EDITOR'S NOTE

Football is back. What a ballgame last night. Seahawks fans - we even for the Butler INT now?

Thirty-three volumes in, the best part of running No Huddle has been the people. I'm meeting great founders, operators, investors and creators across the sports business ecosystem every day, and almost all of those conversations started with an intro from somebody on this list. Please keep ‘em coming.

Big news: Episode 1 of The Colosseum drops next week. Covering the business of sports the way people actually want it - with analysis and a vibe that fits from the boardroom to the bar seat.

Every episode also includes The Field Test, a segment where we try early-stage CPG, health and wellness, and retail products on camera and tell you what we think. If you're building one of those companies, hit me up.

YouTube channel to come! Stay tuned 👀

As always, if you want to be featured, connect with founders in the No Huddle family, or have suggestions to help No Huddle grow, just reply to this email or reach out directly to me at [email protected]. Let's keep it rollin'! 🤘

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- Sam

🎓 NO HUDDLE ALUMNI

Kühler | Volume 24

Kühler is starting to turn a promising recovery idea into something with real validation behind it.

Back in Volume 24, we covered Kühler’s bet on an overlooked recovery window during competition. Since then, it’s gotten some major traction - Kühler just received a NIH STTR award to fund a randomized crossover study on palm cooling after heat exposure.

Kühler has also joined AO StartUps, where it is piloting its portable cooling technology with elite junior athletes at Tennis Australia’s National Tennis Academy across training, match simulations, and recovery.

The product is now getting tested in the two places that matter: the lab and the field. That’s what can take this from a cool gadget to a category of its own.

🎙 IN THE POCKET

How I am seeing the field across sports, media, entertainment, wellness and CPG

240,000 people applied to run the New York City Marathon this November. About 1% of them got in, the lowest acceptance rate in the race's history.

Harvard’s last published acceptance rate was 4.18%. Getting into New York is about four times harder than that - roughly the same odds an NCAA football player has of being drafted into the NFL (1.4%).

I'm not a marathoner myself. I'll run a few miles, but haven't caught the long-distance bug yet. Living in NYC though, I feel like an outsider as your average runner in off-the-shelf HOKAs. The running culture here is omnipresent.

I see the West Side Highway fill up on Saturday mornings, I see Bandit Running gear take over the streets of SoHo, and I seem to hear more about Strava posts than Instagram ones nowadays (though I am IG free for 5 years strong, nbd). This running fixation, buzz, and culture really isn't anything new - but it sure feels like the business behind it is evolving and scaling rapidly.

Let's look at it from the top down - the marathon has evolved into an economy on its own. Brand Finance puts the world's top 50 marathons at $5.2 billion in annual economic impact, with the Abbott World Marathon Majors accounting for $2.7 billion of that. New York is the most valuable marathon brand in the world at $292 million. NYRR's events alone push close to $1 billion into this city every year, and marathon weekend alone accounts for roughly $700 million of that, up 58% in five years. And to my knowledge, those figures aren't including the drinks at your buddy’s place on Bedford Ave while cheering the runners on.

Those numbers describe the supply problem that allows marathons to thrive: scarcity. London turns away more than a million people a year. Boston requires most runners to qualify just to apply - and even a qualifying time does not always guarantee a spot. These races generate far more demand every year than they can physically put on a street, and the overflow gets a rejection email.

That leaves a queue of hundreds of thousands of people who have already decided they want to compete - and may be looking for another way to do that.

And that's where Hyrox comes in. Founded in Hamburg in 2017, the format is eight kilometers of running broken up by eight functional stations.

What makes it really work is that anybody can actually do it. The running comes in one-kilometer chunks, so you're never more than about six minutes from a break, and the stations are movements you'd find in any commercial gym. You can enter solo, split it with a friend in doubles, or take two legs each of a four-person relay. Open division has lighter weights for people who just want to finish, while Pro runs are heavier for people chasing a time, and there are age groups across all of it, all on the same course on the same day. Whereas marathons are feats that, for 90% of the population, require a 16-week training plan and a strict regimen around nutrition and recovery, Hyrox is something that, if you’ve been staying active, you can sign up for this month and go finish. And business is booming because of it.

Let's check the splits:

Standardization and low barrier to entry are the key levers to whole product. Your Hyrox time in Dallas means the same thing as a Hyrox time in Miami, which turns a workout into a personal record you can chase… and a number you can show off on IG and Strava.

For many, fitness is an independent ritual fueled by Meek Mill and 90s rock blasting in your headphones. That's a huge business for sure (see Ballers) - but a scheduled, social, competitive event with a start time, a group, and a result is tried and true with centuries of evidence. Gyms have had equipment and classes forever - Hyrox just added a scoreboard to them. Once there's a result, there's a season. Once there's a season, there's gear, travel, coaching, a training block, and a rematch. And the gyms are doing the selling. Fifteen thousand of them are running training programs for a race they don't own and don't take a cut of the entry on.

