Latest / Dugout Dish Baseball Recruiting Podcast powered by EMD Baseball / Episode 140: Interview with TeamMatch Sports founder and CEO Nelson Verbit

Transcript

Episode 140: Interview with TeamMatch Sports founder and CEO Nelson Verbit · Dugout Dish Baseball Recruiting Podcast powered by EMD Baseball

• 0:02
  Speaker A: Hey, parents and coaches, are your kids using the right glove? The most important skill for youth athletes to learn is how to play proper catch. The problem is most youth gloves are made with bad leather and are too big for small hands. They actually make it harder to play catch. That's why former Major League Baseball shortstop Kevin Smith created Cali Gloves. Cali gloves are crafted from 100% Japanese kip leather and are the perfect size for kids. All Cali gloves come with palm slits, finger loops and elastic wrist lacing that encourage proper hand placement. The right closing patterns and give kids more confidence to go make plays. Cali Gloves even allow parents to break in the glove without stretching out the fit. It's the glove Kevin wishes he had growing up and the glove all his teammates want for their kids. Visit cali gloves.com to learn more and help your kids play better catch. That's Cali Gloves. K a l I gloves.com.
• 1:12
  Speaker B: Welcome to this week's edition of the Dugout Dish podcast. I'm Andy Kutis, joined by my Wonderful co host, Mr. Keith Glasser. How we doing? Great. How are you? We got two guests on tonight. First, we've had four people on the Pod quad box.
• 1:28
  Speaker A: What is it? The Octobox and the NFL Red Zone.
• 1:32
  Speaker B: We got the quad box on EMD Dugout Dish podcast. It's going to be a good one. We've got for our frequent listeners. You're going to hear a familiar voice. We got Mr. Jonathan Grasse from Elite National Baseball on Jonathan, welcome.
• 1:50
  Speaker C: I guess.
• 1:52
  Speaker B: And we have a special guest, someone that we're extremely excited to partner with and they got a launch coming up here in 10 days, maybe two weeks. I think we got 10 days until the launch. But we've got Nelson Burbit, who is the founder and CEO of Team Match Sports. I'm going to let him get into what Team Match Sports is. But Nelson, thank you for joining, man. Excited to have you on boys.
• 2:17
  Speaker D: Thank you very much for this opportunity to hang out with you guys tonight. I'm excited to tell you about the project. The world is starting to find out about this a little bit. We're finally going to launch after a long haul in about 10 days in the App Store and we're very excited to tell your audience about what's about to happen.
• 2:35
  Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And we're excited to partner with you because I think our missions align and when Jonathan was able to make the connection between all of us and Jonathan, obviously we love you to death over here and extremely thankful for this and really looking Forward to what we can all do together here. And Nelson, I want to give you a minute because I know there's a backstory on how this all started and how you, you came to build Team Match Sports. I want to give you a minute to talk about how it all came to be.
