Key Takeaways
- LOVB and Youth Inc. begin a content partnership May 4th producing three original series weekly through the end of 2026.
- The flagship is The Courtney Thompson Show, hosted by the two-time Olympic medalist who runs LOVB’s Pro Integration and Youth Coach Development.
- July’s episode features Jordan Larson, the only U.S. indoor volleyball player with four Olympic medals, in her announced farewell season.
- Youth Inc. drew 8.5 million unique visitors and over 40 million views in Q4 2025, the largest distribution asset in the deal.
- The cadence amounts to roughly 100 long-form pieces plus daily clip distribution, an unusual commitment for a single youth sport.
A Three-Series Slate Built for Year-Round Publishing
League One Volleyball and Youth Inc. are launching a content partnership on May 4 that runs through the end of 2026 at a cadence of three new pieces per week. The output is structured around three series that hit different parts of the volleyball audience.
The Courtney Thompson Show is the anchor. Episodes release monthly on YouTube in long form, with weekly clip distribution across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and YouTube Shorts. Thompson sits down with LOVB pros for in-depth interviews, the kind of athlete-to-athlete conversation that has been largely absent from girls’ volleyball media.
LOVB Courtside captures short-form moments from LOVB events and tournaments, giving the partnership a steady supply of in-arena content built for social. LOVB Confessional pulls the lens back to the grassroots, featuring personal stories from LOVB club players and coaches. Together the three series produce a programming calendar that will publish year-round, with everything aggregated at youth.inc/lovb and distributed across both companies’ channels.
The Tuesday before launch, Thompson and LOVB pro Lexi Rodriguez join Greg Olsen on the Youth Inc. podcast to frame the partnership and the state of girls’ volleyball.
“Girls’ volleyball is having a moment, and LOVB is the brand driving it forward. Partnering with them to tell these stories, starting with Courtney Thompson and guests like Jordan Larson, Eva Hudson, and Emily Thater, is a dream lineup. Youth Inc. exists to celebrate the people and stories shaping youth sports, and there’s no better community to lean into right now than this one.” Tim Murphy – Co-Founder | President at Youth Inc.
Why Courtney Thompson Anchors the Deal
The Thompson show works because the host has the resume and the role. Thompson won silver at the 2012 London Olympics and bronze at Rio 2016, captured gold at the 2014 FIVB World Championship, and won an NCAA title at Washington, where she became the first female athlete to have her jersey retired. After her playing career she spent seven years as a mindset coach with Finding Mastery, the firm founded by Dr. Michael Gervais.
Image: Stanford Health
Her current role at LOVB matters as much as her playing record. As Head of Pro Integration and Co-Director of Youth Coach Development, Thompson sits at the intersection of LOVB’s pro league and its club system. That gives the show a built-in editorial perspective that pure-host arrangements lack.
The first three guests reflect the depth of the U.S. volleyball pipeline. Emily Thater of LOVB Nebraska opens the series in May. She finished top five in blocks at Missouri, played seven professional seasons in Germany and France including a French League title, and led Team USA to gold at the 2025 NORCECA Final Six. Eva Hudson of LOVB Atlanta follows in June. She was a three-time AVCA All-American and the 2025 SEC Player of the Year at Kentucky, where she took the Wildcats to the 2025 NCAA championship match before turning pro. Jordan Larson of LOVB Nebraska closes the opening run in July.
Larson is the centerpiece. She is the only American indoor volleyball player with four Olympic medals, captained the gold-medal Tokyo 2020 squad where she earned MVP and Best Outside Hitter honors, and announced her retirement in January. The 2026 season is her farewell, which makes a long-form Thompson interview during this specific window a piece of content with permanent shelf life.
Distribution Scale and Talent Density
The partnership pairs two specific assets that have historically been hard to combine in youth sports media.
Youth Inc., founded by three-time Pro Bowl tight end Greg Olsen and Tim Murphy, is the first digital media network built exclusively for youth sports. The company reports serving more than 30 million young athletes, families, and coaches. In Q4 2025 it logged 8.5 million unique visitors, more than 40 million views, and 258,000 subscribers. That is the distribution side of the deal.
LOVB brings the talent. The professional league features more than 20 former Olympic players and just concluded its second season of play. The club footprint is the largest in girls’ volleyball in the country. Most youth sports content partnerships pair distribution with either talent or events, rarely both at the level this deal does.
The cadence of three pieces per week is the operational signal worth watching. That schedule produces roughly 100 published pieces over the run of the partnership before counting daily clip distribution. Sustaining that volume requires standing access to athletes, a production system that can move quickly between events, and editorial alignment between the two companies on what gets covered and how.
The Gap This Partnership Is Filling
Girls’ volleyball is one of the fastest-growing youth sports in the United States. Participation has climbed steadily, club fees have followed, and the talent pipeline now produces NCAA finalists who turn pro domestically rather than going overseas. Eva Hudson is a clean example. A year ago she was leading Kentucky to the title match. Now she is a featured pro in LOVB Atlanta, available to a domestic audience that did not exist for previous generations of American players.
The content infrastructure has not caught up to the participation curve. Volleyball families have invested time and money at a rate that should support a year-round media product, but the supply has been thin. Highlights, post-match clips, and event recaps have done the work that long-form storytelling, athlete access, and educational content do in older sports.
That is the gap the partnership is built to close, and it is being closed by the two parties best positioned to do it: the league with the talent and the platform with the audience.
What This Means for the Youth Sports Industry
Multi-year content partnerships at this cadence are uncommon in youth sports. The default deal structure is seasonal, event-driven, or campaign-based. Brands sponsor a tournament. A league cuts a one-off documentary. A media platform runs a sport-specific series for a quarter and then pivots.
The LOVB and Youth Inc. arrangement is a different shape. It commits real publishing volume to a single sport for a calendar year, and it does so in a vertical where the participation and talent fundamentals support that bet. If the engagement data validates the thesis, the model becomes replicable. Other sports with strong domestic talent pipelines, lacrosse, hockey, and baseball among them, have the raw ingredients to support the same structure.
The other implication is on the talent side. Athletes like Larson, Hudson, Thater, and Rodriguez gain a domestic platform with reach they previously had to source from individual social channels or international broadcasts. That changes what a professional career in American volleyball looks like as a brand-building opportunity, which in turn affects how the next generation of college players evaluates LOVB versus going overseas.
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What is YSBR? Youth Sports Business Report (YSBR) is the largest and most trusted source for youth sports industry news, insights, and analysis in the United States. Founded by Cameron Korab, YSBR is the premier B2B publication dedicated to the $54 billion youth sports market. With over 50,000 followers and millions of monthly views and impressions, YSBR publishes daily across its blog, weekly newsletter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, and Substack.
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