Fastbreak AI has integrated its professional-grade, AI-powered sports scheduling engine into its youth sports platform, Fastbreak Compete.

Compete already included access to youth sports-specific services touching sponsorship, operations and ticketing management. But the integration of the AI engine puts Fastbreak’s AI-powered schedule-making tool — which is used by more than 50 pro leagues, including the NBA, NHL, NWSL and MLS — into the hands of amateur sporting event operators.

“The engine is the engine, but you have to set up the user interface,” John Stewart, Fastbreak’s CEO, told SBJ of the implementation process. “How do you simplify the experience, so an operator of youth events is going to set up what has typically been a complex problem?”

The result is a software-as-a-service platform, similar to its Fastbreak Pro platform for professional teams, through which youth sports tournament operators can quickly generate and manually edit event schedules that incorporate preset formats, rules, preferences and venue constraints, among other factors. Stewart said the AI scheduling engine is currently being used by 12 youth sports organizations, with commitment from over 40 more for 2026.

That list includes Ryan Silver, whose company Attitude of Gratitude will operate 140 tournaments and 18 camps this year, serving between 300,000-400,000 customers, and 200 tournaments and 40 camps in 2026. Attitude of Gratitude has been using Fastbreak’s AI scheduling engine since the start of the year.

Silver touted Fastbreak’s services for bringing professionalism to youth sports.

“The tools that John and his teams have developed are completely changing the industry,” Silver said. “When you’re scheduling a 150-200 team tournament, these data points [preferences] save you hours and hours and hours of scheduling.”

Fastbreak was one of the finalists for Sports Business Awards: Tech — Best in AI this year.

Khan Younis, Gaza – In the ruins of his home in Khan Younis, 75-year-old Shaker Safi gently thumbs through fading photographs of his son Mohammed’s sporting career.

Medals, trophies, team huddles, and group photos of young athletes coached by Mohammed now serve as a haunting memorial to a dream destroyed by war.

On November 15, 2023, Mohammed Safi – a football coach and physical education teacher – was killed in an Israeli air strike.

He had spent years building a legacy of hope through sport, training at schools and community clubs, and transforming underdog teams into local champions.

A graduate in physical education from Al-Aqsa University, Mohammed was the head coach of Al-Amal Football Club in southern Gaza and was widely admired for his work nurturing young talent aged between six and 16.

“My son dreamt of representing Palestine internationally,” Shaker says, surrounded by remnants of his son’s accolades. “He believed sport could lift youth from despair. But war reached him before he could reach the world.”

Now displaced, Mohammed’s wife Nermeen and their four children – 16-year-old Shaker Jr, Amir, 14, Alma, 11, and Taif, 7 – live with the painful void created by his death.

The children cling to their father’s last football and coaching notes as keepsakes.

Nermeen, an art teacher, gently wipes away Taif’s tears when she asks, “Why did they take Daddy from us?”

“He was a man of dreams, not politics,” Nermeen says. “He wanted to become an international referee. He wanted his master’s degree. Instead, he was killed for being a symbol of life and youth.”

Mohammed Safi is one of hundreds of athletes and sports professionals who have been killed or displaced since the war began.

According to the Palestinian Olympic Committee, 582 athletes have been killed since October 7, 2023, many of them national team players, coaches, and administrators.

Sports replaced by survival

For those who remain alive in Gaza, survival has replaced sporting ambition.

Yousef Abu Shawarib is a 20-year-old goalkeeper for Rafah’s premier league football club.

In May 2024, he and his family fled their home and took shelter at Khan Younis Stadium – the same field where he once played official matches.

Today, the stadium is a shelter for displaced families, its synthetic turf now lined with tents instead of players.

“This is where my coach used to brief me before games,” Yousef says, standing near what used to be the bench area, now a water distribution point. “Now I wait here for water, not for kickoff.”

His routine today involves light, irregular training inside his tent, hoping to preserve a fraction of his fitness. But his dreams of studying sports sciences in Germany and playing professionally are gone.

“Now, I only hope we have something to eat tomorrow,” he tells Al Jazeera. “The war didn’t just destroy fields – it destroyed our futures.”

When he looks at the charred stadium, he doesn’t see a temporary displacement.

“This was not collateral damage. It was systematic. It’s like they want to erase everything about us – even our games.”

Hope beneath the rubble

Still, like the patches of grass that survived the blasts, some hope remains.

Shadi Abu Armanah, head coach of Palestine’s amputee football team, had devised a six-month plan to resume training.

His 25 players and five coaching staff had been building momentum before the war on Gaza. The team had competed internationally, including in a 2019 tournament in France. Before hostilities began, they were preparing for another event in November 2023 and an event in West Asia set for October 2025.

