SBJ Unpacks: CFP title game viewership drops 12%

The first year of the expanded CFP saw viewership for the championship fall 12% from last year. Ohio State’s 34-23 win over Notre Dame drew 22.1 million viewers on Monday across ESPN/ESPN2/ESPNU, well below the 25 million for Michigan-Washington last year, when the title game fell earlier on the calendar as part of a four-team CFP. OSU-Notre Dame had some competition with Inauguration Day coverage, while also falling on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

The 22.1 million viewers for the game marks the third-lowest CFP title game since the playoff began in January 2015, and the fifth-lowest mark since the BCS era started in January 1999.

OSU also jumped out to a quick lead, posting a 31-7 score by 10pm ET. The audience peaked at 26.1 million viewers early in the game from 8:30-8:45pm ET.

The audience is well above Ohio State’s last appearance in the CFP title game in 2021, when Alabama beat the Buckeyes 52-24 for an audience of just 18.7 million (that was the end of the COVID-impacted season). When Notre Dame last appeared in a title game in January 2013 (BCS era), Bama’s 42-14 dismantling of the Irish drew 26.4 million viewers on ESPN.

The home of the Daytona Tortugas was built in 1914, initially just a field and some bleachers sitting on an island off the Florida coast that gradually morphed into a minor league baseball venue over the decades. When other Florida ballparks wouldn’t host a game involving a Black prospect named Jackie Robinson in 1946, Daytona Beach offered to host the game instead, a move that helped enable Robinson to break the Major League Baseball color barrier the following year.

The stadium, now called Jackie Robinson Ballpark, is on the National Registry of Historic Places and the oldest minor league ballpark in use, but it hadn’t been renovated this century. So, when the list of Minor League Baseball teams that MLB planned to cut in a dramatic reorganization of the system leaked in 2019, the Tortugas were on it.

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In 2021, the cull took place. The surviving affiliated teams signed non-negotiable Professional Development League contracts with MLB clubs. The contracts instituted new facilities standards that stemmed from a perceived loss of focus on the point of the minor leagues: to develop players.

The new standards require on-site weight rooms, properly sized batting cages and pitching tunnels, and dining facilities, as well as devoted locker room facilities for women, who are increasingly coaching, managing and umpiring in MiLB. Each team’s stadium was assessed, with points given for each new standard not reached (similar to golf, the fewer points, the better). Some ballparks topped 200 points; a source told SBJ that the only venue with a perfect score was the Las Vegas Aviators’ 5-year-old Las Vegas Ballpark.

“We’re operators,   and we talk a lot about the fan experience, from the parking lot through the gates and inning to inning, and ushers and different touch points,” said Jim Jaworski, general manager of the Tortugas, the Cincinnati Reds’ Class A affiliate. “Well, it’s the same thing for the players, too. We need to make sure they can do what they need to do to develop as players.”

Since MLB’s 2021 decree, at least $2.3 billion of spent or committed MiLB ballpark investment (including projects that haven’t been completed) has been made, according to SBJ research. This year ($572.2 million) and next ($1 billion) will be the two highest ballpark investment spending years in Minor League Baseball history, SBJ research shows. Four venues open this year, with another four set to open in 2026 — most of those projects initiated because of the PDL standards — and by 2027, almost all the 120 MiLB teams will have renovated their ballpark or built a new one.  

“Never in the history of Minor League Baseball has this kind of support or dollars gone into the system,” said Diamond Baseball Holdings CEO Peter Freund, whose company has acquired 41 MiLB teams since 2021. “It’s a really exciting time for us to be around it and it’s why DBH in many senses exists, because we believe in the thesis of what’s going on.” 

The Tortugas and Jackie Robinson Ballpark survived the 2021 cut list, but they still have more than 100 points against them before they are PDL compliant. A $30 million renovation approved by the city of Daytona Beach last year that would create a 30,000-square-foot, multilevel building housing larger home and visiting team clubhouses, pitching and batting tunnels and weight rooms by 2026, should be a big step toward compliance. 

