Two thousand brands. A hundred pro teams. Sixty-five college athletic departments. That’s the company the NCAA just hired to sell sponsorships it says it can’t effectively sell itself.
On Aug. 20, 2026, the NCAA signed Playfly Sports to run local sponsorship sales across 90 of its 91 championships. The exception is the Division I men’s basketball tournament, which stays with CBS Sports and TNT Sports, the one property too valuable to hand to anyone else.
Charlie Baker’s chief of staff, Brian Higgins, put the problem plainly: The NCAA “had the ability to sell local sponsorships, but it was pretty limited.” That sentence is the whole story. A governing body that runs 91 national championships just admitted it never built a real sales organization beneath them.
I was part of building one of those organizations 50 years ago. For one sport. In one region. With a Philadelphia Flyers logo on it.
Ed Snider started Hockey Central in 1976. In reality, it was the first professional fan-development organization in the history of major-league sports. I joined at 16 as co-founding communications officer, became executive director at 18, and eventually created and led the Flyers Office of Amateur Hockey Affairs as President, working with Flyers President Jay Snider.
From day one, I learned something from Aaron Siegel, Snider’s business partner.. Ed didn’t just want to write a check to support youth hockey. He wanted something built to last.
What came out of it was substantial. The Flyers Cup, the region’s high school hockey tournament, is still being played 47 years later. The Pepsi Shootout became a between-period television feature because Flyers TV producer Pete Silverman had the foresight and the courage to put youth hockey players on Flyers broadcasts in a competitive format.
We pioneered “Mites on Ice” at Flyers home games at the Spectrum, despite objections from other NHL teams’ general managers. We hosted what became USA Hockey’s largest coaching clinic, taught by Flyers coaches Fred Shero, Mike Nykoluk and Barry Ashbee, and later Bob McCammon and Pat Quinn. We also gave then Flyers conditioning coach Pat Croce, who would eventually become an owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, one of his earliest opportunities to speak before hundreds of youth hockey coaches.
Then there was the Learn-to-Play program. Originally sponsored by Medford Meats, the program put sticks and skates in kids’ hands and on their feet at what would eventually become four Philadelphia Department of Recreation ice rinks. The mission continues today through the fine work of Snider Hockey, not the Flyers.
None of this ran on national television money. It ran on regional and local sponsorship dollars.
Pepsi-Cola Bottlers of the Delaware Valley backed the Shootout and the Flyers Cup, money brought in by Flyers broadcast sales VP Pete Huver, whom I dubbed my Patron Saint of Pepsi. Medford Meats funded Learn to Play, with then-Flyers President Jay Snider helping make the relationship possible. The Tropicana Hotel and Casino supported the Flyers Cup. And virtually every equipment brand that mattered in that era found its way onto the ice: KOHO, JOFA, Titan, Cooper, CCM, Bauer, Vaughn and ITECH. Thousands of kids came through those programs every year. Thanks to Flyers Alumni great Joe Watson and Ad Sales guru Ivan Schlictman, local advertisers joined in as well. The emphasis here was local.
With the help of our TV partners at Channel 57, the late John Gardner (who recruited me to join him at The Denver Nuggets), Carol Healy, and the late Mike Rubin, all friends and colleagues, we eventually took the sales effort national through Katz Media. That’s where my dear friend Andi Poch came in. Andi, whom I dubbed our A-Team leader, as the third member; Armando Fitz was the third member. She is the living definition of the Energizer Bunny and brought Burger King and Fayva Shoes into the mix. She took what we had been doing in Philadelphia and helped turn it into national advertising money for youth sports, creating five-figure sponsorships inside six-figure sports advertising buys on Flyers telecasts in the 1980s.
No one kept track of exactly how much money the Flyers contributed over the years. I could probably come up with a reasonable estimate if someone asked me to. But I do know this: Every sponsorship dollar we raised between 1976 and 1988 went back into growing youth hockey in a market supposedly owned by football and baseball.
