Cages Were Just the Beginning: Building the Home Field for Baseball & Softball

Six years ago I couldn't find a decent place to hit. Not a complicated problem — I just wanted reps, close to home, without paying $150 and driving 40 minutes to stand in line at an overcrowded facility. I'm a lifelong ballplayer. I've been a kid in this game, an adult still chasing it, a coach who's built teams from nothing, and now a dad with a four-year-old. And the thing I kept running into, over and over, in every one of those roles, was the same: the baseball and softball world is wildly fragmented, and nobody had ever bothered to put it in one place.

CageList started as the fix for one piece of that — batting cages. But cages were never the whole point. The point was always to build the front door for this entire community. Today we're opening that door wider: travel teams, men's leagues, and little leagues can now list on CageList for free, and we're on a mission to get every quality backyard cage in the country on the map so there's always a place to hit within ten miles of you. Here's why, and here's what's coming.

I built this because I lived it

I didn't come to this from a spreadsheet. I came to it from the batting cage — or more accurately, from not being able to find one. I've been on essentially every side of this game there is:

As a kid, I was the player looking for reps.
As an adult, I still am — I know what it's like to want to keep playing and have nowhere convenient to train.
As a coach, I've spent hours doing the thing every coach hates: chasing down a place to practice, coordinating schedules, paying too much for too little.
As a team founder, I've run club teams and organized everything from the ground up — rosters, practices, fields, tournaments, all of it.
As a parent of a four-year-old, I'm now seeing the little league world from the sideline — a family trying to figure out where their kid fits and how any of this works.
On the facility side, I've opened an indoor facility, and I've worked at and trained in a lot of them. I understand from the inside how brutally hard that business is to run.

That team-founder chapter stuck with me the most. When I was starting a team, there was no good way to simply say to my community, "I'm starting a team, and I'm looking for players." You basically had two options. You could just go for it — scrape together whoever you already knew and hope it came together. Or you could be the other kind of coach: the one who wins with an All-Star roster and then quietly pulls players off other local programs to stack his own. Parents talk about that behavior constantly, and they hate it — for good reason. It's the thing that makes this game feel political instead of fun.

I kept thinking: it shouldn't be like this. If a solution like CageList had existed back then, I could have listed my team openly, said exactly what I was building, and found the right players fairly — without poaching anyone. That's the kind of thing we want to facilitate here: a fair game. Quality coaches who genuinely love baseball, who want to pour their time and energy into building a program the right way, should have a streamlined place to do it — and more places to actually play.

The one hat I haven't worn is scaled indoor-facility owner — and honestly, that's exactly what taught me how tough that model is. Indoor facilities are a genuinely hard business: the margins, the overhead, the seasonality — it's punishing. The one operator that's really cracked it at scale is D-BAT, and even for them it's hard; they've just mastered the model well enough to expand it consistently. Most operators don't have that machine behind them. They have a great space and no easy way to fill it.

So when I say I understand where the gaps are, I mean I've stood in them. And the biggest gap of all isn't any single one of these problems. It's that all of them are disconnected from each other.

The real problem: fragmentation

Think about what a baseball or softball family actually navigates today:

You want cage time → you're Googling, calling around, or asking in a Facebook group.
Your kid is ready for travel ball → you're asking other parents, digging through team websites that may or may not exist, hoping you hear about tryouts before they happen.
You're an adult who wants to keep playing → you're hunting for a men's league through word of mouth.
You run a little league or a program → you're trying to reach families with flyers and group chats.
You built a backyard cage → it sits empty most of the week while families a few miles away can't find anywhere to hit.

Every one of these has the same shape: supply and demand exist, but they can't find each other. The information is scattered across a thousand websites, group chats, gym bulletin boards, and people's heads.

It was only ever a matter of time before someone centralized this. It's too fragmented not to get centralized. I just decided it was going to be me — and then I spent six years learning how to actually build it.