The PDL standards sparked anxiety in minor league baseball communities nationwide. MLB’s goal was always “greater stability, greater spaces for the players and staff members to develop, do their jobs and become major leaguers,” said Peter Woodfork, MLB senior vice president, minor league operations and development, who has overseen PDL standards implementation. “Hopefully, 10 years from now, they’ll see that a big step happened in the early 2020s; those facilities started to provide them the support they needed.”

Points

The Chattanooga (Tenn.) Lookouts and their AT&T Stadium were on the initial MLB cut list, too. The Reds’ Class AA affiliate’s ballpark was landlocked on a hill next to a highway, eliminating expansion options.

“There was anxiety surrounding anything where you’re going to be compelled to make significant changes,” said Hardball Capital Chairman and CEO Jason Freier, whose company owns the Lookouts, the Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies and the Fort Wayne (Ind.) TinCaps.  

PDL standards point tallies came from architecture firm EwingCole’s stadium assessments on behalf of MLB — 40 per year during the last three years — combined with MiLB clubs’ self-audits. BrightView, MLB’s official field consultant, cross-checked playing surfaces and field lighting, which eventually were upgraded at most MiLB venues.

Jason Michael Ford, Populous principal and senior architect, who helped design Knoxville, Tenn.’s, new $114 million stadium that opens this spring, said Populous had clients with more than 200 points. The DBH-owned Wichita (Kan.) Wind Surge, which built a new venue in 2021 for Class AAA but then moved to Class AA in the reshuffle, weren’t perfect but were compliant.  

The original deadline for MiLB teams to hit PDL compliance was 2025. Teams that aren’t compliant go before the PDL Facilities Compliance Committee, which decides the penalty.   There are remedies for the committee, including, according to sources, potential fines, but MLB wouldn’t provide details.

“Each individual club is a little different in this sense,” Woodfork said. “We’re trying to be reasonable that if you’re building something, like a new stadium, the major league club isn’t going to walk away if you’re halfway done with your stadium. There are situations like that, and those teams are getting an extra year to get into compliance.”   

MLB’s player development requirements weren’t outlandish, but they were detailed. The quality of the playing field was important, but so was the grade and drainage. Batting cages needed to be 75 feet long.

“Every inch literally mattered in what they were auditing for these ballclubs,” Ford said. “There isn’t a lot of flexibility in those guidelines.”

On-site batting cages, pitching tunnels and weight rooms were prioritized in the new standards. Many MiLB teams, including the Lookouts, had memberships at local gyms where their players would work out alongside the public. Other aspects focused on safety and security, such as instituting padded outfield walls at every ballpark — some of the older ones still had wooden walls with nails in them — as well as ensuring secure on-site parking for players’ vehicles when they’re on road trips.

Movement

Many of the new standards required space. Some venues, such as Hillsboro Ballpark, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Class High-A affiliate, the Hillsboro Hops, just didn’t have any. That multisport venue, built in 2013 northwest of Portland for $15.5 million, shared a concourse with an adjacent football stadium on one side and was pinned in on another by a 66-inch pressurized regional water main. 

“Logistically, it became very nearly impossible” to continue playing at the stadium, said SRG Partnership architect Aaron Pleskac, who helped design the $120 million Hops ballpark that will open across the parking lot from the old one in 2026.   

In Chattanooga, even if the Lookouts had knocked down their venue and built new on the cramped and hilly site, they couldn’t have accommodated everything it needed for PDL compliance.

“Long term, if we were unable to get a new ballpark in Chattanooga, we would have lost our license to operate there,” said Hardball Capital’s Freier. 

Most MiLB ballparks are municipally owned; of the 40-plus teams DBH has acquired since 2021, it owns only the Charlotte Knights’ Truist Field. The PDL stipulations landed in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, so it was unclear whether some MiLB towns and cities were financially fit enough to fund necessary improvements and keep their teams while dealing with the crisis.

