Pro Team Partnership Opportunities
Eight adjacent ways into a team's building, beyond selling its sponsorships directly. None of these asks you to trust Zubie Five with core sponsorship revenue. Each solves a lower-stakes, adjacent problem using the network Zubie Five has already built, and each is a door that can open into bigger conversations later.
You already sell your tickets, your suites, and your sponsorships, and you do it well. This isn't about doing that for you. Zubie Five Sports is a sponsorship brokerage in Tempe, Arizona, run by Adam Zubiate, working with youth leagues, high school programs, and nonprofits. Each section below stands on its own and has its own link, so read whichever is relevant to you.
Where to start
Unused Ticket Inventory Distribution#
Overview
Empty seats cost you money, and a seat filled even at a steep discount still generates concessions, parking, merchandise, and goodwill. The pitch isn't “let me sell your tickets.” It's “I already have a warm, pre-qualified network of youth leagues, schools, and nonprofits who'd fill those seats on short notice.” It's also an easy place to start, because there's nothing on the table to put at risk.
Questions we'd settle together: whether this starts as a relationship-building gesture or something more formal; whether the seats go at a discounted rate or as comps; and how we'd get real-time notice that inventory exists, which would take a contact in ticketing or fan relations.
Example scenario (hypothetical)
A Double-A minor league baseball team's box office realizes Thursday's game is tracking toward 1,800 empty seats out of 6,000. Zubie Five's ticketing contact texts the Zubie Five team Wednesday afternoon, and Zubie Five sends same-day offers to five youth leagues in its network (“$5/seat, 20-seat minimum, confirm by noon tomorrow”). Two leagues take 60 seats combined. The team fills seats that would have sold for zero, the leagues get a cheap team outing, and Zubie Five has its first documented win with that front office.
Group Sales Coordination#
Overview
A step beyond distressed inventory: ongoing coordination of group outings, team nights, and fundraising ticket nights, where an organization gets a per-ticket cut sold through its own network. Your group-sales staff works whoever calls them; they aren't building and maintaining forty relationships with individual youth leagues the way Zubie Five already is. The value is pre-qualified, ready buyers instead of your team generating that demand itself.
Example scenario (hypothetical)
A nearby major college athletics program wants to fill a Tuesday-night non-conference basketball game. Zubie Five proposes a “Fundraising Night” structure to three nonprofits in its network: each sells tickets to its own donor list at face value, with $4 from every ticket going back to the cause. The program gets a guaranteed buy of 150+ seats it wouldn't have had otherwise. Zubie Five coordinates which organization takes which date across the season.
Community Relations Partnerships#
Overview
This is the closest fit to Zubie Five's own professional background. Community-relations departments constantly need local partners for player and mascot appearances, clinic days, and outreach events, and those relationships are normally built one at a time by your own staff. Zubie Five becomes the connective tissue between your community goals and a real, vetted roster of youth organizations.
Context from the data. SponsorUnited's analysis of the 2025-26 season, covering eight pro and major-college leagues, finds that community initiatives are increasingly written into sponsorship agreements as formal, recurring assets (SponsorUnited, “Breakout Plays: The Trends Winning Sports Sponsorship in 2026,” Community Sponsorships). Youth initiatives are the largest category by share of assets, at 28% of the community assets it tracked. Separately, as a share of brands, nearly 45% of the brands that activate community assets take part in youth-focused programs. In that data, “youth” means a team's own programs, such as clinics, literacy, and back-to-school events, not sponsorship of youth leagues.
Example scenario (hypothetical)
A developmental-league affiliate team's community relations manager wants to run four “Reading Night” clinics this season at local chapters of a national nonprofit but has no list of qualified sites and no bandwidth to vet them. Zubie Five, already working with three of that nonprofit's local chapters on sponsorship, introduces all three as vetted, ready partners and helps schedule the appearances: a completed program in one conversation instead of three months of outreach.
Team Foundation & Fundraising Support#
Overview
Team charitable foundations actively look for legitimate local causes to support (autographed memorabilia for a gala auction, a donated suite for a charity raffle, a share of a ticket night's proceeds), not just to be asked for money themselves. Zubie Five's roster of vetted nonprofits is exactly the pipeline a team foundation needs, and supplying it costs the foundation nothing but builds real goodwill.