• 3:06
  Speaker D: So the way we look at things, and I'm sure the way everybody else looks at things, youth sports is a mess. It's not organized. It's the wild wild west out there. And when things become the wild wild west, it's usually because of one thing, lack of information. So we had a. And we've tried to figure out, you know, what, what's going on out there. And it kind of, it kind of went with my son as Jonathan knows. He's Jonathan's center fielder at Elite National. But the story of how we got to Elite national is really what created Team Mets. So my son was a high level player, but not the highest of level players. So we'll call him a dude D2, D3 type of recruit. So he played for a powerhouse, semi local, semi national team, let's call it 65 and three powerhouse kids. Basically we were just all from the same area. But when things started to fall apart, Team Match was created by one simple thing. Why do I have to go ask friends? Why can I not get information? I want to get my kid onto a national team for exposure, maximize his playing time, put him in the right spot with the right coaches that will help with his recruiting. Why am I not able to find that? Of course, Andy, anybody can look up keynes.com and figure that out, right? So you're there. But there's so many teams and organizations like Jonathan's out there. This is probably going to sound like a big promo for Freely national by the time I'm done tonight. But where was that information? How did I get to Jonathan? I got to Jonathan because one of our top stud pitchers ended up going over there and say, man, you gotta go play the center field over here, blah, blah, blah. But I never heard of Elite National. Why is that? Because the information wasn't there. If it didn't come across my phone, my desk, my friend group, we would not have found out about Elite National. So what happened there? I was like, I'm going to put this thing together for kids from 8 through 17 years old and I'm going to put together the biggest information directory and matching algorithm in the world for baseball, soccer, lacrosse and basketball. So our product, to go into our product, you'll build a profile. Everybody's familiar with sports recruits, ncsa, blah blah, blah. Eleven hundred dollars. That's what people do when they don't know. So the kid builds a profile and then something special happens. If he's interested in changing teams. And Andy, there could be a variety of reasons, right, he's the backup catcher and the Coach's kid at 12U kick and play, but he's stuck there. He doesn't know where to go. He plays for this team. His friends play for his team. Hey, he doesn't want to travel. Hey, the parents don't have $4,000 to spend for the summer season. A myriad of reasons might make him want to change teams, but they don't know where to find these teams. So what we've done, we built what's called the match center and team match where we've taken the kids profile, put it into an algorithm, we put the organizations into an algorithm and then we will provide five high quality choices that we're recommending this kid should contact. Well, here comes the next problem. Well, how do I contact these teams? Do I call Mr. Elite? Do I call Mr. Keynes? No, you push a button on the mat center, your profile immediately goes to that organization. So it lands on Jonathan Grasse's desk. Wow. Center fielder, 93 miles an hour from the outfield, runs the seven flat, blah, blah, blah. Jonathan now can push a button and immediately start dming with that kid's parents. So we've made a match connection to help both the athlete and the organization place the kid in what is probably the best place for him.
• 7:35
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing and I've been lucky enough to to see a demo of of how this stuff works. And I think it's being able to provide people information to make good decisions. And despite the fact that we are a wildly connected society with social media and the Internet, some of this stuff, to your point, it's, it's not easy to find. And in order to make good decisions, you got to have good information at your fingertips. And you know, luckily you were able to find Mr. Grass over there because you can't do much better than that guy.
• 8:09
  Speaker D: But it was a match made. But you think about it, Andy, you take an athlete's journey from eight years old, there is a decision that has to be made constantly. Is he in the right place? Do we like the coaching staff? Is the money right? Is he playing travel ball? How far does he have to go? Blah, blah, blah, you can go down the line and each year, hey, are you going back to that team? Do we need to find somewhere. You're really good at this, you know, we need to find somewhere else instead of just being on the same train, which people just do. And then you get to 12 years old and we all know at 12 years old decisions have to be made. Do I stay in our township program? Do I play Connie Mac? Do I go out into the world? I go out into the world. How do I find the right program to go out into the world? We are providing this information. Parents and athletes deserve to have this information, okay? They need to be able to contact organizations, they need to be able to ask questions. When he's 15 and he's put on the B team, no problem, he's going to get playing time. How many kids have you had recruited from this B team? Which coaches, you need to ask questions because hey man, this is four to $5,000 a season which we all know for every sport. And this is the only product I've ever seen in the world that you're forced to into a situation and to pay this period, you're going to pay this if you want to play here. Well, what if I don't want to play here? Maybe there's another answer out there for my kid and that's what we're trying to provide.
• 9:53
  Speaker B: So I know we're, we're kind of focusing on the team aspect of it right now, but I know the search capability and the match capability. It either does or has intentions of going beyond that because there's other layers to this process. It's not just the travel team, but it's can you get connected with the right people to help you develop? Can you get connected with the right people to help you in the recruiting pipeline? Like can you talk through, you know, some of the other layers to this? That power to the parent and the player it is.