“You can see the rub there between the club, the city and Major League Baseball very quickly,” said Populous’ Ford. 

In some MiLB markets, the money never materialized. That led to the Downeast Wood Ducks leaving Kinston, N.C., for Spartanburg, S.C., and the Carolina Mudcats moving 27 miles east from Zebulon, N.C., to Wilson, where a ballpark is being built for the Milwaukee Brewers’ Class A affiliate. In California, Rancho Cucamonga’s team moved 17 miles southwest to a stadium being built amid a youth sports complex in Ontario, while Modesto is moving to San Bernardino after the 2025 season.   

“Our first goal always is to stay in a municipality and to give them the opportunity to fund what needs to happen for PDL compliance,” said DBH’s Freund. “At some point, some of these stadiums just can’t be retrofitted.”

Some cities responded, though, including Daytona Beach; Hillsboro, which received public funding for its stadium from the city, county and state levels; and Chattanooga. The latter’s plan for a $115 million ballpark that will open in 2026 included Hardball Capital investing $19 million upfront in the venue and paying $1 million in annual rent. The Richmond (Va.) Flying Squirrels’ lease to use the under-construction CarMax Park also features a hefty hike in annual rent; many smaller cities’ precarious financial states dictated the need for higher annual guarantees from tenant teams. 

“We think Chattanooga is a great market and we knew this is something we needed to do in order to maintain our PDL license and stay in Chattanooga,” Freier said. “But you can imagine other places where even if the team was offered the same deal, the market would not allow the team to make that level of commitment, because there just isn’t the economics in the market.”

Old and new

The PDL quake has created work for sports venue industry mainstays such as Populous and Barton Malow, which is building the Jackie Robinson Ballpark renovation and new stadiums in Knoxville and Wilson. Local builders and less nationally prominent sports architecture practices also have landed projects, such as Pendulum (Wilson project) and MSA Design (Jackie Robinson Ballpark), for example.   

“It’s definitely given a jolt” to the sports venue design and building industry, said Len Moser, Barton Malow vice president of national sports. “Teams said, ‘Here is an opportunity. We’ve got to do some improvements anyway based on PDL, so let’s maximize the opportunities while you’re raising money for that.’” 

More than a few of the renovations involved placing revenue-generating premium areas and social spaces above the newly required player development facilities, offsetting to some degree renovation spending and creating future income streams for the teams and venue owners.  

Mixed-use development also figures into the design of at least seven of the eight stadiums opening in 2025 and 2026, including Knoxville; Spartanburg; South Jordan, Utah; Richmond; Wilson; Chattanooga; and Columbus, Ga. The real estate arrangements vary. At The Ballpark at America First Square, south of Salt Lake City, the mixed-use development and the team are owned by the same parent company, the Larry H. Miller Co. In Chattanooga, team owners Hardball Capital partnered with Atlanta-based New City Properties.  

“Communities have gotten to the point that they understand the positive impact that these facilities and mixed use around them can bring, but they’re demanding that the projects be de-risked,” Freier said. “They want to know that the stadiums are going to come with a certain amount of development, which alone de-risks things, but the more critical mass you start from, the more successful it’s likely to be.”

The Salt Lake Bees’ $140 million The Ballpark at America First Square in South Jordan will be the most expensive stadium opening this year in the U.S. and Canada. The Bees’ move from Salt Lake City proper to the suburbs came about naturally, the result of an expiring lease and the chance to put a ballpark amid a planned community being developed by Miller’s real estate arm. 

The Ballpark at America First Square’s design by HOK was more influenced by team owner Miller Sports + Entertainment’s pursuit of hosting the A’s during their stopgap years before moving permanently to Las Vegas than by the PDL standards. So, the facility has three batting cages (instead of the required two), bigger dugouts, safety netting down the entire baselines and separate locker rooms for female umpires and coaches (home and away). Miller S+E President Michelle Smith said the target for Bees players and their opponents was “a major league experience in a minor league ballpark,” thinking that seems more prescient given that the A’s and the Tampa Bay Rays will play the 2025 season in MiLB ballparks.  

