Sponsorship Development • Brand Partnerships • Youth Sports

You reach thousands of youth sports families. Your sponsorship revenue should reflect that.

I help tournament operators and youth sports properties turn audience into revenue, and the right brand partners into part of the experience.

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Selected Outcomes
53
sponsorship deals secured since 2023
$2.7M
in sponsorship value closed
50+
national and regional brand partners
60–90
days to first signed agreements

Results from 3+ years as SVP, Business Development for the largest operator of multi-day junior golf tournaments in the U.S.

At a Glance

What I Do

Build the sponsorship revenue your audience already justifies. Infrastructure, pipeline, and closed deals, handled by a senior partner with 25+ years of brand relationships.

Who This Is For

Leagues, tournaments, camps, and combines. Any sport. Any size. If your events draw a few hundred families a weekend or more, the math works.

Fractional Structure

Senior-level sponsorship leadership covering strategy, pipeline, closing, and digital advisory, without adding headcount or a six-month ramp. Engagements begin with a paid 30-day diagnostic, then continue as a monthly retainer to execute the plan.

Expectations

First signed agreements typically land inside 60 to 90 days. Larger multi-year deals close in months three through six.

The Problem

Most youth sports organizations know they are leaving sponsorship money on the table. They just don't have the time, structure, or sales expertise to go get it.

You are running events, managing operations, building schedules, and handling a hundred other things. Sponsorship gets pushed to the side or handed off to someone who is already stretched thin.

Done well, sponsorship doesn't just add revenue. It buys back the time your team loses chasing it, brings in partners who strengthen the experience for your families, and creates a budget line you can plan a year around.

What Most Properties Get Wrong

The five mistakes that show up in almost every sponsorship deck I read.

01

Selling a logo when the brand wants a moment.

A logo on a banner is a line item. A moment families remember is the thing that gets a brand to renew.

02

Pricing title rights like a banner buy.

Naming rights are a media product, not a signage product. Pricing them by the square inch leaves six figures on the table.

03

Treating on-site activation as an upsell.

Sampling, fan zones, and demo stations are not add-ons. They are their own tier. The brands that show up between games are the brands that come back next year.

04

No post-event report.

No report, no second year. Brands have stopped writing checks they cannot defend internally.

05

Pitching impressions to a buyer measuring households.

The brand-side metric changed two years ago. Cost per household reach is the number on the spreadsheet. Most pitch decks still lead with impressions.

What You're Actually Selling

Brands aren't buying tiers. They're buying three things at once.

The silver-gold-platinum structure made sense in 1995. Today's brand buyer wants the anchor, the moment, and the proof. The properties that close are the ones who sell all three.

The Anchor

Title, Presenting & Official Sponsorships

The brand becomes part of the event identity. Naming rights, logo placed across every event asset, broadcast and digital mentions before, during, and after the event.

The truth most properties miss: this is the largest single line in a real sponsorship plan. Most properties price it like a banner buy. It is closer to a media partnership than a logo placement.

The Moment

Product Placement & On-Site Activation

The brand buys the moment. Sampling stations between games, branded fan zones, point-of-sale at the venue, demo areas, athlete appearances, and content capture with athletes and families.

The truth most properties miss: your weekends already concentrate the audience. Most properties give this real estate away with the title deal or sell it as a logo placement. It is its own category, and it is the one a brand renews on.

The Proof

Experiential Marketing & Measurement

The brand buys proof. First-party data from registration, post-event surveys, attribution back to household behavior, and content rights for use in their own marketing.

The truth most properties miss: brands have stopped paying for impressions they cannot tie to behavior. They want cost per lead, household reach, and a report that tells them what to fund again. Properties that cannot deliver that do not get a year two.

What I Do / How It Works
Phase One

The 30-Day Diagnostic

A paid audit and valuation. By the end of it, you know what your inventory is worth and exactly what needs to be fixed.

The Audit & Valuation

A complete diagnostic of your sponsorship program across nine operational areas, paired with a working valuation model, a defensible rate card, and a target list of named brands. Three streams of research run in parallel over 30 days.

What You Receive

At delivery, you receive:

  • A written audit across all 9 areas of the sponsorship program
  • A working valuation model and a defensible rate card
  • A tier structure with founding partner and category exclusivity positioning
  • An activation playbook with execution standards at each tier
  • Vertical-specific positioning frameworks for 4 sponsor categories
  • A target prospect list with category prioritization
  • A 3-year sales plan with realistic funnel math
What Changes

Your company stops guessing what its sponsorship inventory is worth. The portfolio has a written valuation defensible to a Fortune 500 CMO. Your in-house team has a sales tool that matches the inventory. The next sponsorship conversation starts with a defensible number, not a brochure.

At delivery, you decide. Take the plan and build it yourself, or bring me in to build everything out.
Phase Two

The Retainer

Five service areas inside one ongoing partnership, typically a 6 to 12 month commitment based on what the audit surfaces. The audit identified what to fix. This is the work that fixes it.

01

Sponsorship Infrastructure

Most organizations have inventory but no product. The first job is turning the raw assets you already own into something a brand will pay for, defend to their CMO, and renew.

What gets built
  • Tiered sponsorship packages: title, presenting, supporting, and category-level partners
  • Pricing models for single-tournament, multi-tournament, and full-season commitments
  • A professional sales deck and supporting materials suitable for national outreach
  • Engagement metrics and post-event ROI reporting frameworks

What changes: You stop guessing what your sponsorships are worth and start defending the number with confidence.

02

Prospect Pipeline

You cannot close what you have not identified. Every engagement starts with a prospect list built from scratch and a real pipeline you can see into.

