The Marathon and the Market
There is a difference between solving an inefficiency and creating an industry.
In 2011, when I helped assemble one of the most talent-dense offseason football rosters in Pennsylvania, I believed I was correcting a market imbalance. I was working at Gateway High School under Terry Smith, assisting with recruiting and cutting highlight film. Gateway possessed something scarce: institutional visibility. College coaches circulated through the building with regularity. Evaluation capital flowed through our hallways.
But film does something subtle to the observer. When you cut enough tape, you begin to see patterns beyond your own roster. Talent is rarely centralized. It is distributed. A receiver on an opposing sideline who separates without fanfare. A safety who processes in silence. A quarterback whose mechanics are sound but whose platform is not.
Ability, I realized, was not the scarce resource.
Exposure was.
When the Badger Sports 7-on-7 tournament — hosted by Baron Flenory — came to Gateway, the solution appeared almost mechanical: aggregate elite regional talent, centralize it, and let the recruiting market evaluate efficiently. No politics. No brand. No circuit. Just signal concentration.
The invitation list that followed would, a decade later, serve as its own validation metric. From that single offseason aggregation emerged:
Five NFL players from what was, at the time, simply a regional exposure experiment.
At that stage, 7-on-7 was infrastructure — not industry.
That distinction is critical.
Infrastructure Solves Problems. Industry Monetizes Them.
Early 7-on-7 solved a coordination problem in recruiting. College staffs needed comparative evaluation environments in compressed windows. Summer aggregation allowed them to see dozens of skill players simultaneously, stripped of scheme complexity. It was efficient.
Efficiency attracts capital.
Capital reorganizes incentives.
Over time, 7-on-7 migrated from tool to platform, from platform to brand, from brand to circuit economy. Teams became intellectual property. Logos became reputational currency. Players became both participants and content.
The center of gravity shifted quietly but decisively: from development to visibility.
And visibility scales faster than development.
The Incentive Drift
Economies reward what they measure. 7-on-7 measures separation, ball placement, reaction time, tempo. It privileges skill isolation and aesthetic explosiveness. It does not measure pad level in the fourth quarter. It does not measure a linebacker’s gap discipline after 60 snaps. It does not measure the willingness to take on contact in November weather.
Yet the offseason circuit increasingly influences recruiting narratives — and in the NIL era, narrative is pre-capital. We now inhabit a system in which valuation begins before physical maturity is complete. Sophomores accrue brand equity. Freshmen are evaluated like speculative assets. Middle schoolers are advised about exposure pathways.
Speculation, once introduced into youth ecosystems, accelerates timelines.
Acceleration distorts patience.
Patience, however, is what football ultimately rewards.
The Illusion of Early Optimization
The error many families now make is optimizing for exposure at sixteen rather than sustainability at twenty-six.
The data point that endures is not who dominated a July bracket. It is who survived ten years in a violent labor market. The arc of a football career is unforgiving. It filters through injury, depth charts, coaching turnover, contract volatility, and physical attrition. It demands technical refinement layered slowly over years, not viral flashes accumulated in months.
The athletes from that 2011 roster who reached the NFL did not get there because they mastered offseason branding. They endured because they built skill, resilience, and professional discipline over time. The marathon selected for durability, not for momentary shine.
7-on-7 did not create their talent.
It briefly concentrated it.
That difference matters.
Exposure Equity Becomes Exposure Stratification
What began as a corrective to uneven visibility gradually mirrored broader economic hierarchies. Travel costs expanded. Affiliation signaled legitimacy. Circuit alignment became reputational shorthand. The barrier to entry increasingly depended not merely on ability but on access to the access.
This is not a moral indictment.
It is structural evolution.
Markets scale what is monetizable. Offseason aggregation became monetizable. The ecosystem matured accordingly.
But maturity does not equal alignment.
When exposure becomes product, development risks becoming secondary. When circuits require constant participation, rest becomes liability. When brand growth depends on visibility, invisibility — the quiet months of physical strengthening and technical refinement — becomes undervalued.
And invisibility is where real development often occurs.
Youth Football as Pre-Professional Labor Market
The modern youth football ecosystem resembles a pre-professional labor exchange. Recruiting services function as informal rating agencies. Social media operates as marketing infrastructure. NIL formalizes the speculative dimension that 7-on-7 accelerated.
Children are no longer simply training.
They are being positioned.
Positioning introduces pressure. Pressure reshapes identity. Identity, when tethered prematurely to valuation, narrows developmental freedom.
Football, at its healthiest, is apprenticeship — a slow acquisition of craft under physical and psychological stress. When apprenticeship is replaced by early-stage capitalization, something subtle is lost: the space to mature before being priced.
Why I Stepped Away
I did not leave 7-on-7 because it lacks utility. It does what it is engineered to do.
I stepped away because the inefficiency I initially sought to correct had been absorbed into a self-sustaining market. Bridge-building was no longer necessary. Operation within the system required acceptance of its incentive design.
And once you understand incentive design, neutrality becomes fiction.
The ecosystem had industrialized. My participation would have been less about correcting imbalance and more about reinforcing structure.
Understanding the system made withdrawal the most coherent choice.
The Marathon
Ten years later, the lesson is stark.
Football is not a sprint through a summer circuit.
It is a marathon through a physically violent, psychologically demanding profession. It rewards longevity over flash, craft over optics, resilience over recognition.
The young athletes who endure are rarely those most consumed by early exposure. They are those built — methodically, often invisibly — for distance.
The offseason economy will continue to grow. Capital will continue to seek youth attention. Branding will continue to begin earlier.
But the body still develops at its own pace.
The game in pads still decides value.
And the marathon still exposes what the sprint conceals.
If there is a corrective available now, it is not abolition of 7-on-7. It is reordering priorities. Exposure should serve development, not replace it. Visibility should amplify craft, not substitute for it. Parents and coaches should measure ten-year trajectories, not ten-day tournaments.
Because the market may reward acceleration.
But the game still rewards endurance.
And endurance cannot be industrialized.