• 10:23
  Speaker D: So again, what are we in? We're team matches in the information business. Okay? So yes, it's a team. But listen, what player of any substance or non substance or a third stringer doesn't have a hitting coach? What player at 15 years old that can play ball shouldn't have some kind of recruiting person that they are working with, okay? Because as we all know, we. You need help, okay? Everybody needs help right now. You need these recruits. And we'll talk about it later. We're not a recruiting app. But it's really hard to get this. Sure, the 1% guy throwing 96 miles an hour at 16, he doesn't need help, okay? But the 99% of the people behind Them need people that have connections, information, relationships, and you're going to be able to find these people just like yourself on Team Match. You're going to be able to, as an organization, you're going to be able to have uniform companies. Anything that you need in the sports arena, especially in the travel arena, is going to be on this site.
• 11:43
  Speaker B: Jonathan, question for you. You run a really high quality travel organization and I know you don't make decisions whimsically. What's, what's the value that Team Match brings to you? How does it make your life easier? How, how does it elevate your program and what you guys try to do in Elite?
• 12:05
  Speaker D: Yeah, it was a no brainer.
• 12:07
  Speaker C: And obviously, you know, Nelson sun plays for us. Jigs has been awesome for us and but I think the one thing for us that, you know, we went to, you know, to him with when we, you know, sat down and talked was, was that, hey, what, how can you, how can you provide value for us as well, you know, and the value for us was, was undeniable, man. Like, it was, it was phenomenal. Like getting an opportunity to, you know, to match with players that didn't know about what our brand was, didn't know, you know, who Elite national was, didn't know, you know, anything other than, you know, a couple of like, bigger organizations out there. And I think for us it was like, all right, well, this is perfect. Like, this is exactly what we want. We want to match with kids that want to go somewhere where they're going to have an opportunity at place like have an opportunity where they're gonna get recruited, that they're gonna be in front of schools. You know, I mean, we just ran our numbers the other day. We have 42 kids that, you know, are gonna play in college from Elite national from last year. There's not a lot, there's not a lot of other orgs that can say that, you know, it's just the reality of it. So I think for us it was a pretty natural fit because we knew, you know, what Nelson and their team wanted to do and what they wanted to do in terms of like putting guys in front of schools. And we said, hey, we think we can help. And it was a natural, natural fit.
• 14:04
  Speaker D: So, Andy, so you take John's organization, right? And again, this could just turn into a promo commercial for those guys. But me and John did not even know each other a year ago. And we sat down and we talked and John said, I'm going to do this if you come play for me. Okay, so one year later, you're taking a young 20, 27 and there's five offers already sitting in front of him because John said he would do that and that's how it would go down. Now does the kid have to perform? Of course, but, and by the way, none are D1 offers. So everybody talks about the offers, offers, offers, but most of the kids out there aren't D1. And what it tells me about his organization is sure, a bunch of D1 kids signed off on my son's team, but you know what, there's about nine others that are going to play college baseball at levels two and three and that's pretty damn cool. Okay, so you take those larger organizations and you take, let's not say Canes National, Cane's American, whatever's under that, okay? Canes Northeast. How many of those kids are being pushed by that organization? The answer is none. It's the show. Everybody's looking at the show and making sure the show kids are in front. John, if he takes you on to his national team, you're going to play college baseball. If he takes you onto his American team, you're probably still going to be playing college baseball. And that's the kind of information that I want on my site, okay? Parents need to know about him. Listen, there's probably 500 Johns out there that I'm going to be doing business with, okay? But it's those people that the people need to know about. There is such a disconnect in youth sports, it's awful. People know what they know. There is so much of the unknown out there. Listen, so from an organizational standpoint, how John is going to be affected by me, okay? John wants to add younger teams. Sure, John can put his email list out, but John's also going to have access to filter 14 you1, 8, 9, 6, oh. 50 miles left handed pitchers, 79 miles an hour. He can filter down to that and go and reach out to those parents of those left handed pitchers. John can also fill teams, John can fill roster spots. John can find who's willing to travel, who's willing to guest play. John's able to because we have the world's first youth sports feed. Meaning you take Twitter, Instagram. What 10 year old has a Twitter and Instagram account?
• 17:07
  Speaker B: Nobody.
