Chris Lyons said something midway through our conversation that I had to stop him on. We were talking about Gym Class — the VR platform that just locked in licensing deals with both the NBA and MLB — and he said something that reframed the whole conversation for me: it's the DTC moment for the leagues.
Direct-to-consumer. The thing every brand in every other industry figured out years ago. The idea that you don't have to run everything through a middleman to reach the person who actually cares about your product.
The NFL doesn't own its fans. The NBA doesn't own its fans. The MLB definitely doesn't own its fans. The TV networks do. The sponsors do. The platforms that carry the highlights do. Every league in professional sports has built its entire business on renting access to an audience it never actually controls — and the second the contract with the network changes, or the ratings dip, or the demo skews older — the whole thing is fragile in ways nobody inside those buildings talks about honestly. VR changes that math. Not all at once, not next year. But structurally, in the way that actually matters.
That's what this conversation was about, even when it sounded like it was about headsets and basketball games and pitching to Ken Griffey Jr.'s avatar.
The fans they're about to lose
MLB didn't get into VR because the technology is cool. They got in because they did the math on their audience and the math scared them.
Chris put it bluntly: the baseball world is starting to age out where their core fan base is right now. That's a polite way of saying: the people who grew up loving baseball are getting older and not being replaced fast enough by people who love it now. Gen Z does not have the same relationship to sitting in front of a TV and watching nine innings that my generation did, and my generation didn't have it the way the generation before me did. Every league faces some version of this — but baseball faces it acutely.
The traditional answer to declining youth engagement is marketing. Run more ads. Put players on social media. Partner with content creators. Show highlights on TikTok. All of which MLB does, and none of which actually solves the problem, because watching something on TikTok is not the same as caring about it. The engagement is passive. The attention is borrowed. The minute the algorithm serves something more interesting, the kid is gone.
VR offers something different — not better highlight packaging, but actual participation. Chris used a phrase I keep coming back to: headset native audiences. He means kids who are growing up inside spatial computing environments as a default mode of engagement, not as a novelty. For those kids, sitting and watching is the passive version. Being inside the thing is the real version. If you want them to love the sport, you have to get them into the sport — not into a highlight package of it.
My kids are four. They love hitting off a tee in the backyard. The question I'm actually asking myself now is: what is the first sports experience they have that they choose themselves, without me driving anywhere? Because that experience might be in a headset. And whichever sport is inside that headset first has a real advantage.
The licensing moat nobody talks about
Here's the thing Chris said that most people miss when they talk about VR in sports. He said: anybody can build a VR app. But to have the Warriors' practice facility — to be inside Yankee Stadium before you've ever visited New York — that's the thing that can't be replicated.
Gym Class has over a million downloads on the Meta Quest. That number is real, but it's not the number that matters. The number that matters is the licenses. Because the reason a kid plays Gym Class instead of some other VR basketball app is that Gym Class has the Warriors. Has the Yankees. Has the actual courts, the actual logos, the actual environments that carry the weight of real fandom. The IP is the moat. The technology is just the shovel that dug it.
Chris made the Fortnite comparison — the skins, the in-app purchases, the digital merchandise — and I think it's right but incomplete. Fortnite's business model works because kids are genuinely emotionally invested in their avatars and their presence in that world. The reason anyone buys a Fortnite skin is the same reason anyone buys a jersey: it communicates something about who you are inside a community that matters to you. If VR sports can generate that same emotional investment — and the licensing is what makes it possible — then the revenue model isn't speculative. It's proven. It already exists in gaming. This is just sports entering it with real IP.
I will say this as an investor: the teams and leagues that sign these licensing deals early are making a bet that's asymmetric. If VR adoption stays niche, they've spent relatively little. If VR becomes the dominant fan engagement medium for the next generation — and I think it does — they own the foundational relationship with that audience. The leagues that wait will pay more for access to an audience they could have owned for free.
