By Ben Cohen
On any given day, the most downloaded apps in the world are ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
But one day not long ago, the AI tools of our time were suddenly joined at the top of the app charts by another product that Americans can't live without.
It wasn't the product of colossal sums of money. It doesn't offer access to the most powerful machines on earth. And it didn't come from a secretive lab building a form of artificial intelligence meant to be smarter than the human mind.
It came from Dick's Sporting Goods.
When they noticed their app rocketing up the charts, even top executives at Dick's were stunned.
"We were watching in real time," said Emily Silver, Dick's chief marketing officer. "Like, what's happening?"
They soon found out exactly what happened -- and I'll get to it later in this column.
But long before any of this, something more essential to their business had already transformed the company: Dick's has become the biggest winner in youth sports.
There has never been a better time to sell parents all the stuff their kids need to play sports. Families are now shelling out more than $40 billion every year on children's sports activities, according to Aspen Institute research. As much as they may rant about the intensity, time commitments and increasingly absurd economy of youth sports, there is no way to escape it -- or avoid their nearest Dick's Sporting Goods.
As it turns out, youth sports have been very good to Dick's. Over the past decade, the company's revenue has roughly doubled. Last year, it generated a record $14.1 billion in sales. Instead of shopping online or schlepping kids to multiple stores, parents just stop by Dick's for everything they need.
America's largest sporting-goods retailer has been around since the 1940s,, when a teenager opened a fishing supply shop in Binghamton, N.Y. with $300 in cash from his grandmother's cookie jar.
His name was Richard Stack. Everyone called him Dick.
There are now more than 700 stores across the country, but a photo of the first location is still hanging in each one, and employees who have worked at the company for 20 years receive a $300 bonus tucked inside their own cookie jars.
Dick's Bait and Tackle eventually became Dick's Sporting Goods, and the brand's namesake sold the company to his children. His son Ed became CEO in 1984, moved the company to Pittsburgh in 1994 and took it public in 2002.
When Ed was growing up, his father convinced local car dealers, restaurant owners and plumbers to sponsor more Little League teams with the goal of boosting participation. To make sure nobody would ever accuse him of backing youth sports for the sake of his own business, the money came with one condition.
"The teams created through his efforts couldn't buy their uniforms or gear from Dick's," Ed later wrote.
At this point, it is almost impossible to play baseball without buying from Dick's.
"It is basically the only game in town," said Neil O'Connor, the equipment coordinator of his 14- and 11-year-old sons' league in Baltimore.
Here's what it takes to survive another year of Little League these days. There are sleek composite bats that cost up to $450. There are training bats, wood bats, torpedo bats and backpacks to carry them. Plus, gloves, helmets, elbow guards, leg protectors, arm sleeves, sliding mitts, cleats, turf shoes, the coolest sunglasses, Bruce Bolt batting gloves, fluorescent batting grips, socks, pants, belts and garments known simply as "ice-cream shorts."
Also, headbands. Do kids really need a headband if they are always wearing a hat or helmet? Don't be ridiculous. Of course they do.
Ed Stack told me that he can relate. When he was a child obsessed with baseball and listening to Yankees games in bed on a transistor radio, he could only dream about walking into a store and staring at a wall of gloves in every color of the rainbow.
He now keeps a catcher's mitt on his desk -- in Dick's green.
Until recently, that would have been unthinkable. But his favorite sport hasn't looked the same since a minor tweak in Major League Baseball's rulebook before the 2019 season loosened the color restrictions on player cleats. The effects of that deregulation have now trickled all the way down to Little Leaguers, who race to get their hands on the latest, hottest equipment. When a sick bat comes out, it sells out almost instantly. There is so much demand for these hunks of carbon fiber that bats have entered the stratosphere of products known in the retail industry as "high heat."
And all that heat isn't cheap. Teenagers on travel teams are rolling into weekend tournaments wearing a few thousand dollars of apparel, equipment and swag. The average family's annual spending on baseball increased nearly 70% between 2019 and 2024, according to the Aspen Institute's Project Play initiative -- and it was already the most expensive of America's most played sports.
It was also the most lucrative one for Dick's.
But when parents open their wallets at Dick's, they find a reason to keep coming back. As soon as their annual spending cracks $500, they earn access to the premium tier of the company's loyalty program and exclusive benefits like deals and early product releases. There are now more than 8 million shoppers with this elite Dick's status and they account for 50% of the company's total sales.
Along the way, they provide Dick's with valuable data on its consumers -- "athletes," as they are called.
With all that data, the company has a pretty good idea of what you want and when you want it.
If you bought a bat last year and live in a place where the baseball season starts in April, Dick's can personalize a message reminding you to buy a new one in March. If you live in a state that doesn't have to worry about snow on the infield, that nudge arrives a few months earlier.
This wasn't always obvious to Dick's. When the company expanded to the South in the 1990s, executives realized they were pulling gear too early in the fall and restocking it too late in the spring. As one store manager in North Carolina informed his bosses in the Northeast: "Guys, we can sell baseball stuff in January."
These days, Dick's can sell lots of stuff for youth sports that would have once sounded crazy.
The most unusual product in the company's portfolio is GameChanger, a subscription app for stat-keeping and livestreaming that Dick's acquired in 2016. it has become a staple of youth sports and disastrous for the sanity of Little League parents. It is now printing almost $150 million of annual revenue, with the average user staying on the platform for 45 minutes.
Dick's pays even more attention to the amount of time people spend in its actual stores. In fact, it cares so much about this "dwell time" metric that the company is now betting on an entirely different kind of store.
This one doesn't just have cleats. It has batting cages, climbing walls, golf simulators and fields to run around in those cleats before walking out with them. The megastore sprawls across 150,000 square feet -- triple the size of a typical store. It is the kind of place where you can lose an hour just looking at shin guards. The first Dick's House of Sport opened five years ago. Now there are 35. Within the next two years, Dick's plans to operate as many as 100 Houses of Sport.
"It really is a destination," Stack said. "We give the consumer something they can't get any place else."
As it happens, that impulse helps explain why Dick's recently found itself in the company of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
After their app shot up the charts, Dick's executives traced the surge in downloads to a viral post on X about a feature that has been part of the app for the past decade: getting paid to exercise.
If you connect a fitness tracker to the app and hit certain milestones -- 10,000 steps in a day, or a 30-minute workout -- you automatically get three Dick's loyalty points. And when you reach 300 points, you get a $10 credit.
Free money!
Something you can't get anywhere but Dick's. Not even from Claude.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 13, 2026 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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