Draft:LENZ Sports

LENZ Sports

LENZ is a sports-technology company focused primarily in the $40 Billion youth sports and travel sports industries. Leveraging consulting services such as coaching, brand management, customer retention, merchandising, and media, LENZ enhances and improves the current product within organizations to encourage athletes to participate in sports longer. The company started in travel baseball on the East Coast, but has continued to grow into other sports and regions within the company.

On top of the consulting arm of the business, LENZ originally serves as a centralized consumer platform within travel sports, know as LENZ Guide. LENZ is a website/application that offers on one hand families with consumer intelligence on the 3 main aspects of the travel sports industry: Travel Teams, Training, and Events. On the other hand, this will also serve as a B2B accelerator for Organizations to create marketing profiles featured on our platform. Lenz will collect mass amounts of data by having consumers themselves rank a series of questions that encompass the quality of the overall travel sports organization experience. The scoring system for these questions will be a calculated algorithm that best weighs the aspects of a quality travel sports organization.

LENZ has recently moved into the events space as well, by hosting their own recruiting camps, training clinics, and tournaments within the region.

History

Founded in 2021 Matt Wray and Mike Palumbo, LENZ serves as a catalyst for sports organizations to reach their greatest potential. The two met on a baseball field back in 2017 during a travel baseball tournament, and immediately started collaborating on how they could help each other out with baseball in the NorthEast. At the time, Palumbo served as the Director of Business Development for Philadelphia based travel sports company, Philadelphia Baseball Training. The company went on to hire Wray as well that year, in which he served as the company's Director of Special Events. Wray and Palumbo spent 4 years with PBT, before ultimately doing some consulting work within the industry in the summer of 2021.

The two were struck with the idea of LENZ due to a consistent theme amongst parents in travel sports. "We use to get 3-4 calls a week between the two of us from parents, telling us that they were leaving their current travel team, and that they want X,Y,&Z from their experience and wanted to know where they should go play" says Wray. The two finally saw the issue in the industry being that there was zero place for information about the teams, training, and tournaments in travel sports. The industry solely relied on word of mouth, and because of that billions of dollars were being spent with zero purchasing knowledge.

Thus, LENZ was founded in the winter of 2021 and officially launched to the public in July of 2022. The original platform had users in 31 states across the United States, with the epicenter of users coming from the Northeast Region. (Primarily PA, NY, NJ, DE) The company has continued to grow and pivot into different sectors within Travel Sports, such as consulting, events, media, and merchandising.

"The goal is to have a positive effect on every single purchasing decision made in youth sports for athletes from 8-18, and provide environments that keep kids in sports longer."

Founders

Mike Palumbo, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Starting as an amateur scout and on-field coordinator at the Baseball Factory in an internship role, Mike got to see first hand the relationship between business and amateur sports. After an unsuccessful comeback into playing at a Penn State campus, Mike entered the coaching world at the ground level, assistant coaching a freshman team at his alma matter, Archbishop Carroll High School.

Mike found a work home for the next 5 years as he was the first full-time employee for then-startup Philadelphia Baseball Training. Working in all areas of the business, which included training, teams and eventually tournaments, Mike was at the front lines through the growth of the business which included hiring 4 new full time employees over 50 contracted employees and a 500% growth in total business. Alongside the business growth, Mike was also appointed the pitching coach at The Haverford School, where in his first year the Fords lowered their team ERA from 5.11 to 3.50 in his first season (‘19) then lowering it again to 3.21 in his 3rd season (‘21) and once more to 3.20 in his 4th season (‘22). In his time at Haverford he has overseen 12 pitchers commit to play baseball in college, including: East Carolina, Harvard, Pitt, Rider, Dickinson, Rhode Island, Army, Norwich, La Salle and Brandeis University.

In 2021 Mike co-founded the LENZ software, which was the first ever platform that allowed parents to rate their experience with their travel sports teams and events they played in. LENZ quickly caught onto local and regional markets, with over 4000 site users across multiple sports, leading to recognition as one of “Philadelphia’s top Innovators Under 25” by Philadelphia Business Journal.

Most recently, Mike served as the East Coast Events Director for the nationally recognized events company, “Triple Crown Sports”. He currently works at Archbishop Carroll High School as their Major Gifts Officer and resides in Philadelphia, PA while still coaching pitchers both privately and in school.

Matt Wray, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer

Starting as an Events Director at NXTLevel Events in 2014, Matt was exposed to every level of travel sports there was from managing events and teams. For 3 years, the company was running events with 70+ teams per weekend in baseball and softball tournaments, managing a team of 15 employees.

In 2017, Matt was brought on full time for the then-startup Philadelphia Baseball Training as the Director of Special Events. Matt managed the events division from top to bottom, including sales, operations, customer service, and managed a staff of 20+ employees during his tenure. The events division grew over 400% in his time with the company, as well as the formation of strategic partnerships with companies such as Dicks Sporting Goods, The Hamels Foundation, and Hitrax. Matt also created the company’s media division, in which he was the host of podcast “Beyond the Bell” where pro-athletes, sports media personalities, and college athletes were interviewed.

In 2021 Matt co-founded the LENZ software, which was the first ever platform that allowed parents to rate their experience with their travel sports teams and events they played in. LENZ quickly caught onto local and regional markets, with over 4000 site users across multiple sports, leading to recognition as one of “Philadelphia’s Top Innovators Under 25” by Philadelphia Business Journal.

Most recently, Matt has spent 3+ years in the front office of the Philadelphia 76ers and their ownership group, Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment, as a Senior Account Executive. In 2023, Matt ranked in the top 5% of the NBA in group sales revenue.