• 17:08
  Speaker D: But you know what, the parents are still out there filming that kid, proud of that kid and posting it onto their own social media sites. Now this kid's going to have his own site because the only people that can post on my site are from 8 to 17 years old. There's no commenting on my site, there'll be no bullying. You can hit the fire emoji or you can do nothing. So they're going to have their own feed. So John's going to be able to blast out his tryouts to a whole new group of people that he wasn't able to reach out. And then once they get to John, they're going to figure out, hey, this is a great organization that not enough people know about. And that's what we're about. Narrowing the gap, closing the bridge a little tighter and being able to provide information for parents, for organizations like John out there.
• 18:02
  Speaker B: And I think that that's where our missions align, right? Like we're on this podcast. The reason me and Keith started to do what we did with helping, helping families navigate the recruiting process is because there's a gap in education, there's a gap in information. And you know, this podcast is our way of trying to get out a ton of information. And you know, when, when we came together and started to talk about what this could look like, like, obviously there's, you know, a mutual benefit, but for us it's, it's similar to Jonathan. It, you know, we're looking for people who want to be helped and if there's folks, if there's a way to get in front of people where we can interact with them to find out if they're serious about this and they believe in what we do and kind of the core values of how we go about this. We want to help people. Like, we're in the business of helping people and we try to use our expertise to do so and, you know, having exposure with team matches, you know, something that seemed like a no brainer for us and, you know, it just, it makes a ton of sense. And I love the idea of really trying to like, democratize information. Like, it's important that people have access to this stuff because it can make a difference.
• 19:16
  Speaker C: I think one of the biggest things for me is that.
• 19:21
  Speaker D: You don't have.
• 19:22
  Speaker C: To play for us. It's okay, it's all good. Like, or you could play for us. You might not, but you could too. But Team Match allows, and I think this is the best way to put it, is Team Match allows kids to understand wherever they are in their process, that there is help available to them. Whether it's moving a travel team, whether it's not moving a travel team, whether it's working with emd, that's what team matches for. Team matches for helping kids get to the next level, no matter what your perfect situation that you think you are.
• 20:15
  Speaker B: In.
• 20:18
  Speaker C: Allows you to get to that next level.
• 20:21
  Speaker D: Correct. Because we all have kids, okay? And when it comes to your children, whether it's in home life or athletic career, you should never settle. There's. There's so much settling, okay? Because there's so much lack of information out there, okay? Your kid wants to be a better hitter, get a batting coach and go to work. Your kid wants to play on the national team, be able to reach out to them. Your kid wants to have a recruiting coordinator and go to Bucknell, needs to call the people at emd. Like, this information needs to be out there. People are settling, okay? You settle, you follow the herd and that's it. Okay? I'm done with the herd mentality in youth sports. And this goes for every one of those sports. Baseball, soccer, basketball, lacrosse, okay? I'm going to provide the parents the information. I'm going to give the power to the parents to make an educated decision about their child. It doesn't have to be at an elite program, like elite national, okay? It doesn't need to be. It could be two towns over where they charge $1,500 and play 10 games and my kid's still going to play baseball and he's going to stay involved in sp. There's a million scenarios. This is not a recruiting talk right now, okay? This is finding your fit for your kid in the athletic world, okay? Instead of following the herd. And that's really what this thing's about.
• 22:04
  Speaker B: Fill me in a little bit more about the impact this has on the player. Like, you talk about the social media feed, you talk about the the page, but is there any other detail in there that that's important from like a player perspective in terms of what they're able to to provide over to team match and what's accessible to different folks?
