Under The Number

Skybox

Sports are serious business. On Under the Number, Brent Peus goes deep with the innovators driving the Sports Economy—from elite athletes and investors to visionary founders and executives. Get inside the deals, trends, and disruptions reshaping the industry. Whether you’re a fan, entrepreneur, investor, or industry insider, Under the Number offers cutting-edge insights into the world of sports business.

  1. Aug 4

    The Man Behind The Most Jaw-Dropping Locker Rooms in Sports | Hollman Inc. CEO Travis Hollman

    Travis Hollman runs Hollman Inc., the largest locker manufacturer in the world. His lockers are in Alabama, Notre Dame, USC, UCLA, Oregon, the Lakers, the Raiders, and the Mavericks. If you have walked into an elite locker room in the last decade, you have probably stood inside his product.Brent Peus went on site in Irving, Texas to talk with him about what he sees from inside the arms race.Travis started at the family company in 1995, grew it from roughly $5 million to $28 million, got pushed out by his father in 2001, came back in 2011 to a business under $7 million, and finally bought it outright in 2016. Along the way he co-founded the Marshmallow Fun Company, launched the first relaxation drink in the US, and co-executive produced MTV's Bully Beatdown.They get into the economics nobody publishes. A pro football locker room runs $600,000 to $800,000. A good college locker room runs about $1.5 million. Everyone assumed NIL would collapse that spending. It went the other way.The conversation also covers the internal tracker Hollman built to follow coaches and athletic directors between jobs, why Phil Knight is the number one donor at Oregon and the number two donor at Oregon State, why Travis thinks the next conference realignment lands in three or four years, and what he would fix about college sports if he could fix one thing.CHAPTERS 00:00 On site in Irving with Travis Hollman 00:30 Buying the company back from his father 07:00 Raised by wolves and the old school sales mentality 09:00 The Planet Fitness cold call, the Chuck E. Cheese meeting, and the marshmallow guns 13:00 How you differentiate a locker 14:30 R&D, and why a locker is the only private space an athlete gets 16:30 Global sourcing and 200 POs for one Alabama build 18:30 College vs pro: the real budget numbers 21:00 Relegation risk, TV contracts, and the next realignment 23:30 What NIL actually did to facility spending 25:30 Following coaches, not schools 28:30 The degree problem Travis wants fixed 31:00 Sixty-seven new recruits and the culture question 33:30 High school kids with agents 35:30 Alabama, Oregon, Texas Tech, and the billionaire requirementUnder The Number is a Skybox Production. www.skyboxmedia.com

    The Man Behind The Most Jaw-Dropping Locker Rooms in Sports | Hollman Inc. CEO Travis Hollman
  2. Jul 27

    Inside the Fight: The Protect College Sports Act with Dary Stone

    https://www.skyboxmedia.com/ Dary Stone on the Protect College Sports Act — The Fight to Save College Athletics Dary Stone has done a little of everything — he's been a lawyer, real estate developer, political operative, chairman of the Texas banking commission, and chairman of the board at Baylor University. Today he's one of the central figures behind the Protect College Sports Act, the bill racing through Congress to put guardrails on a college sports landscape that's become, in his words, professional sports without a commissioner. In this episode of Under the Number, Brent sits down with Dary for an up-to-the-minute look at the most consequential legislation in the history of college athletics — and why its backers believe this is a one-shot window before the August Senate recess. We get into: How the NCAA's NIL loss morphed into an unregulated, uncapped pay-for-play system with no parity and no one in charge What the bill actually does — transfer rules, eligibility, direct-pay limits, antitrust protection for the NCAA, and the ability to pool media rights Why pooling media rights (à la the NFL and the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act) could roughly double revenue for universities and protect women's and Olympic sports The SEC / Big Ten vs. everyone-else dynamic, and why competitive advantage is pulling against the health of the whole system How Dary and Cody Campbell merged their efforts into the Saving College Sports Board of donors, board chairs, and university presidents The bipartisan tightrope — unions, the employment question, plaintiffs' attorneys, and why antitrust protection needs 60 votes Private equity, bridge financing, and real estate plays like Tennessee's Neyland development — and Dary's warning to schools about "selling their souls" The midnight-phone-call work of Senators Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz And to close: Dary's "art of the deal" — why the best deal is picking the right cause A rare, insider view of a live legislative fight from one of its key pieces of connective tissue. Under the Number is a Skybox production. Recorded on July 26 and July 27, 2026.

    Inside the Fight: The Protect College Sports Act with Dary Stone
  3. Jul 14

    The Youth Sports Economy · BASE Sports Group Co-Founders Mark Dvoroznak & Carrie Gamper

    Youth sports is a $40B+ market on its way to $70B, and for years it was too fragmented for national brands to touch. Mark Dvoroznak and Carrie Gamper built BASE Sports Group to fix that: one point of contact connecting brands to a network reaching 30 million consumers across 26 sports in 47 states. Fresh off a $2.5M raise led by Balius Partners, the BASE co-founders join Under the Number to explain why the youth sports family is the most coveted and hardest-to-reach demographic in the country, and how you commercialize it without wrecking the athlete experience. We get into the case for youth sports as an institutional asset class, why the average 5.5 hours of dwell time at an event is the most underpriced inventory in sports, and how BASE turned that into activations like Invisalign's on-site teeth-scan lead-gen play. Mark and Carrie break down which three categories of brands should be in this space yesterday, why the LA28 Olympic cycle is a grassroots land grab starting now, and what Capitol Hill keeps getting wrong about who actually runs youth sports. A conversation about fragmentation, data, and the quiet institutionalization of the games our kids play. In this episode: Why BASE raised, and what "building a strong base" actually bought themThe operator vs. brand education problem, and BASE's two-sided modelHousehold income by sport (lacrosse and volleyball lead at $200K+, roughly 2x the national average)The Invisalign activation: dwell time as a lead-gen engineDoing well by doing good: commercial dollars as a subsidy that lowers the barrier to entryNIL vs. the "allure of the scholarship" as the real driver of the travel-sports machineThe three brand categories that belong here now: CPG, finance, and auto/insuranceLA28: budget in '26, activate in '27, scale in '28Roll-ups, consolidators, and setting the price of the youth sports space Guests:Mark Dvoroznak, Co-Founder & CEO of BASE Sports Group Carrie Gamper, Co-Founder & COO of BASE Sports Group BASE Sports Group: https://basesportsgroup.com/ Substack: https://underthenumber.substack.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4mj9Z1n... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Check out Skybox: https://www.skyboxmedia.com #SportsBusiness #YouthSports #Sponsorships #youth #SportsEconomy #UnderTheNumber

    The Youth Sports Economy · BASE Sports Group Co-Founders Mark Dvoroznak & Carrie Gamper

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Sports are serious business. On Under the Number, Brent Peus goes deep with the innovators driving the Sports Economy—from elite athletes and investors to visionary founders and executives. Get inside the deals, trends, and disruptions reshaping the industry. Whether you’re a fan, entrepreneur, investor, or industry insider, Under the Number offers cutting-edge insights into the world of sports business.