Which brings us to this week's news. L Catterton, LVMH's private equity arm, led a consortium that bought Infront's majority stake in Hyrox at a €600 million valuation (~$697 million), with founders Christian Toetzke and Moritz Fürste taking majority control back in the process. That's ~20x last year's EBITDA for a nine-year-old company, and more than twice what the most valuable marathon brand on the planet is worth.

So here's where I've landed: for a century, sports business has traditionally monetized the people in the seats and the professionals in the uniforms. The money in the industry right now is flowing toward the everyday athletes training to compete on the course themselves. Whether you're one of the 55,000+ crossing the Verrazzano this November or one of the 1.5 million doing wall balls in a convention center, you're a customer with a drive and an appetite to spend on performance. It's like an NBA2K closet or Fortnite skin brought to life - these athletes want the latest and greatest shoes, watches, gels, coaching apps, recovery boots, shorts, socks, tape, etc.

We’ve seen VC and PE back nearly every line item on that list. But one lane still feels wide open for this new class of high-performance athlete: sun protection.

Meet Wattz, a performance sunscreen built by runners for runners, launching from NYC eight weeks before the marathon.

More below. 👇

📺️ THE WATCH LIST

A mini investment memo on the stars of tomorrow

The Company: Wattz

The Business in a tweet: Wattz is performance sunscreen built for runners. Engineered so it doesn't sting your eyes or run off your face in the midst of a long run, Wattz is made from mineral zinc with creatine and electrolytes.

The 101:

If you're interested in learning more or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].

📶 THE SIGNAL (No Huddle's Take):

This is the earliest No Huddle has ever covered a company, and we're doing it on purpose. The Wattz team is rooted in solving an issue they have faced head-on themselves - skin cancer from too much time in the sun.

Everybody reading this is an athlete in some capacity - and many of you run - but how many of you think of applying sunscreen when you head out for a summer jaunt through Central Park? And if you do, are you dealing with sweat in your eyes before you even make it to mile 3?

Running is one of humanity's oldest athletic feats, and distance runners have always been ritualistic about it. But what was traditionally a personal journey (and still can be if you want), has now morphed into something much bigger and more social. Strava's 2025 Year in Sport Trend Report showed running club creation up 3.5x YoY, club-organized events up 1.5x, and Strava crossed a million total clubs on the platform.

A 2018 study of 2,445 runners in Porto, Portugal found that only 23.5% had adequate sun exposure and protection behavior. Among men it was 17%. This is a population that will spend $250 on shoes, $40 on a singlet, and analyze their sleep data every morning, but they're running two hours a day in direct sun with nothing on their face. A 2006 study out of Austria found marathon runners carried elevated melanoma risk relative to the general population, and that the more they trained, the worse the sun-damage markers got.

So you have a roughly $15.5 billion global sun-care market, projected to grow at about 6% annually through 2034; a participation boom in the most sun-exposed endurance sport there is; and a protection rate below 25% within that community. The serious runner’s experience is bespoke from the start - if you walk into a specialty running store today you can choose between fifteen kinds of nipple tape and have a gait analysis done in minutes to find the best shoes and insoles for you. Ask them what to put on your face, though, and they’ll point you toward a CVS aisle stocked with products that have looked the same for decades.

Now let's slow our roll for a second… This company is less than a month old. There's a lot they still need to prove out. We're covering them now anyway, because the idea, the people and the product are all there. The stars are aligning; now the Wattz team just needs to execute.

And there's competition for the position. Kelly Slater's Freaks of Nature launched in 2024 and released a mineral SPF spray in May, following an electrolyte skin product in March. Wattz is selling one $29 tube today - the ten-pack of single-use sachets that makes this a repeat purchase is on the horizon. And sunscreen is a regulated drug - the FDA sent warning letters to Supergoop and Vacation last August over mousse formats that weren't approved dosage forms.

What helps differentiate Wattz is that it's evident from the jump that Wattz is built by runners and marketers. Brennan has run sixty road races and had five cases of skin cancer, which is not a founding story anyone workshopped. Kapono has branded and launched three companies that went on to be worth more than $200M each. And there's a line in their investor deck that has sat with me as an extremely powerful branding strategy: "we are marketing SPF like an energy drink."

Thinking of the business that way gets really interesting at scale. A $29 tube may be a seasonal purchase for runners who have winters. But once the ten-pack ships, a set of single-use packs that will live in a race belt next to your gel gets restocked every few weeks by someone already in the habit of restocking.

Wattz's underlying bet is right: running has always been an identity and identities buy products that signal membership. Sunscreen is the one gap in a runner's kit that nobody has filled. Whether they can go from a beloved NYC brand to a national category is still open, but I am ready to see the word start to spread and NYC marathoners applying Wattz this November.

If you're interested in learning more, or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].

No Huddle is for informational purposes only and is not financial or business advice. The content in this newsletter does not represent the opinions of any other person, business, entity, or sponsor.

If Wattz's bet on runners as identity buyers caught your attention, revisit Volume 29 on Ballers. That issue covered the participation economy and the athlete who spends on performance as identity; Wattz sits in that same lane, with the SPF gap still missing from the runner's kit.

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