alliance. Taken together, the public contracts now look less like one-off wins and more like a growing book of city sponsorship business.
What's Actually Being Built Here
Zipp Family Sports Park is a roughly 130- to 150-acre complex, depending on the source, with four baseball fields, four softball fields, and four soccer fields, plus the supporting infrastructure (utilities, drainage, sidewalks, paving) that a municipal complex needs to host tournaments. The City of New Braunfels describes the park as nearly 130 acres, while SportsMan's release and local coverage in the San Antonio Express-News describe it as 150 acres. The land came from a 2013 voter-approved bond and a 25-acre donation from the Zipp family. Construction funding came from multiple sources, including a 2019 voter-approved bond, a Texas Parks & Wildlife Department grant, and a $15 million commitment from the New Braunfels Economic Development Corporation. MySA and SportsMan's release both report that the NBEDC has invested nearly $19.5 million in the project since 2018 across land acquisition, construction support, and future operations and maintenance contributions. The total project cost, per MySA, is roughly $35 million.
The current footprint is Phase 1. The city's site says additional fields and amenities are planned for the future.
City Manager Robert Camareno framed the park's purpose in the city's announcement:
"The opening of Zipp Family Sports Park represents a major investment in the quality of life for New Braunfels families and future generations. This park is more than just a place to play sports. It's an important gathering space for residents, promoting community and healthy living."
The relevant detail for investors is who is being paid to sell the sponsorships on top of that civic investment. City complexes have historically left sponsorship dollars on the table because parks departments are not built to run a sales process. The fix has typically been one of two paths: hand operations to a private operator on a long-term lease, or build a sponsorship sales team inside the parks department itself. New Braunfels picked a third path, keeping ownership and operations in-house while bringing in an outside agency to do the selling.
The Pattern Across Patrick's Other Cities
The New Braunfels contract is not the first time Patrick has done this. Working backward from public announcements over the last two years, the list of city clients running the same playbook now includes:
Hernando, Mississippi (Renasant Park, 2024), sitting alongside a $13.7 million parks improvement project funded in part by a $1.7 million Mississippi Outdoor Stewardship Trust Fund grant. Norwalk, Iowa (Norwalk Central, 2023 onward), a $300 million mixed-use development that includes the Gregg Young Chevrolet Auto Sports Campus and the City State Bank Norwalk Fieldhouse; 2023 city releases named SportsMan Solutions and Great Plains Sponsorships as joint sponsorship partners, predating the firms' formally announced 2024 alliance. Blue Springs, Missouri (Hidden Valley Sports Complex, 2025), on top of a $3.6 million city-funded softball renovation at the same complex. Clarksville, Indiana (town parks system, 2025), including a soccer complex converted from a former softball facility. Killeen, Texas (multiple facilities including Long Branch Community Park and the Killeen Athletic Complex, 2025). Winston-Salem, North Carolina (Fairgrounds Arena and Bowman Gray Stadium, city announcement dated October 17, 2025 and posted in mid-November), after a nationwide search. And now New Braunfels, Texas (Zipp Family Sports Park, May 2026).
Patrick has also handled school-district work and, per a 2024 announcement, a strategic partnership with EDGE Sports Global that gave the firm a route into the company's 11-facility East Coast ice portfolio plus the Mosaic Quarter development in Tucson, Arizona.
The cities are not identical. Hernando is a town of about 17,000 people in DeSoto County. Winston-Salem has roughly 250,000. New Braunfels sits in between and is growing faster than either, with a population that grew 31.7% between 2019 and 2024. What ties the list together is the structure of the assignment. Across the city examples listed here, the relevant client or asset owner is a city or public venue rather than a private facility operator, and the thing being sold is sponsorship on public infrastructure. The fee structure is generally not disclosed in the press releases, though one public-meeting summary for Killeen reported a 20% commission to SportsMan Solutions on a specific naming-rights agreement. Patrick's comments to officials in Hernando give a sense of the sponsorship slots and price points the firm typically works with:
"Typically we see some of the co-branded opportunities go for $50,000 a year all the way up to $100,000 a year. But we will have something for everybody. We will have outfield banners from $1,000 and up."
The quote, from Ryan Patrick in the DeSoto Times-Tribune, gives the clearest publicly available read on the deal range these contracts produce.
Why This Model Has Room to Run
There is a structural reason a city sponsorship business can grow this way. Many American cities and counties have spent the last decade building youth-sports infrastructure with limited fanfare, often funded through voter-approved bonds and economic development authorities betting on sports tourism. Once the fields are open, the same cities are stuck with a sales problem they are not always staffed to solve. A parks director has a different professional skill set than a brand-partnership director. Hiring one specifically for sponsorship sales is hard to justify on a single complex.