Bees players will never have to pump iron at Planet Fitness. But neither will any other minor leaguers, whether the ballpark they play in opened in 2025 or during World War I. It’s been a tumultuous process, but MiLB’s 120 venues are in much better shape than they were previously.

“Aside from the new builds, all of that money went into player development, player facilities, which is astounding when you think about it,” Ford said. “In hindsight, Major League Baseball increased the value of these franchises, of these buildings, to the cities.”

Following last August’s content department restructure, ESPN is shuffling the division under EVP Mike McQuade.

The senior team directly reporting to McQuade now includes Tim Corrigan (promoted), Amanda Gifford (promoted), Mark Gross, Meg Aronowitz, Scott Favalora, Jack Obringer, Phil Orlins and Linda Schulz, according to an internal memo from ESPN President of Content Burke Magnus.

Corrigan is now SVP/Sports Production, overseeing event and studio for the NBA and WNBA, with newly promoted VP Hilary Guy, Thomas Kintner and Kate Leonard reporting to him. The event and studio directing team under Favalora, and wraps and content supervised by Obringer, will move to the sports production team.

Gifford is now SVP/Sports Production, and will oversee event and studio productions for college football, as well as the UFL, golf, lacrosse, volleyball and gymnastics. Gross will continue to oversee event and studio production for the NFL, as well as MLB, UFC, boxing and F1. Aronowitz will continue to handle ACC, SEC, NCAA women’s and men’s basketball and a plethora of other properties. Schulz continues to handle NHL and college ice hockey, and Orlins still leads technology and innovation initiatives.

On the original content side, Jose Morales, Marsha Cooke, Craig Lazarus, Heather Anderson and Chantre Camack will all report to SVP Brian Lockhart. 

SBJ’s class of 2025 Champions: Pioneers & Innovators in Sports Business once again will include sports industry veterans who have made their mark with championship performances throughout the industry and driven change, innovation and growth in their respective fields. Profiles of our honorees will start appearing in April. This year’s class:

Dave Checketts

Dave Checketts was a 28-year-old consultant with Boston-based Bain & Co. when a chance meeting led the NBA’s deputy commissioner, David Stern, to recommend him for a job leading the floundering Utah Jazz in 1983. Over the next 40 years, Checketts would hold some of the more influential roles in sports. He went from the Jazz to the NBA office, then took over as president of the New York Knicks, later ascending to president and CEO of Madison Square Garden. Checketts left in 2001 to found SCP Worldwide, a consulting and investment firm that eventually purchased the St. Louis Blues and Real Salt Lake. A decade later, he was named chairman and CEO of Legends Hospitality, with his private equity firm purchasing a minority stake. He’s now an adviser to a clothing company owned by two of his sons and son-in-law.

Ross Greenburg

Hired as a production assistant in what was a one-person sports department at fledgling cable network HBO in 1977, Ross Greenburg launched a career that followed the rocket-like trajectory of the network. Thrown into the deep end producing boxing and other live events, Greenburg quickly rose to executive producer, a role he filled for 15 years before ascending to president of HBO Sports in 2000. An avid fan of documentary films, Greenburg established HBO Sports as the home for those, as well as groundbreaking series such as “Hard Knocks” and the 24-7 all-access shows that built interest leading up to lucrative pay-per-view fights in a decade that saw the rise of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. A winner of eight Peabody Awards and 56 Sports Emmys, Greenburg left HBO to launch his own production company in 2010.

Carmen Policy

The name of Carmen Policy’s California vineyard translates into English as “Full House.” It refers to his love for his family and entertaining, but you might say it applies to his trophy case and NFL resumé after an august, five-decade career in professional football. He was in the front office for five Super Bowl wins during the San Francisco 49ers’ 1980s-90s dynasty, first as general counsel and later as CEO and president. He then returned to his home state of Ohio to help start up the expansion Cleveland Browns as their first CEO and president. Then, he escaped into Napa Valley to enter the grape and wine business, where he remains, but he’s never far from the action. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has called on his input at key times in the past decade, and his son, Ed, will take the top business role at the Green Bay Packers in July.