That’s the model Playfly is now selling to the NCAA as modernization.
Strip away the press-release language and the Playfly deal is pretty simple. The NCAA already has a national sponsorship product: the Corporate Champions and Partners Program, sold alongside the CBS/TNT broadcast rights. What it hasn’t effectively monetized is everything underneath it.
That means the regional bank that wants to be associated with a championship in its hometown. The restaurant chain that operates in three host markets but doesn’t need a national NCAA package. The local car dealer. The regional beverage company. The category brand that wants one sport rather than the whole NCAA universe. That inventory has either gone unsold or been badly sold for decades.
Now Playfly gets to sell it. Dedicated staff will work alongside NCAA personnel to create local packages around the cities hosting championships. And this matters: It is explicitly not the national sponsorship program.
Christy Hedgpeth, who runs Playfly Sports Properties, described the NCAA as “entrenched with colleges on the local and national level” while talking about the opportunity. Read between the lines. The same buyers exist at both levels. Nobody had connected the layers.
This isn’t happening in isolation, either. It comes at the end of months of NCAA commercial modernization, including expansion of the men’s basketball field to 76 teams, a change projected to generate more than $131 million in additional revenue distributions over six years. The NCAA also cleared beer, wine, spirits and hard seltzer for inclusion in its national Corporate Champions Program for the first time and opened another lane for sport-specific equipment sponsorships.
The examples the NCAA itself cited? STX for lacrosse. And Bauer for hockey.
Bauer.
The same equipment brand whose name was appearing throughout the Delaware Valley hockey scene when I was running Learn to Play in the 1980s is now being cited by the NCAA as an example of “modern” sport-specific sponsorship. The playbook wasn’t invented in 2026. It was rediscovered. Back in the 80s, I sold the Learn to Play concept to them via their regional rep, Larry Davenport, who had for years run local ice rinks and had been a supporter of what The Flyers were doing in the community. He and I convinced the national marketing folks and the rest, as they say, is history.
Think about that for a minute. Bauer was part of the sponsorship ecosystem around the Flyers Cup, Pennsylvania Cup, and youth learn-to-play hockey programs at city rinks in the Delaware Valley in the 1980s. Now, in 2026, Bauer is being held up by the NCAA as an example of modern, sport-specific sponsorship.
Same category. Same basic idea. Different decade. Much bigger deck. Even bigger budget.
The other piece of this story is on the demand side. Youth Sports Business Report recently looked at the high school sports economy, and the numbers tell you why sponsors care. American families now spend roughly $54 billion a year on youth sports. The average family spent $1,016 on one child’s primary sport in 2024, up 46% from 2019. And 8.26 million kids played a high school sport in 2024-25.
The sponsorship numbers are even more interesting. According to the report, 80% of parents say they would choose a sponsor’s product over a competitor’s. Eighty-four percent say sponsorship influences what they actually buy. And 60% spend more on game days than on practice days.
That’s no longer a youth hockey rink somewhere in the Philadelphia area. That’s the American youth and high school sports economy behaving exactly the way the sponsors in our Flyers Cup program books were betting it would behave in the 1980s. Parents at the rink buy from the brands they see. Parents at the field do the same thing.
Scale that behavior over 50 years and suddenly you have the business case an NCAA executive puts into a board deck.
But that was Ed Snider’s vision five decades ago. Create more youth hockey players. You create more hockey fans. Create more fans, and eventually you create more season ticket buyers and more people watching games on television. It wasn’t complicated. It was long-term thinking.
Here’s where I would push back on anyone who wants to call this exactly the same story twice. It isn’t. And the difference matters.
Hockey Central was built by hand. It was built by people who were in the building, knew the rink managers, knew the parents and knew which people had to be convinced. We could get Fred Shero to show up at a coaching clinic because he believed in what we were doing. It was regional. It was relational. And it scaled slowly because trust scales slowly.