An outside agency working across multiple cities, sometimes on a commission arrangement where the terms surface publicly, solves the staffing problem for the city and gives the agency one sales effort it can spread across every city it works in. Each new city makes the next pitch easier, because the agency now has real examples to point to. Each closed sponsorship deal adds a reference for the next one. The agency does not own any facilities, which is what makes the model interesting as a services business rather than a capital-heavy operating business.
The Texas geography matters too. New Braunfels sits along the I-35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin, in the heart of one of the country's most active growth corridors (the city's median household income is around $86,000), and the city itself was ranked near the top of MoneyLion's 2026 list of fastest-growing, most-affordable American cities, listed at No. 3 in the page's numbered ranking despite a key-findings bullet that describes it as No. 2. Sports complexes in growth corridors are attractive places to sell sponsorships because the audience keeps growing while the fields hold their value. That dynamic tends to produce stronger sales than a complex in a flat or declining market.
What Could Stall This
Every services business with a single dominant rainmaker has a problem if that person leaves, and SportsMan Solutions has visibly built its city sponsorship business around Patrick. The cluster of public client wins is also the cluster of public Patrick appearances. If Patrick steps back, slows down, or moves on, the agency would need to show the model survives without him.
Sales cycle length is the other operational constraint. Patrick told Killeen officials that selling naming rights is "a lot like selling a house," and the city later confirmed in its own release that First National Bank Texas was one of approximately 450 groups SportsMan contacted during the first month of the naming-rights outreach process for the Killeen Family Recreation Center. That is a lot of calls per closed deal, and an agency working on commission carries the cost of those calls up front. A softer environment for marketing budgets would make those cycles longer, not shorter.
The risk runs at both ends of the model. On the client side, losing one anchor city would dent the track record the firm uses to win the next contract. On the sponsor side, the agency's pitch depends on staying close to the brands writing the checks; turnover in those brand-side relationships, or a single high-profile contract that does not deliver for a sponsor, becomes a story the firm has to overcome in the next sales conversation.
What's Worth Watching Next
The New Braunfels announcement included a line that's easy to miss: more announcements tied to the sponsorship partnerships are expected in the coming weeks. Patrick is scheduled to be at the June 20 grand opening to meet potential sponsors directly. The deals that come out of Zipp Family Sports Park are the first real test of whether a fast-growing Hill Country complex sells sponsorships faster than the agency's Midwestern city clients have. If it does, watch for SportsMan Solutions to start showing up in more Texas-corridor RFPs (Austin, San Marcos, Killeen-Temple, Boerne, Bulverde), and watch for at least one larger competitor to start building a comparable business.
The other thing to watch is whether the EDGE Sports Global partnership becomes a template. Pairing a city-sponsorship sales effort with a private facility developer-operator opens a route into private-operator sponsorship work too, which would widen the pool of business the firm can chase well beyond what city contracts alone could support.
Takeaways for Investors
City Youth Sports Infrastructure Is Becoming a Services Market
The capital is increasingly public and the operations are increasingly public, but the selling is increasingly handed to outside firms. The investor move is to track who is winning these agency contracts and to watch whether private operators start building competing in-house sponsorship sales teams, since that buildout is what would close the window for the agencies.
SportsMan Solutions Is the Operator Worth Tracking First
Patrick has now been associated with at least seven public city sponsorship contracts between SportsMan Solutions and its allied firm Great Plains Sponsorships, plus an East Coast ice-facility partnership through EDGE Sports Global, all over roughly two years. That makes the firm one of the clearer publicly visible examples of the multi-city sponsorship model right now. Future expansion (new cities, larger deal sizes, more named asset positions) will show whether the model has the legs to become a business worth real money to investors.
New Braunfels Is the Most Demographically Attractive Test So Far
A complex on the I-35 corridor in one of America's fastest-growing cities is a higher-profile sponsorship asset than most of the firm's existing city work. How fast New Braunfels fills out its sponsor roster will tell investors whether the smaller-market examples understate how much room the model has, or whether sales cycles across the whole business are longer than they look.
The Acquisition-Target Question Is on the Table
Services businesses with multi-city public-sector contracts, a credible case for buying up smaller firms, and a recognizable rainmaker are exactly the kind of business that PE firms betting on youth sports tourism look at. Whether SportsMan Solutions is interested in selling or buying competitors is not publicly known, but the firm now has the profile to be on the right side of either conversation.