What gets built
  • A targeted list of regional and national brands with demonstrated youth sports interest
  • Category prioritization across beverage, financial services, QSR, healthcare, sporting goods, and retail
  • A running pipeline with weekly status visibility and deal-stage tracking

What changes: The conversation about sponsorship stops being “who do we know?” and becomes “which deals are at which stage?”

03

Outreach, Negotiation, and Closing

This is the part most providers will not actually do. Building a deck and handing it back is not closing.

What I run
  • All outbound sponsor outreach, introductory calls, pitch meetings, and follow-up
  • Negotiation of terms and pricing within guidelines agreed with your leadership
  • Deal management end-to-end through signed agreement and first payment

What changes: Deals move forward without the executive director or commissioner making the calls.

04

Digital Sponsorship Strategy

Most sponsorship money still goes to physical signage. The bigger upside is in your digital footprint, and few youth sports orgs know how to package it. Ticketing impressions, streaming, social amplification, and proprietary player data all carry real value once they are specced and priced correctly.

What gets built
  • Digital placements specced across ticketing, streaming, social, and platform inventory
  • An advertising framework with sponsor visibility standards and impression-based pricing
  • Sponsor-ready digital assets and integrations, in coordination with your design team
  • Sponsor education on the value of digital activation in youth sports

What changes: Your digital footprint stops being free inventory and starts being priced inventory.

05

Ongoing Advisory

Sponsorship is not a one-time build. The value compounds when someone is steering it as your footprint changes and existing partners come up for renewal.

What you get
  • Sponsor relationship management and renewal strategy
  • Upsell and expansion guidance for existing partners
  • Strategic counsel as your tournament footprint grows
  • Weekly check-ins and a monthly summary of pipeline activity, outreach metrics, and deal progress

What changes: Renewals and expansions stop being a scramble. They become a planned rhythm.

About Me

Meet Rex Grayner

Rex Grayner, sponsorship development consultant for youth sports organizations

I'm Rex Grayner. I've spent 25+ years in youth and amateur sports, most of it building the kinds of partnerships and revenue streams you are thinking about right now.

Most recently I was SVP of Business Development for the largest operator of multi-day junior golf tournaments in the U.S. I closed multi-year partnerships with brands like GEICO, Dunlop Sports Americas, Revelyst, Cirkul, IMG Academy, AdventHealth, and many others. In just over three years, I secured $2.7 million in sponsorships and helped scale revenues by 20%.

Before that I founded and ran Student-Athlete Showcase for nearly 20 years, helping 15,000+ families navigate their college recruiting journeys.

I hold a Master's in Sport Management from Central Michigan University, a BA in English from UC San Diego, and was a Denver Business Journal “40 Under 40” recipient.

Today I work as an extension of your team. I show what needs to be fixed, then I build your sponsorship infrastructure, price the assets, create the packages… and then I go sell it to brands who elevate the experience for your families.

My view: the right sponsorships don't just write a check. They show up for the families on the field. Done right, the brands you bring on become part of why families return, not a reason they tune out. That's the bar I set for every deal.

In my experience, you don't need to hire a full-time person, train them, and hope it works out. Instead, partner with someone who's done the work before, who can show you what your sponsorship program is actually worth, and who can start generating revenue for your organization quickly.

If that sounds like what you need, let's have a conversation.

Brands I've Worked With

Partnerships developed across 25+ years in youth and amateur sports
Blog

Notes on how youth sports sponsorship actually works.

Sponsorship May 15, 2026 4 min read

The Gap

A brand puts real money into a youth sports sponsorship. Six months later it has almost nothing to show for it. That is not a one-off. It is built into how the business works, and almost nobody is set up to fix it.

Read the full piece →
Free Download

What Your Sponsorship Program Is Worth

A 9-area diagnostic for youth sports operators who suspect they're leaving money on the table but cannot yet prove how much.

For tournament operators and event organizers running between $100K and $5M in current sponsorship revenue. This guide gives you a defensible way to measure the gap, and a self-assessment that tells you where you stand.

  • The 9-area framework every sponsorship program lives or dies on. What each is, how it breaks, and what the break costs you
  • An 18-statement self-assessment that scores your program from 1 to 90
  • The structural undermonetization gap, with typical dollar figures at three operator scales
  • Three honest paths forward based on where your score actually lands

Yours to keep whether we ever talk or not.

No spam. No newsletter. Just the guide.
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Common questions before we talk.

The initial consult is free. We'll discuss the fee for the audit during that call, once I understand your events and what we'd be looking at.
That's where I recommend every youth sports property start, and there's no obligation beyond it. The audit is “here's what needs to be fixed.” The retainer is “here's me fixing it.” The audit is yours to keep and act on yourself if you decide to take it from there.
A complete diagnostic of your sponsorship program across nine operational areas, paired with a working valuation model, a defensible rate card, a tier structure, an activation playbook, a target prospect list, and a 3-year sales plan. By the end you know what your inventory is worth and exactly what needs fixing. The full breakdown is here.
Typically 6 to 12 months, based on what the audit surfaces. The audit identifies what to fix; the retainer is the work that fixes it.
You don't need to hire a full-time person, train them, and hope it works out. You get senior-level sponsorship leadership, strategy, pipeline, closing, and digital advisory, without adding headcount or waiting through a six-month ramp. I've done the work before, I can show you what your program is actually worth, and I start generating revenue quickly.

Let's talk about what your sponsorship inventory is actually worth.

No pitch deck. No pressure. A 30-minute conversation about your events and where the revenue opportunities live.

I come in with a few observations about your events and a point of view on where the biggest upside is. You decide if it is worth a second conversation.

Prefer email? rexgrayner@gmail.com
Or connect on LinkedIn.
Brands seeking youth sports partnerships: get in touch.
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Typical response within one business day.
Thanks, there. Your request is in. I'll be in touch to set up a time.