— EDITOR'S NOTE

Welcome to Volume 28. We’ve got America’s 250th birthday 🇺🇸, a steady dose of World Cup games, and the Jaylen Brown trade still making me shake my head. Heading into the long weekend, I want to thank everybody again for joining us. I appreciate each reader and new subscriber and look forward to tracking the trends, insights and companies building in the spaces we love.

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⚡ THE HIGHLIGHT

The biggest cause of shoulder tightness isn’t where athletes are treating, it’s where they aren’t. SCAP Athletics is built to reach what foam rollers, massage guns, and lacrosse balls can’t:

🎙 IN THE POCKET

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

Pop over to the Cape League or a high school summer showcase and take one scan behind home plate - you’ll see dozens of scouts with notebooks, radar guns and other gadgets tracking as much as they possibly can. Whether it’s a soon-to-be draft-eligible flamethrower or a 16-year-old with a 12-6 like Kershaw, the pack of scouts will converge, drum up their own analysis and grade out plays - all hoping they will be right and spot the next star.

We are amidst a decade-plus boom of the most optimized athletes in human history. Scouts, trainers and athletes themselves measure everything - sprint speed, quick twitch, velocity, spin rate, launch angle, vertical - and have even bolted virtual reality into the training stack. We’ve engineered training, nutrition, biomechanics and recovery to squeeze out every last inch of performance. And it’s worked. Athletes today are bigger, faster and stronger than the generation before them, top to bottom. I apologize to all the Boomers reading this, but you just can’t compare the level of athletes now to “back in my day.” For what it’s worth, I’ll concede that the average athlete’s passion, intensity and dedication to the craft have (sadly) regressed. They don’t make ’em like they used to on that front.

The most interesting part of all this optimization? The body itself has become the bottleneck. We’ve gotten so good at maximizing output that we’re now asking bodies to do more than they were ever built to withstand - and they’re breaking down younger and more often. The frontier of performance isn’t another mile per hour anymore. It’s durability. As coaches have preached for decades - the best ability is availability.

Baseball is the canary in the coal mine. In December 2024, MLB released a yearlong study concluding that rising velocity, pitch shaping and max-effort throwing are the likely culprits behind the explosion in major arm injuries. The numbers are staggering: by 2024, nearly 4 in 10 MLB pitchers had a Tommy John surgery on their résumé - up from about 27% in 2016, and climbing every single year. The chase for “stuff” comes with a literal injury tax - every 100 rpm of added spin on a four-seamer raises injury risk ~20%, and every extra tick on a sinker raises it ~30%.

Let’s go back to that scout scene. The guy throwing 88 isn’t getting noticed, and young athletes know it - so they're chasing velocity as the easiest way to stand out.

But that comes with its downsides. More than half of all Tommy John surgeries are now performed on kids ages 15 to 19, a group where the surgery rate is climbing roughly 9% a year. And it’s no mystery why. The reward for a 16-year-old who throws hard has never been bigger: scholarships, NIL opportunities, social followings - so the incentive to chase velocity has never been more dangerous. Prospects throwing over 95 at the Perfect Game National Showcase went from three in 2018 to 36 in 2024.

This is where it goes from a medical story to a No Huddle story - because there’s real money on both ends of that radar gun. Look no further than Corbin Burnes, who blew out his elbow and needed Tommy John in 2025 - in year one of a six-year, $210 million contract. When the best arm on the staff is also the most expensive non-performing asset on the books, durability stops being a medical footnote and becomes a balance-sheet problem.

And the same math is pushing all the way down to the kids. Youth sports is now a $40 billion-plus economy. Families are spending an average of $1,016 on their kid’s primary sport (up 46% in five years) and travel-baseball families can run $5,000 to $10,000 a year chasing exposure. And what are they chasing it for? A scholarship that, for most, never comes. Only about 7% of high school athletes play a varsity sport in college, under 2% reach Division I, and the average athletic scholarship is less than $11,000 against a sticker price that can top $50,000 a year.