• 22:21
  Speaker D: Yeah. So getting a little more detail. So the Kiddo Builder profile, it's fantastic. It is detail oriented. So when they load their stats up, they can load up their school season and then click a button and load up their AAU season. All of their highlights are right on the front page of their profile, which is a beautiful thing. We know where this goes. Your gpa, your school stuff, every piece of information that you want to put in there is on that profile. So if I don't care if you're the backup catcher, okay. But you want to go catch somewhere and you put some highlights at 11, you, hey, this kid can catch. And you send this to an organization, what organization is not going to look at that? Okay? If you go to a tryout, as we all know, you go to a team camp, as we all know, if that coach doesn't know who you are and have looked at film at you before, that the odds of you getting noticed or recruited or making that team is basically zero. Correct. You are now just paying a fee to somebody. So when you click that Max center, that profile goes out. I don't care who you talk to. Anybody can look you up on our profile. It's built user friendly for an 8 year old, okay? We expect the 8 to 12 year old market. We think in the next 16 months there'll be one, over 1 million kids on this site, okay? There's going to be a lot of 8 to 12 year old kids on there because that's really where the decisions have to start, okay? And the parents need options and the parents need to understand, okay, my kid's a good player, okay? He needs a batting coach, okay? He needs to be looked at. He needs this, oh, my kid's not a very good player. That's no problem. He still needs a batting coach, okay? He still needs somebody to talk to and he needs to find time and get on the field because the only way he's going to get better is to get on the field. Not being the 16th man year after year because the parents don't know any better. There's opportunities out there for every kid in America to get on the field somewhere in an OR in most organizations, but people don't know that. They just don't know it. They don't understand it.
• 24:44
  Speaker B: Now I know we're, you know, we're talking about kind of some of the younger groups here, but put yourself in the shoes of like a 16 year old kid who's, you know, embarking on the recruiting process. Things have changed. We talk about this all the time on the podcast, but is this the type of profile that a kid could send out to a college coach as a part of an email that a coach would have access to it to be able to see those highlights, to see that information. Does it, does it serve that purpose as well?
• 25:11
  Speaker D: It does because so our revenue model is it's 99 bucks a kid, which is really cheap. I wanted to make it much more. It's 99 bucks a kid. And not only that, one 10 year old only plays baseball. You know, he plays soccer, you know, he plays basketball. You know, you can build multiple profiles for 99 bucks a kid. Now there is a free Version to this. So anybody can sign up for free. As an organization, you have limited access. You can't post, you can't shout out your tryouts, but you can certainly look at anybody's profile. And on that profile the first thing you see is the only thing people want to see the videos. Because when the kid puts 12 home runs at 12, you, you want to see the swing that produce those 12 home runs. And that's why we're putting that in the forefront.
• 26:09
  Speaker C: One of the things too that we've seen and obviously we have partnered with tmatch, so just let that be known. But one of the things we've seen is that for our kids.
• 26:28
  Speaker B: To be.
• 26:28
  Speaker C: Able to have one place to put every single thing on makes it super, super, super easy for us to just Clinton. For me to click one button and say there it is. High school stats, video metrics, this is who they are. Gpa, like it's a one stop shop. Which is in my opinion is huge. And I know for you guys, you know, Keith, Andy too, like to be able to just send that, just one click of a button like, hey, you saw this guy play, what do you got on him? Here's everything you got.
• 27:13
  Speaker D: And something else cool that you probably don't even know John, is that because going through this recruiting journey with my young man here, what do they want to see year after year? John, what does everybody want to see year after year? Development, improvement. Okay? So the stats are now archived. You can look at his 60 time as a 15 year old and then click 16 year old and see the improvement. Exit velocity, whatever stats that he chose, choose to shout out. So we're like John said, we're trying to provide the full picture in this profile. Okay? So we know that the NCSAs of the world, the sports recruits, a thousand bucks, okay? Basically what do you get for that? You get camp invites because that's what the colleges use that for. We want people to know who everybody is. We want to personalize this for each individual. We want to make people know EMD baseball takes care of its clientele. We want people to know if Jonathan Grasse says you're going to play for my team, you're going to play for that team, okay? And when he tells you, the people need to be honest, right? And the greatest thing with dealing with John is he told me what's going to happen. He told me the level my kid's going to get interest at. And that's how it went down. Okay? There's too much smoke and mirrors out There with these large organizations, we all know the CD&E teams for certain organizations pay the fees for the national teams. We know how it works. Parents don't know how it works. Okay. They're given a hat with a C on it and they're thinking they're playing with a team with a C on it. We know that's not true. Okay? You're not getting attention. You are paying bills, and that's fine. But that's not going to get you. Where do you want to go if there's somewhere you're looking to really get to. And we know that information, Andy.