Gene Smith

The Ryan Day critics have stopped chirping now that Ohio State is in the College Football Playoff title game. Somewhere, Gene Smith is winking. Smith, the former Buckeyes athletic director who retired this past July, is the one who hired Day in 2019 — without considering anyone else. Smith’s 19-year tenure as Buckeyes AD was filled with on- and off-the-field glory in the midst of NIL, a pandemic and the transfer portal. Under Smith, the Buckeyes captured 35 team and 127 individual national championships (including the football title in 2014), not to mention 115 team and 369 individual Big Ten titles. A former defensive end on the 1973 Notre Dame national championship team and a former coach on the Irish’s 1977 title team, Smith is outwardly famous for being one of the few people to win a ring as a player, coach and administrator. His legacy is the Eugene D. Smith Leadership Institute.

Carol Stiff

Over more than three decades at ESPN, Carol Stiff tirelessly advocated for the network to show and showcase women’s sports. She joined the network in 1990, rising to be vice president of women’s sports programming and acquisitions. Her work spanned many sports but proved revolutionary in women’s basketball, a sport she played collegiately at Southern Connecticut State University. Stiff started the Tennessee-UConn rivalry, which first was broadcast in 1995, and pushed to have all women’s NCAA Tournament games televised. Her role expanded to include the networks’ coverage of the WNBA, women’s softball and the Frozen Four, among others. Stiff retired from ESPN in 2021, the same year she was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. A 2016 SBJ Game Changer, Stiff serves as president of Fast Studios’ Women’s Sports Network.

Frank Vuono

Veteran property marketer Frank Vuono was a driving force behind sports licensing’s ascension in the late 20th century, when that business went from counting in the millions to the billions. Vuono headed consumer products at NFL Properties from 1985-1993, growing retail sales from $300 million to more than $2.5 billion. He helped create programs now fundamental to sports licensing, including sideline apparel and coaches wear, elevating the sales of licensed apparel and top retail distribution. After the NFL, Vuono used his influence to co-found Integrated Sports International in 1993, which became an influential agency in sports I.P. marketing. ISI quickly established reputations in naming rights, merchandising, sponsorship marketing, intellectual property rights, team and individual athlete marketing, and third-party sales. Vuono subsequently co-founded 16W Marketing.

The newest sports skinny bundle is on the way following the demise of joint venture Venu -- but DirecTV’s “MySports” package was in the works long before Venu’s announcement and subsequent dissolution.

Sources close to the matter are adamant that the MySports announcement -- just a week after Venu’s folding -- had nothing to do with the joint venture’s collapse.

“Our path to getting this started well before Venu was contemplated,” said DirecTV CMO Vince Torres. “Somewhere along that path, Venu was announced as potentially coming to market, and Fubo launched their lawsuit. But in parallel, we never stopped working on what we believe to be a comprehensive solution that a sports fan would want. We were able to navigate to a place where we were able to create the package that is skinnier at a more accessible price point. Those programmers made a run at trying to go at it themselves without distributors.”

MySports will include 40 sports and broadcast channels in 24 markets, with more to come as affiliate and RSN deals get locked in. The package will be $69.99 per month ($49.99 per month for three months for early subscribers) compared to Venu’s $43. The package includes content from Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and NBC (the latter was not in Venu). The company is in conversations to add CBS, multiple sources confirmed.

DirecTV signed deals with the carriers in the second half of 2024, though conversations began in 2023. Disney was the first major programmer to sign onto MySports, and the dominoes fell after that. A source close to negotiations implied that NBCUniversal may not have wanted to be left out of Venu, and when MySports came calling, it gave the company the opportunity to join a skinny bundle.