“Now, we can’t even gather,” Shadi says. “Every facility we used has been destroyed. The players have lost their homes. Most have lost loved ones. There’s nowhere safe to train – no gear, no field, nothing.”

Supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the team had once symbolised resilience. Training sessions were more than drills – they were lifelines. “For amputees, sport was a second chance,” Shadi says. “Now they are just trying to survive.”

Shadi himself is displaced. His home, too, was bombed. “The clubs I worked for are gone. The players are either dead or scattered. If the war ends today, we’ll still need years to bring back even a fraction of what was lost.”

He adds, “I coached across many clubs and divisions. Almost all their facilities have been reduced to rubble. It’s not just a pause – it’s erasure.”

A systematic erasure

The scope of devastation extends beyond personal loss.

According to Asaad al-Majdalawi, vice president of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, Gaza’s entire sporting infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. At least 270 sports facilities have been damaged or destroyed: 189 completely flattened and 81 partially damaged, with initial estimates of material losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Every major component of Gaza’s sports system has been hit,” al-Majdalawi told Al Jazeera. “The Olympic Committee offices, sports federations, clubs, school and university sports programmes – even private sports facilities have been targeted. It’s a comprehensive assault.”

Among the fallen are high-profile athletes like Nagham Abu Samra, Palestine’s international karate champion; Majed Abu Maraheel, the first Palestinian to carry the Olympic flag at the 1996 Atlanta Games; Olympic football coach Hani al-Masdar; and national athletics coach Bilal Abu Sam’an. Hundreds of others remain injured or missing, complicating accurate assessments.

“This is not just loss – it’s extermination,” al-Majdalawi says. “Each athlete was a community pillar. They weren’t numbers. They were symbols of hope, unity, and perseverance. Losing them has deeply wounded the Palestinian society.”

He warns that beyond the immediate human toll, the interruption of sports activities for a year and a half will result in physical, psychological, and professional regression for remaining athletes. “You lose more than muscle and skill – you lose purpose.”

A global silence

Al-Majdalawi believes the international response has been alarmingly inadequate. When Gaza’s sports community reaches out to global federations, Olympic bodies, and ministers of youth and sport, they’re met with silence.

“In private, many international officials sympathise,” he says. “But at the decision-making level, Israel seems to operate above the law. There’s no accountability. It’s like sport doesn’t matter when it’s Palestinian. The global and international sports institutions appear complicit through their silence, ignoring all international laws, human rights, and the governing rules of the international sports system,” he says.

He believes that if the war ended today, it would still take five to 10 years to rebuild what has been lost. Even that gloomy timeline is based on the assumption that the blockade ends and international funding becomes available.

“We have been building this sports sector since 1994,” al-Majdalawi says. “It took us decades to accumulate knowledge, experience, and professionalism. Now, it’s all been levelled in months.”

As the war continues, the fate of Gaza’s sports sector hangs by a thread. Yet amid the ruins, fathers like Shaker Safi, athletes like Yousef, and coaches like Shadi hold on to one unyielding belief: that sport will once again be a source of hope, identity, and life for Palestinians.

This piece was published in collaboration with Egab.

South Dakota native and University of Alabama football coach Kalen DeBoer will return to his home state for Sanford Sports Night with Kalen DeBoer on Thursday, July 10, at the Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls. 

By Grant Egger – sports@enterprisepub.com

Available softball fields in both Arlington and Blair were occupied Friday through Sunday for USA Softball of Nebraska district tournaments.
Nearly 80 teams participated.
Arlington’s RVR Bank Sports Complex and Bell Creek Park fields hosted two brackets of competition as did the Blair Youth Softball Association (BYSA) Fields at the Blair Youth Sports Complex.
In Arlington, 29 teams competed altogether. Seven vied for the age 16 and 18 District 8 and 10 tournament title.
Twenty-two more, however, competed across a 22-team, double-elimination bracket for the age 10 District 8 and 10 title. Three of those squads hailed from Washington County.
The Blair Chaos (McManigal) team started 2-1 and was still in contention going into play Sunday. It first beat the Arlington Black 14-0 before an 11-5 victory against the Nebraska Storm (Eppenbach).
The Chaos lost, however, to Bennington (Larson) on Saturday night and was forced to battle back in the loser’s bracket. The Ashland Blue, however, ended their run Sunday morning, 12-2.
The aforementioned Arlington Black, meanwhile, were 2-2 at home. The 10U team beat the Nebraska Venom (Wacker) first, 8-7, before the loss to the Chaos.
Arlington then beat Logan View in loser’s bracket play, 14-9, before their own tourney-ending loss to the Ashland Blue.
A second 10U Blair team, the Chaos (Mlnarik), went 1-2 too. It beat Logan View 13-1 before back-to-back losses to top-seeded Kelly’s Fastpitch (Peters), 13-0, and the Venom, 7-1.
Blair fields, meanwhile, hosted 48 teams altogether Friday through Sunday in USA Softball play. Three of those ballclubs were Washington County-based.
In the 11-team District 8 and 10 age 14 tournament, Arlington went 0-2. The Eagles dropped their first game on a BYSA field to Pender, 10-4, before a 16-14 loss to Kelly’s Fastpitch (Fite).
The robust age 12 District 8 and 10 tourney had 37 teams in it. Arlington’s representation started with a 9-4 win against a hometown team, the Blair Chaos (Town). The Eagles, however, lost their next game to Underwood (Iowa), 12-4, before a 15-0 loss to Kelly’s Fastpitch (Werner).
The Chaos, meanwhile, lost its second game of the tournament to the Elkhorn Elite (Garth) on Saturday afternoon, 6-3.
BYSA next hosts an age 8 and younger tournament Sunday before its in-house Modified League Tourney is played June 23-26.