PULL QUOTE: "It's the DTC moment for the leagues. Right now all they rely on is TV networks and sponsors to access fans. VR can create a new direct-to-fan distribution." — Chris Lyons
What Jaylen Daniels figured out before most coaches did
I brought up Jayden Daniels midway through because I'd read an article about him using VR since college to study defenses. Reading formations, processing coverage looks, training his eyes to find the right receiver before the pressure gets there. He's been doing this since LSU.
Chris has a name for what happens when VR training works at that level — he called it the lizard brain. The part of your brain that doesn't distinguish between reality and virtual reality. The part that just reacts. The value of training in VR isn't that it's a good simulation. It's that your brain stops treating it as a simulation at all. You're reading defenses. You're feeling the pocket collapse. And the reps you're getting in the headset are actually building the same neural pathways as reps on a real field.
I think about what that means for players who are earlier in their careers, who have less access to elite coaching, less film time, less one-on-one repetition with the staff. A rookie who can afford a $500 headset and access to a serious training application is getting reps that would have been impossible without a coaching staff five years ago. That gap is going to close faster than people expect — and the players who close it first are going to have an edge that doesn't show up in any scouting report.
The flip side of this is the player IP conversation, which is where Chris and I spent real time. If you're building your game inside a VR platform, your movements, your tendencies, your shot mechanics — your avatar — that's yours. The leagues and teams have their licensing. You have yours. And right now, most players aren't thinking about this at all. They're not thinking about what it means to build a digital identity early, before anyone is asking them to, before the market is crowded.
The analogy Chris used was about being a big fish in a small pond. The VR sports audience is 20 million headset owners right now and climbing. That is not a small number. But it's still early enough that a player who invests in this space — really invests, not just posts about it — can build something foundational that becomes genuinely valuable as the pond gets bigger.
What I'd actually do, if I were coming into the league right now
This conversation changed three things for me concretely — not in a general way, but in the specific way that changes how I think about the next decision in front of me.
- Get familiar with the platform before anyone asks you to. Gym Class is on the Meta Quest. The hardware has come down enough that there's no real financial barrier for a professional athlete. The reason to get in now isn't to be trendy — it's to understand what you're actually looking at before a team, a sponsor, or an agent tries to structure a deal around it. I've been in too many rooms where I was the person who should have known more about the asset being discussed and didn't, because I'd waited for someone else to bring it to me. Don't wait. Twenty hours inside the platform tells you more than twenty meetings about it.
- Think about your avatar the same way you think about your jersey number. This sounds abstract, but it isn't. Chris talked about players building digital IP — name, image, likeness, avatar — early, before the market is mature. The players who did NIL deals before NIL was officially codified were laughed at for being early. They made real money. Your digital presence in VR environments is an extension of your brand, and right now the price of entry is attention and time, not lawyers and licensing fees. Build the identity before someone else builds it for you under terms you didn't negotiate.
- Ask the revenue share question before you say yes to anything. I said this directly in the conversation: if a team comes to you and says your likeness is going into a VR product, the first question is not "that sounds cool" — the first question is how do we both win. The leagues are going to be aggressive about controlling this space because VR represents exactly the kind of direct fan relationship they've never had. Players are the content. If the leagues are building a business on your movements, your face, your name inside their VR environments, that value needs to be shared. The NFLPA, NBPA, MLBPA — they're all going to have to get in front of this or they'll be negotiating it backward after the infrastructure is already built.
The conversation ended with Chris challenging me to a one-on-one in Gym Class, two weeks of practice on my end, and then a live game to settle it. I told him he doesn't want this smoke.
But the part I keep thinking about isn't the game. It's the 20 million headsets already out there, and the kid in Kansas who's about to fall in love with baseball in a virtual Yankee Stadium before he's ever left his state. That kid is going to buy a jersey. Going to follow a player. Going to watch a game. He just needed a door into the room first.
VR is the door. The room was always there.