For many, the days of collecting newspaper clippings are no more, but Dan Beach is intent on keeping memories alive for high school athletes and their families.

Beach is the founder and CEO of SBLive Sports, a national high school sports media company based in the heart of downtown Spokane, at 809 W. Main, across Main Avenue from River Park Square.

The company, which was founded in 2014, received almost $14 million in funding from undisclosed investors in April, according to data from PitchBook, a proprietary market data software subscription platform. Beach says a substantial portion of that funding is debt conversion from its largest investor, Cowles Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Spokane-based Cowles Co. Beach says the rest of the funding will be used to mature and continue building the company.

SBLive is a media company that provides coverage of high school sports across the country through its website, app, and social media platforms. It provides scores, schedules, statistics, rankings, articles, podcasts, and highlight videos.

“The design is to be the ESPN.com of high school sports,” says Beach.

Schools and coaches can claim, or identify the teams they represent, on SBLive and provide rosters, stats, schedules, and other data for the company to share across its platforms. SBLive also collects data from feed providers—companies that compile scores or rosters, for example.

“We’re not out broadcasting live games or streaming games,” Beach says. “We’ve built a data infrastructure that allows high school teams to claim their team, upload their stats, their rosters, their schedules.”

SBLive is also a technology partner for state athletic associations, which are able to use the company’s bracket-building or computer-ranking software to organize and manage their postseason events, he says.

From basketball and football to water polo and lacrosse, SBLive provides expanded coverage in 25 states, with about 20,000 high schools in its database. It provides schedules and scores in all 50 states.

Beach says that SBLive chooses states for expanded coverage selectively, based on the level of athletic competition and where high school sports are popular.

“We go into every state with a plan,” he says.

SBLive has a team of 40 full-time employees and hires about 100 freelance reporters and photographers at any given time, Beach says.

Beach was born and raised in Spokane and attended West Valley and Gonzaga Prep high schools before playing baseball at Gonzaga University. He then moved away for 25 years and worked for several large companies, including the Walt Disney Co. and ESPN.

At ESPN, he was director of strategy for its mobile division for over three years. He says he was on the front lines of creating apps for smart phones and the iPad.

He then went on to start a company called ScoreStream Inc., which he says is now the most popular way to crowd source high school sports scores. He is no longer affiliated with ScoreStream, but SBLive is a customer of his former company.

Beach came up with the idea for SBLive while traveling from gym to gym around the country watching his son play basketball on the national circuit, he says. The company started out as just a digital basketball scorebook, he says.

“(I) realized that they were still using pencil and paper to score the games, so I thought I could create a basketball scorebook on an iPad and see if I could make that popular,” he says. “So that’s what got us started.”

SBLive was founded in San Diego and had an office there until Beach decided to close it during the pandemic. Beach moved back to his hometown in 2015 and opened an office here when his son received an offer to play basketball at GU.

He says the company was founded as VarCity Sports, and eventually rebranded to Scorebook Live Inc. It changed to SBLive a couple of years ago, Beach says, to better represent the types of content the company was providing.

“We didn’t want to be pigeonholed into just doing an app,” he says. “We hired a media team. We started filling a void where the newspapers were departing high school sports across the country. We were more than a scorebook, so we had to go to SBLive.”

SBLive partnered with Sports Illustrated in February of 2022. Beach declines to provide further details regarding that partnership.

Beach says that challenges facing the local newspaper industry—financial struggles, a decrease in coverage, and other hardships brought on by the emergence of digital media—helped to shape the business model of SBLive.

“The original idea was that we would feed newspapers all of this data and they would be our fan destinations, but more and more newspapers were struggling, more and more newspapers didn’t want to lose the relationship with all of the coaches, and then a lot of them put it behind a paywall,” Beach says.

After this realization, SBLive hired its own media team and began providing coverage that newspapers were unable to provide.

“Nobody in Washington, none of the newspapers are covering high school sports outside of a subscription area,” he says. “We cover it from the state level down and focus on the entire state, not just one region.”

Although it was founded in San Diego, the company started out covering sports in Washington. It found success in the Evergreen State, and then expanded to California before taking on other parts the country.

SBLive covers a mix of large and small schools, which Beach says is beneficial for athletes when it comes to college recruiting.

“We have parents and coaches sending us highlight videos that we then publish on our social media platforms, on our website, and give those kids more exposure,” he says.

Beach says that the original passion behind SBLive is to help create lasting memories for kids, the vast majority of whom won’t go on to play organized sports at levels higher than high school.

“When we all grew up, there was the print newspaper. You’d have your name in an article and mom or dad would cut it out and put a magnet on the refrigerator,” he says. “If we could do something that would create a footprint—at least a digital one—that replaces what used to be on the refrigerator … then we’re doing our part.”

SBLive is one of just two companies that provides this type of high school sports coverage, Beach says.

He says the high school sports market is largely fragmented, and that SBLive is working to fix that problem with its technology that simplifies and consolidates the process of schools, coaches, and leagues providing data.

Beach says he wants high school sports to have real-time score updates, similar to how college and pro sports do, so that fans don’t have to wait for hours or even longer to find out the outcome of a game.

“The end goal is to become the number one destination for high school fans,” Beach says.