So now you have a generation of kids being asked to throw harder, jump higher and lift more - earlier and more often - because that’s what gets you noticed, recruited and (maybe) paid. The measurables are the currency. And every one of those measurables is borrowed against a body that’s still growing. And this is just for baseball!

We’ve turned athleticism into a number on a screen, and we’ve gotten very good at producing those numbers - but we’ve built very few ways to protect the bodies producing them. The entire industry is pointed at more output, with not enough focus on prevention, durability and recovery. The recovery world (which I wrote about a few volumes back) is mostly about bouncing back after the damage. The bigger, emptier lane is keeping athletes from breaking down in the first place.

This week we dig into SCAP Athletics, a company doing it for the overhead, rotational athletes whose shoulders are quietly paying for every rep. They started with a single muscle nobody else could reach, and the players found them.

More below. 👇

📺 THE WATCH LIST

A mini investment memo on the stars of tomorrow.

The Company: SCAP Athletics

The Business in a tweet: SCAP Athletics is the shoulder recovery platform for overhead athletes. Think Therabody, but built specifically for overhead athletes fighting shoulder tightness, mobility restrictions, and throwing-related fatigue.

The 101:

If you’re interested in learning more, seeing the SCAP investor deck or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].

📶 THE SIGNAL — NO HUDDLE'S TAKE

There’s nothing I love more than a founder who runs into a problem, takes the initiative to solve it, and then builds a business off it. That’s exactly what Nick did with SCAP Athletics, and it really feels like just the beginning of the company’s journey.

The early traction is beyond impressive: dozens of MLB organizations, 60+ D1 programs, demand strong enough to sell out four straight production runs and margins north of 70%. When the best players are willing to pay for a premium tool, that’s a product-market fit like no other.

Where SCAP goes from here is the fascinating part - and like most early-stage businesses, it all starts with the moat. Most recovery tools are limited by anatomy: think massage guns, foam rollers and bands. But those all stop where the body stops letting them in. SCAP is the first platform designed to give athletes direct access to the deep shoulder muscles those tools simply can’t reach.

Next up for SCAP is Revlo and building a path from a one-time $80 purchase into a recurring, multi-product platform (including the first-party data that will come from sitting inside what will soon be hundreds of programs’ training rooms, dugouts and bullpens).

But in my opinion, the bigger near-term unlock is go-to-market. SCAP has won at the college level almost by accident - merely through referrals and locker room banter. Now think about everything below and around that: club teams across every age group, showcase rosters that should own several ScapSticks, training facilities, every bullpen at Perfect Game and the major tournaments, and even a partnership with some of the advanced labs like Driveline and Cressey.

It’ll take some capital to scale the production runs and a few more champions, as well as backing from a strategic name (if that’s a route they want), but all of those could put rocket fuel behind what’s already working.

And yes - in theory a tool like this is replicable (though I’m not talking about the PT who tapes a tennis ball to the end of a PVC pipe.) But once you’re entrenched, you’re entrenched, and I think people underestimate the size of this market - for baseball and for every other overhead, rotational sport (as well as the other niche use cases listed below)… I could have used a ScapStick on my shoulder back when I was playing QB… maybe found a little extra zip on those 15-to-12 comeback routes and had more than 352 passing yards in my illustrious D3 career! The same logic extends to tennis, golf and lacrosse, where the shoulder can take a similar kind of repetitive overhead load.

Pair that with the mindshare and team SCAP has already built, and you have a company positioned to target specific pain points one by one and build out new lines of business. Just a few theoretical directions I could see them heading:

Most of all, we love supporting a young founding team that’s already in it - building this while juggling a high-intensity course load and a college season all at the same time. The fact that SCAP has reached this kind of traction part-time is the most bullish data point of all. Just wait until Nick and the team graduate and can chase this thing full-time…

If you’re interested in learning more, seeing the SCAP investor deck or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Revisit our earlier breakdown of Kühler and the New Frontier of In-Competition Recovery. Together, the two pieces show how recovery is expanding from a sideline toolset into a broader performance and durability category.

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