Six years grinding the chicken-and-egg problem

Here's the part most people don't see. A marketplace is worthless empty. Nobody comes to a directory with nothing in it, and nobody lists on a platform with no audience. That's the chicken-and-egg problem, and it kills most marketplaces before they start.

I refused to launch into an empty room. So for the last six years I did the unglamorous work: I studied how to build this from scratch, and I scraped, sourced, and assembled listings one at a time — cage by cage, program by program — just trying to get enough real supply on the map that when a player showed up, they'd actually find something.

It worked. In a growing number of places, you can open CageList right now and find something near you. That's the moment I'd been waiting six years for. The room isn't empty anymore — which means it's time to stop building quietly and start building loudly.

What we're launching: the front door for the whole community

We're expanding CageList from "find a cage" to "find your people." Four moves, all live or rolling out now.

1. The national travel team directory — free to list

If you run a travel team, list it on CageList for free. If you're a parent thinking about getting your kid into travel ball, CageList is where you go to see what's out there.

I want the behavior to be automatic: a parent starts wondering about travel ball, and the first thing they think is "go to CageList." Browse the teams near you, see how each program runs, understand their philosophy and cost and commitment level, and find out when tryouts are — all in one place, before you ever fill out a form or show up to a field.

This is where the fair-game idea really matters. Tournaments are everywhere now, and the demand is exploding — which is genuinely awesome. The connectivity of the world means kids have more options than ever, and that's a beautiful thing. But it has to be harnessed the right way, or families get taken advantage of. Our job is to keep up with that demand and grow the game honestly: give the good coaches a streamlined way to build a program and find players openly, give parents a clear window into how each program actually operates, and take the politics out of it. We want CageList to be the conduit for the whole thing — education, practice, and real connections between people in the community.

As far as I know, there isn't another free, open, national directory where families can actually vet and compare travel programs like this. That's the gap we're closing.

2. Men's leagues — the same directory, for adults who never stopped playing

The adult game is just as fragmented as the youth game — maybe more, because nobody's marketing to grown men and women trying to find a Sunday league. So we're building the same thing for them: a place to list your men's (and adult) league, and a place for players to find one near them. If you never want to stop playing, we want to make sure you never have to stop finding a game.

3. Little league programs — meeting families where they start

This is where most players' journeys begin, and it's where I am right now as a dad. Getting little league programs onto CageList means a family's very first step into organized ball starts in the same place as everything that comes after it — cages, teams, leagues. One front door, from tee-ball to travel to adult rec.

4. Every backyard cage in the country — a place to hit within 10 miles

Here's the density goal, and I don't think it's crazy: I believe there's at least one quality batting cage within about ten miles of almost anyone in this country. They're in backyards, sitting unused most of the week. If we get them all on the map, then no matter where you are, there's somewhere to get your reps in — affordable, close, and bookable.

For the family that built the cage, it turns the thousands they spent into real income. For the family down the road, it turns "there's nowhere to hit" into "there's a cage six minutes away." That's the whole thesis in one sentence.

I've been everything this platform serves except one thing, and I've spent six years making sure that when this community finally shows up, there's something real waiting for them. There is now.

— Isaac Hess, Founder of CageList

Why this matters (and why now)

Youth and adult baseball and softball are enormous, growing, and — still — running on scattered information and word of mouth. Families spend real money and real weekends on this game. They deserve better than a patchwork of dead websites and group chats, and they deserve to be treated fairly while they're at it.

What we're building is simple to say and hard to do: make CageList the place you go for anything baseball or softball near you. Cage time. A team for your kid. A league for yourself. A program to start with. The reps that make you better. We'll be the conduit that connects and educates the community, and we'll do it in a way that grows the game the right way.

We're making moves. Come build the home field with us.

List with us — it's free. Travel teams, men's and adult leagues, little leagues, and backyard and facility cages. Or find what you need: find a team or find a cage near you.