Fastbreak brings pro-level schedule creation engine to youth sports tournament operations

CHARLOTTE, N.C., June 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Fastbreak AI, the leading AI-powered sports operations software company, today announced the launch of the AI Schedule Engine for amateur sports tournament operators in the Fastbreak Compete product. Designed for the demands of complex, high-volume sports events, this new engine enables tournament directors to generate complete, competition-ready schedules in minutes, even for events with hundreds of teams across dozens of venues.

Currently used to handle the most complex scheduling problems in professional sports, Fastbreak’s engine powers schedules for more than 50 of the top professional sports leagues around the world, including the NBA, NHL, NWSL and MLS. Fastbreak’s engineering team is comprised of multiple experts  in optimization and AI. These PhDs designed the technology to solve one of the biggest challenges in sports: generating a fair, travel-efficient schedule that accounts for hundreds of complex constraints – all in minutes.

“This is a watershed moment for us, and marks a significant milestone in Fastbreak’s mission to bring professional-grade tools to every level of sport,” Fastbreak AI CEO John Stewart said. “With thousands of amateur tournaments taking place every weekend across the country, the need for a scalable, intelligent solution has never been greater. This engine has been validated at the highest levels of sport, and it will now be the backbone of youth and amateur athletics. This launch brings us one step closer to making operations simpler, more efficient and more fair, for everyone in sports.”

Fastbreak’s engine handles every major scheduling format – including bracket play, multi-venue and multi-day tournaments – automatically accounting for team preferences, time requests, coaching requests, blackout windows, rest periods, venue constraints and more. Once the schedule is generated, organizers can make manual edits using a drag-and-drop interface, with the platform providing real-time feedback showing the impact of changes to help prevent conflicts.

“We’re using Fastbreak right now for all of our scheduling,” CEO and Founder of Attitude of Gratitude Events Ryan Silver said. “They just came out with a new version of the scheduling app, an AI-powered way to schedule tournaments. I think this AI technology is incredible, and it’s the future. Once again, Fastbreak is ahead of the curve in what they’re doing.”

“Until now, scheduling has been a bottleneck for tournament organizers across every sport,” said Ray Glassmann, General Manager of Fastbreak Compete. “Organizers had two options: spend days manually moving teams around spreadsheets while trying to appease individual preferences, or outsource the task to someone else. The AI Schedule Engine removes that pain, and gives you access to the same technology used by the biggest leagues in the world to build the most complex schedules.”

This launch marks a new milestone in Fastbreak’s mission to bring professional-grade operations management to every level of sport. With thousands of tournaments happening every weekend across the country, the need for scalable, intelligent solutions has never been greater. The Fastbreak Compete team is offering onboarding support for first-time users, helping tournament directors configure rules, apply preferences and get up and running in hours.

Visit www.fastbreak.ai/compete/ to learn more.

About Fastbreak AI
Fastbreak AI is the ultimate AI-powered sports operations engine. From professional leagues to amateur and youth tournaments, Fastbreak products streamline logistics, increase revenue, and improve the experience for everyone involved in sport. Learn more at www.fastbreak.ai.

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SOURCE Fastbreak.ai

• Former Rutherford and NFL player Javien Elliott hosted a free youth football camp at Tommy Oliver Stadium in Panama City, Florida.
• The camp, attended by nearly 170 young athletes, focused on skills development and combine-style drills.
• The event was a collaboration between Elliott, Speed Plus Sports, Florida State University–Panama City, and Bay District Schools.
• Organizers emphasized the importance of community involvement and inspiring local youth to pursue their athletic goals.

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — One of Bay County’s own returned home over the weekend to give back to the next generation of athletes.