In conversations with customers, DirecTV identified rising costs as the largest cord-cutting cause. Much of that is driven by the pay-TV model, which includes larger packages with networks that consumers aren’t necessarily interested in (think Disney Jr. and the like), that are required to bundle a service like ESPN+.

ESPN+ will be part of MySports, as well as upcoming DTC service “Flagship.”

“A programmer is going to want to protect their self-interest,” a source said. “Reeducating them that the market is shifting, and actually, Programmer X, you are the reason that the market is shifting.”

DirecTV and other distributors found themselves frustrated seeing programmers reinvest profits into programs that run first on streaming platforms and airing later on linear. An unbundled skinny package like MySports aims to eliminate those challenges.

DirecTV plans to have MySports available nationwide, with the only limiting factor being how quickly affiliates opt-in.

Staying out of Venu fight

While vMVPD Fubo filed the lawsuit that eventually led to Venu’s dissolution (with DirecTV’s support), the company quietly worked in the background to secure deals with the major programmers for MySports.

“Our position was pretty consistent with some of the challenges that Fubo raised during the lawsuit,” said Torres. “[It] put us on equal footing with whatever the programmers wanted to do directly. We were able to negotiate arrangements that were at least able to meet somewhere in the middle. If they had boxed out the distributors and just kept this to themselves, it would have been a significant harm.”

A source close to the matter said DirecTV chose not to directly litigate against Venu due to its upcoming contract negotiations with Disney and kept it as out of the public eye as possible.

Remember, DirecTV and Disney were involved in a major contract dispute that lasted two weeks in September, blacking out ESPN and more for DirecTV’s 11 million subscribers. DirecTV wanted to unbundle Disney’s networks, and the conflict ended with DirecTV being able to offer Disney’s channels in genre packages as well as the company’s streaming services. This paved the way for MySports, which the company negotiated at the same time as content agreements.

“Through the lawsuit and through our negotiations, we were able to get to the point we originally wanted to get to,” said Torres. “You’ll see us expand the markets as broadcast owners opt-in,” comparing MySports to YouTube TV’s launch.

“There’s ongoing conversations with CBS, and we’re hopeful that they’ll be a part of this in the near future,” added Torres. “You’ll see enhancements in the broadcast channels and the number of markets that we cover as those opt-ins happen. You’ll see hopefully positive traction here with CBS.” 

In recent years, there has been a positive shift toward normalizing the conversation surrounding mental health in sports. Athletes such as Simone Biles, Michael Phelps, DeMar  DeRozan and more have courageously used their platforms to talk about their struggles. The NFL and NBA have responded by implementing policies and guidelines aimed at addressing the growing need for mental health and mental performance services. Yet, mental health support remains inconsistent and is still too often seen as secondary — important, but not essential. This raises a critical question: Are teams genuinely prioritizing mental health, or is it simply a checkbox on their list?

Teams invest a significant amount of money in cutting-edge technology and equipment for physical training and performance. But why do they often overlook the benefits of investing equally in the mental health and well-being of their players? For teams and leagues aiming for sustained success, implementing effective and high-quality mental health support is a foundational part of training and performance — a key to building a culture of resilience and excellence.

The struggle to prioritize mental health

Professional athletes face intense scrutiny and pressure to perform, sometimes under circumstances that would be unthinkable in other careers. In their professional lives, athletes are expected to compartmentalize and push through without missing a beat, through injuries, performance slumps and personal challenges. Then off the court or field, they often struggle with managing expectations, setting boundaries, and not enabling those around them. These factors add to the intense environment many professional athletes navigate daily.

While leagues and teams have taken steps to improve mental health access, these efforts are often optional and insufficiently integrated. In contrast, the physical health of athletes is treated with utmost seriousness — teams invest millions in strength and conditioning, sports medicine, and injury prevention. So what’s the solution? Integration is the key here; mental health support must be seamlessly embedded into daily training regimens, coaching and injury recovery plans, ensuring that athletes receive comprehensive care.

