Kearney-Based Summer Athletes Joins Portfolio

Marcus Benesch - CEO, Co-Founder

Millions of youth attend summer camps annually. Each camp comes with its own - typically painful - form of registration and lackluster means of communication. Camp organizers are left stitching together excel spreadsheets, payment forms, and texts with campers or parents. It can be disorganized at its finest. 

Kearney’s Marcus Benesch and Guy Richard set out to solve this with Summer Athletes. 

Summer Athletes simplifies the camp enrollment process for the parent. Instead of completing a paper form with camp attendee information (address, camper information, shirt size) and mailing in a check, Summer Athletes offers a simple, web-based interface to submit camper details and payment. No forms, no checks. Coaches love the simplicity, instant payment., and ability to send messages to all campers at once. Parents love the ease of use.

“For years, coaches have added even more administrative work onto their passion for youth sports simply because there wasn’t a better solution,” shared Marcus. “Now, coaches can enjoy camps and eliminate the headaches associated with registration, payment and communication.”

The application launched in the summer of 2022. His beta with coaches from across the country proved its value. Now, Marcus is already looking ahead to next summer and currently has nearly three dozen committed coaches on the platform that are eager to use Summer Athletes for more than 100 camps.

Summer Athletes partnered with Proven Ventures to support its scalable, sustainable growth. 

“Marcus and Guy are iconic of the talent our state wants to retain and Summer Athletes is yet another example of Nebraska’s unique ability to create compelling sports tech companies,” shared Proven Ventures General Partner Nathan Preheim.

To learn more about Summer Athletes, please visit www.summerathletes.com.