Aaron Siegel and I had to convince Pete Silverman to put the Pepsi Shootout on television. Pete Huver had to get Pepsi to say yes. When Ed Golden asked Aaron why there wasn’t a high school hockey championship, I created the Flyers Cup and convinced Flyers captain Bobby Clarke to let me name the MVP award after him. Then Pete Huver got Pepsi to say yes again.
In the summer of 1984, Jay Snider told me he had met the president of Medford Meats. They wanted to do something with the Flyers. Jay asked me to come up with something. That “something,” launched at the Cobbs Creek Ice Rink in West Philadelphia, became the prototype for our Learn to Play programs. And that opened the floodgates.
Over the next four years came Fayva, then Burger King, both powered by Andi Poch and an introduction from John Gardner, along with virtually every major hockey equipment brand I could meet and close after connecting with the decision-makers at the annual hockey equipment show in Montreal. At every turn, when i learned then, relationships mattered.
That’s why so much of what I’m watching today feels like déjà vu.
But there is one enormous difference. Playfly is a national sales infrastructure company trying to scale local relationships. It reaches more than 85% of U.S. sports fans through its existing footprint. That’s a real asset.
But reach isn’t relationship.
It isn’t the standing I had with every rink manager in the Delaware Valley. It isn’t Pete Huver knowing exactly whom to call at Pepsi. It isn’t Jay Snider meeting the president of Medford Meats and saying, essentially, “Andy, come up with something.”
The NCAA isn’t rebuilding what Ed Snider built. It’s renting a scaled version of it from a vendor whose contract can eventually be renegotiated, replaced or lost.
That doesn’t mean it won’t work. It may work extremely well. But a local sponsorship sold by someone who lives in that market is a different product from a “local” sponsorship sold by the regional representative of a national platform. Both can work. They are not the same thing.
And anyone pricing these packages should understand the difference, rather than pretending that scale replaces relationships. It doesn’t.
This is where the story stops being nostalgia and starts becoming Comunicano Sports thinking.
Any regional or category brand that watched national sports sponsorship prices run away from it has just been handed another door into college sports. A cheaper door. A more targeted door. And potentially a far more relevant one.
A brand doesn’t necessarily need to spend tens of millions of dollars nationally if its customers are concentrated in three or four markets hosting NCAA championships. It can buy the markets it actually cares about.
That’s the opportunity.
The smart move isn’t waiting for Playfly to call. It’s identifying which 2026-27 championship markets overlap with a brand’s existing footprint and getting to the table before the inventory prices itself the way national sponsorship inventory did.
That’s the Pepsi Shootout play, just 50 years later and with a much bigger org chart behind it.
What I’d watch now is whether Playfly can put enough good people into enough local markets quickly enough to make the inventory valuable before the championships arrive, whether newly cleared beer, wine, spirits and hard-seltzer brands pile into the same regional inventory and drive prices up, and whether anything created around the 90 non-basketball championships actually lasts.
Because selling sponsorship is easy compared with building something people still care about 47 years later. That’s the difference.
That takes vision. It takes infrastructure. Infrastructure starts with people. Then come systems. But most of all, it takes a village, not one person.
That’s what we had with Flyers Hockey Central. And look at what followed: years of sold-out games, more youth hockey players, more high school hockey, more fans, and a community legacy left behind by Ed Snider that survived long after the original sponsorship checks were deposited.
That’s the part I’m not yet seeing in the NCAA story.
To me, what’s happening now looks much more like a monetization play. There’s nothing wrong with making money. But making money and building something are not the same thing.
What’s needed is a vision that looks beyond the next sponsorship cycle and understands something Ed Snider understood half a century ago: Sometimes the slow dime is worth far more than the fast nickel.
Because putting your name on something is easy. Just write a check.
Building something that lasts is the hard part. Thankfully, Ed Snider taught us both.