• 29:39
  Speaker B: No, I mean, it's. The information is valuable and I think people need to have information to make good decisions. And I think that that's what this really comes down to is, you know, providing information to folks, being able to connect on whatever level you're at. Right. If it's like you said, trying to find somebody to help you develop. Right. This process unfolds for kids at different times. And, you know, if you got a kid who's serious about really trying to play college baseball or just wants to be better at their particular sport, you know, being able to connect with a trainer, being able to connect with a strength coach, you know, I think that that's valuable and it's not always as easy as you would think to find some of that information.
• 30:20
  Speaker D: So, Andy, it's impossible. Google Baseball Strength Coach Baltimore, Maryland Good luck. You can't find this information out there. It's not out there. Okay. Because most of these people are smaller organizations, God bless them, do their thing, have their clientele, would love to grow their business, but how do they get the message out? Okay. How do these organizations now get their message out? And that's what I'm doing here. Okay. I'm going to educate the consumer while also helping the organizations maximize their exposure. That's all I'm doing here. That, that's in a nutshell, what team matches.
• 31:06
  Speaker B: So before we, we, we wrap up here, I want to make sure that you have time to kind of plug where this is going to be in the timing of when this is all. I know you mentioned kind of 10 days, but give the listeners an idea of the best places to find you guys so they can do their research and see team match for themselves.
• 31:27
  Speaker D: Yeah. So we're, we're in mass scramble right now, but anybody listening to this can shoot me an email and I can give them some personal information that's not out to the public yet. Nelson match sports.com the website is tmatch sports.com Please follow us on socials because you'll start seeing some really cool stuff. We are on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We're starting to post some really cool stuff. We are sponsoring tournaments. We are. I know I didn't mention this, but like, this isn't a small operation, Andy. Three of the biggest companies out there have already partnered with us. One of the spooky nook sports, where 2.1 million kids walk in that door every day. Another one is EDP Soccer, which is the largest soccer organization on the East coast with 1800 teams sponsor with them. And then we are extremely proud to announce you have Gatorade, you have Nike, you have T Match Sports now as the three sponsors for Made Hoops, which is the premier basketball organization out there. The Nike teams, everybody plays for these people. They have partnered with us. They have seen the vision of Team Match. So please follow us on socials. Pull up Team Match sports on all of them. Start following us and some really cool stuff's about to happen. We'll be in the App store. Looks like the 17th of November. I know me and you are going to do some things together to help your audience get a hold of this product very inexpensively and we're excited to be here with you and tell you about the product, man.
• 33:26
  Speaker B: No, we appreciate your time and I know, I know that we're excited for the vision you have and being a part of that vision and you know, getting our name out, getting good information to folks. I mean, like I said, the reason we do this podcast is we want to get good information out there and you know, this is a part of it and you know, we're, we're super excited about what the future holds here. So, you know, for the listeners out there, go check out tmatchsports.com email nelson if you've got any personal questions and go ahead and give them a follow on social media. But want to thank you again for your time, Mr. Grasse. I'm sure we'll be having you on soon again as well. Probably need to do some off season college baseball discussions, but no, Nelson, I really appreciate it, man. And thank you for setting aside some time tonight to, to talk about Team Match and in your vision for it and what it's going to be.
• 34:21
  Speaker D: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for your time. I'm really excited about our partnership and you know, let's get it going together. Thank you very much.
• 34:29
  Speaker B: Sounds good. All right, well, thank you everybody for listening. Tune in next week. We will talk to you then. Thanks everybody. Thank you for listening this week. If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that subscribe subscribe button and smash that like button for us. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts as well as Spotify. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram MD Baseball. If you want to find out what me and Keith do to help families and players navigate the recruiting process, go ahead and check us out on emdbaseball.com take a few minutes to check out our new online academy. I promise you'll get some good information out of that. Thanks again for listening. Check in with you next week.