A competitive advantage waiting to be tapped

Athletes who are mentally and emotionally well have a strategic advantage — it provides a competitive edge. A holistic approach to training that incorporates mental resilience leads to better focus, enhanced decision-making, and better performance under pressure. The focus on psychological well-being and training the mind can make the difference in a game where milliseconds matter.

When teams invest in high-quality mental health and performance programs, they not only support the immediate well-being of their players but also create conditions that enable athletes to thrive. By fostering environments that prioritize mental health, leagues can better support athletes who are already juggling intense workouts, media demands, and game days. 

For professional teams to deliver effective and utilized resources, the mental health clinician must be integrated into the team environment and be treated like the other staff. If clinicians are relegated to a small, out-of-the-way office or not included in travel arrangements, it sends a clear message about the perceived importance of mental health support and mental performance training. It is only when mental health clinicians are fully integrated into team operations and their roles are normalized that athletes are more likely to utilize the services proactively.

Leading the charge in changing the narrative

A few teams are setting the standard for high-quality, integrated, and highly utilized services. In the NBA, the Boston Celtics have done a phenomenal job integrating their Director of Mind Health and Wellness in a way that’s providing meaningful resources to their players. It is teams like the Celtics that demonstrate the impact of prioritizing mental health, seeing results not only in player well-being but also in on-court success as a team. 

Imagine if every professional athlete not only had access to mental health and performance clinicians from the day they joined their leagues but also were seeing them proactively just like strength training. These resources wouldn’t just be for crises only, but for maintaining and elevating mental performance, just like physical strength conditioning. If the team psychiatrist, psychologist, or mental health clinician traveled with the team and could implement check-ins scheduled at regular intervals, then maybe mental health services wouldn’t be seen as needed just when something goes wrong. 

Proactively investing in mental health infrastructure could help players thrive, not just survive, throughout their careers. All too often, teams act as if they’re simply checking off a league requirement, diminishing the benefits mental health and performance services can provide athletes.

A call for pro leagues to lead

Professional sports teams are quick to adopt the latest technology for physical improvement. However, if they invested comparable resources in personalized mental health and performance services that are fully integrated into the team’s daily routines, they would likely see measurable benefits, both in individual well-being and team performance. 

In a world where an athlete’s value is too often tied just to their physical capabilities, it’s important to recognize their mental resilience and psychological well-being are equally important. By prioritizing mental health services and treating them as more than a checkmark  on a list of league requirements, we can ensure that the next generation of champions — athletes equipped to perform at their best, personally and professionally.

Brook Choulet, M.D., is a concierge sports and performance psychiatrist and founder of Choulet Performance Psychiatry.

• The PWHL Players Association tapped former OneTeam Partners interim CEO Malaika Underwood to take over as executive director of the union beginning March 3, reports SBJ's Alex Silverman.

• King’s Hawaiian is joining Joe Gibbs Racing beginning with the 2025 NASCAR season, writes SBJ's Adam Stern, giving the brand a new team partner after previously aligning with RFK Racing.

• The Orioles are rolling out a fan-friendly pricing concessions menu for the 2025 season at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, with 11 items that cost $5 or less, notes SBJ's Bret McCormick.

• Fanatics Collectibles’ first flagship store in London will focus on sports and entertainment trading cards and trading-card games, reports SBJ's Wes Sanderson.

• U.S. Figure Skating's board of directors retained Elevate Talent to lead the search for its next CEO, writes SBJ's Rachel Axon.

• The cost of Ryder Cup tickets for this year's matches in New York gave many fans sticker shock with pricing around $750 each, but PGA of America CCO Jeff Price says it only lines up with market expectations, notes SBJ's Josh Carpenter.

• Sugarlands Distilling Company is the official moonshine of the 2025 Ryder Cup, writes SBJ's David Bourne, in a deal that includes the release of a limited-edition Ryder Cup-branded Cherry Limeade Moonshine now available nationwide.

• Cast Iron Media announced a five-year extension of its media rights partnership with MLB, reports SBJ's Mike Mazzeo.