With increased safety concerns still impacting participation in tackle football, flag football continues to make strides in terms of popularity and participation in the U.S., especially with females.

Football is back. It is back with youngsters in local youth leagues on Saturdays. It is back at varsity high school games on Friday nights. It’s back with colleges on weekends. And its back with the pros on seemingly every day of the week.But football is most certainly not completely back to normal.

Soccer is somewhat like the Eveready battery — it takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. Or in this case, keeps on kickin’. That is perhaps the best way to describe how the sport has navigated the COVID-19 pandemic.

A slow boat to China used to conjure images of the longest trip imaginable, but these days the idiom can be reversed, referring to extensive delays of container ships that are traveling from Asia to U.S. ports, arriving only to sit at anchor sometimes for weeks waiting to be unloaded.

Supply chain issues and new technology are on the minds of goals/nets suppliers in 2022.

A technology called Avail, a cloud-based ERP system developed by team dealers for team dealers, is being introduced with the simple goal to, in the words of Avail VP-sales Brian Hensen, “connect the entire team sports industry.”

The 1on1 Project becomes a 1on3 Project this issue as Team Insight sits down with the three founders of the Alli Sports Group, a group of team dealers in the southeast formed this year to compete in a changing team sports business.

The usual methods of doing business have been upended since the start of the pandemic in early 2020 and the old ways of doing things are long gone. The “way-we-always-did-it” strategy no longer works, even in traditional bastions such as the team market.

While nearly every sporting goods team dealer and local retailer understandably dedicates the majority of their time to the Big Four – football, basketball, baseball and softball – that generate the most revenue, they are well aware that the so-called “specialty sports” deserve a fair amount of...

For decades team dealers have focused on developing and maintaining personal relationships with their customers, perhaps more so than in any other segment within the sporting goods industry.

As its impact wanes and then reappears, COVID-19 continues to dominate conversations in the world of team sports. As schools reopen this summer and fall and a semblance of normalcy returns to the playing fields of America, people are realizing just how important sports are to children and...