Example scenario (hypothetical)
The foundation of a women's pro sports franchise wants to donate a signed jersey and two suite tickets to three different nonprofit galas this spring but has no process for choosing recipients. Zubie Five proposes three of its vetted youth-sports nonprofits, each gets a donated item for its auction, and the foundation gets a clean, pre-vetted distribution list for next year.
Venue/Suite Rental Referral (Off-Season Events)#
Overview
A reality check first: venues already have dedicated event-sales teams chasing this exact need, since an empty stadium or arena in the off-season is lost revenue to them too. The honest angle isn't “let me help you sell suite rentals.” It's “I can bring you buyers you don't already have access to”: local businesses from Zubie Five's network who might want to host an event at your venue but don't know it's possible and have no direct line to your event-sales team.
Example scenario (hypothetical)
A regional credit union sponsoring three of Zubie Five's youth leagues mentions struggling to find a venue for its annual client-appreciation holiday party. Zubie Five already knows the local minor-league hockey arena rents its club level in the off-season, so it connects the credit union directly to the arena's event-sales team as a warm referral and takes no cut. The arena remembers who sent them a buyer they didn't have.
In-Stadium Sponsorship Referral#
Overview
Pro teams sell concourse signage, kiss-cam sponsorships, and in-game promotions to local businesses too, not just national sponsors. If one of Zubie Five's existing local-business sponsors ever outgrows youth-league-level sponsorship, Zubie Five can introduce them to your own sponsorship sales staff as a warm referral. That means connecting, not brokering the deal itself. It costs Zubie Five nothing and builds real goodwill with your team at zero complexity.
Example scenario (hypothetical)
A local auto dealership has sponsored a Tempe-area high school football program for two seasons through Zubie Five and mentions wanting more visibility. Zubie Five introduces the owner directly to a nearby pro team's sponsorship sales staff. Zubie Five isn't involved in the deal itself, and the team comes away knowing Zubie Five as a source of qualified local introductions.
Player Appearance Coordination for Existing Clients#
Overview
Smaller in scope, but a real value-add to Zubie Five's existing clients rather than a new line of business. If a current client, a youth league or nonprofit, wants a player appearance at one of its events, Zubie Five is already the trusted point of contact for that organization. Being able to say “I can also help coordinate something with the team” strengthens the relationship we already have, instead of requiring a new sales pitch.
Example scenario (hypothetical)
A Little League district Zubie Five already represents for sponsorship asks Zubie Five, almost in passing, whether it could help get a player from a local minor league team to throw out a first pitch at its season-opening tournament. Because Zubie Five has already built a community-relations contact at that team through the ticket or appearance work above, it makes the ask directly, which is a real win for an existing client, with no new outreach needed.
Internship/Mentorship Pipeline#
Overview
The smallest and slowest-building of the eight, but real. Some teams run youth leadership or internship programs and are always looking for genuine community partners to source participants from. Zubie Five's youth-organization relationships are exactly that pipeline: you get a vetted source of candidates, and the youth organizations get a real opportunity to offer their members.
Example scenario (hypothetical)
A pro soccer affiliate club runs a summer youth-leadership internship for local high schoolers and has historically filled it through word-of-mouth. Zubie Five, already working with three high school athletic programs in the area, offers to circulate the application to student-athletes it already has relationships with: a wider, more diverse applicant pool for the team.
Why these are easy to say yes to
Every one of these works for the same underlying reason: none of them asks you to trust Zubie Five with your core sponsorship revenue. Each offers to solve an adjacent, lower-stakes problem using an asset (the network) that you don't have and that would take years to build yourself, which is a much easier yes than “let me sell your sponsorships.”
Done well, each one builds the kind of real, demonstrated relationship that eventually makes a bigger conversation possible. If you want a place to start, the lowest-friction options are Unused Ticket Inventory Distribution and Community Relations Partnerships.
Reach out directly to talk through any of these
Adam Zubiate, Zubie Five Sports · Tempe, AZ
Schedule a 15-Minute Front-Office Intro602-935-4895 (call or text) · community@zubiefive.com