Westmont Yard tied three new video boards to local sponsor partnerships

Jen Gust needed new scoreboards. She got three video boards and a set of local business partners.

Gust is with Westmont Yard, an indoor sports facility in the western Chicago suburbs, and she led the project with Nevco Media Group. In a MarketScale Studio segment conducted by an interviewer from Nevco Media Group, she put the problem plainly: the building opened in 2010, fifteen years had passed, and the facility had been looking for an upgrade.

Fifteen years on from 2010 puts the upgrade in 2025, by Gust's own count. The boards are the visible part. The part Gust spends more of the segment on is the relationships she wants running on them, because Westmont Yard had already sold banners to local businesses and wanted the next step to deepen those ties.

Gust does not say in the segment what the boards cost Westmont Yard, how the agreement with Nevco is structured or which businesses signed on. For the operator of a fifteen-year-old building, the question behind the project is still a familiar one: how much of a video board's retail price a sponsor program can carry, and what the facility commits in return. The rest of the story is what that trade looks like where it has been itemized, what the boards would cost at retail, and where sponsor-funded programs came from.

Banners came first, and the businesses wanted more

Westmont Yard sold banner sponsorships before it had a single video board. Gust says those businesses enjoyed interacting with its families, and the board project grew out of that interest rather than out of a scoreboard catalog. She frames the goal around the people in the building.

Those families come for year-round sports programs, camps, childcare and birthday parties on three large indoor turf fields, by Gust's description. That is a different audience from a school gym, because the programming does not stop when a season ends. A local business that puts its name in front of Westmont Yard's families gets exposure in every month of the year.

Moving a sponsor from a banner to a board also moves the price. Bigsigns, a signage seller, writes on its site that a standard fence banner of three by eight or four by ten feet carries $400 to $1,500 a season in sponsorship fees at the high school level, and that digital LED signage, which rotates several sponsors through one placement, commands roughly 20 percent higher premiums than a static sign. A facility that has already sold banners starts with a sponsor list and a price point; the board raises the inventory and the rate.

How a sponsor program is built around a board

A sponsor-funded board program starts with a tiered rate structure, by a March 6, 2026 explainer from Varsity Scoreboards. Varsity Scoreboards, a scoreboard manufacturer, published the piece on its own site and lays out the tiers: a title or presenting sponsor, the one business whose name sits at the top of the program with the premium placement, mid-level sponsors with recurring visibility, and short-term or event-based sponsors below them. Bigsigns, in its own material, puts a number on the structure, saying tiered packages with clear placement and exclusivity differences bring in 30 percent or more revenue than flat-rate pricing.

Before a venue approaches anyone, the explainer tells it to know its audience and count its inventory. Audience means who attends, how often and in what age groups; inventory means the slots a board can sell, because a video board rotates several messages through one event, so the venue sells time-based rotations, featured moments such as a sponsored replay or halftime segment, and exclusive segments instead of one fixed sign. Planning that inventory up front, the manufacturer says, keeps a venue from overpromising and losing a sponsor at renewal.

The work does not end at the sale. Someone inside the organization manages sponsor relationships, scheduling and content approvals, and the explainer advises written policies on content standards, contract length and renewal terms so a sponsor trusts its message will run as promised. One common mistake it names is waiting too long to think about sponsorships at all.

Westmont Yard did the opposite, on Gust's account: the sponsor relationships were the reason for the project, and the equipment conversation followed from them.

Her plan for the new partners runs past the install date. Over the coming months, she says, Westmont Yard will work closely with the sponsoring businesses and give them opportunities to engage directly with families. That is the posture the explainer recommends.

What three boards would cost at retail

Bought outright, one video scoreboard costs $15,000 to $150,000 or more before installation, by KeepTheScore's October 2, 2026 pricing guide. KeepTheScore, a scoreboard software company, splits small video scoreboards at $15,000 to $50,000 and large video boards at $50,000 to $150,000 and up on its site. Installation adds $2,000 to $10,000 depending on electrical work and mounting.

The guide explains why the video category costs so much more than the red-digit board it replaces. A segment display is a set of fixed numeric digits that shows scores and a clock and nothing else; a matrix display is a grid of LEDs that can show text and limited animation. A video board is a set of high-resolution LED panels, similar to a television screen, that shows full graphics, replays, game stats and sponsor video.

Installation has its own line items. The guide prices basic hanging and mounting at $1,500 to $3,000, electrical work at $500 to $5,000 depending on available power, and structural reinforcement at $1,000 to $8,000 when a ceiling mount needs upgrades, and it adds $2,000 to $5,000 for a multi-sport board over a single-sport model. Indoor placement helps: the guide puts outdoor boards at 50 to 100 percent more than equivalent indoor models because they need weather enclosures, brighter panels and climate control, and Westmont Yard's boards hang in an indoor facility.

Multiplying the guide's video range by three boards is arithmetic, not a quote: $45,000 at the bottom of the small-board range and $450,000 at the top of the large one, before any installation. The guide also puts the working life of a conventional scoreboard at 10 to 15 years, with $500 to $1,500 a year to budget for maintenance and repairs and $300 to $1,000 a year for warranty extensions once the original warranty ends. Gust's fifteen-year count lands at the top of that life span.

Neither Gust nor Nevco gives the size or pixel pitch of the Westmont Yard boards, pixel pitch being the spacing between LED clusters that sets how close a viewer can stand before the picture breaks into dots. Set the retail range against a sponsor program and the scale of the trade is clear: the sponsorship side has to be large enough, and durable enough, to matter against a five- or six-figure board. Maintenance and warranty are recurring costs that any sponsor-backed contract has to assign to someone.

What a sponsor pays elsewhere, and what it gets

According to the Spring Lake Park Schools sponsorship page, a Platinum all-access package at $10,000 covers the stadium and gym video boards at every event, a static logo on the scoreboard during game play, commercials, a game-day booth per sport and exposure at more than 60 varsity events, and the district limits it to four sponsors. Gold packages at $5,000 cover either the stadium board or the gym board, Silver at $1,500 buys rotating ads for one chosen sport, and a produced commercial is an optional $2,500 add-on below Platinum.

That is a school rate card, and it shows what the inventory looks like once it is itemized: a logo on screen during play at the top, a slot in the rotation at the bottom, and the commercial sold separately. A multi-sport facility like Westmont Yard would sell the same kinds of inventory, with the difference that its events run through the whole calendar.

A closer comparison is Stars Indoor Sports in Columbus, Ohio, a multi-sport indoor facility that sells its own sponsorships. On its site, Stars says it has operated since 2012, draws more than one million visitors a year, and sees its customers return 12 to 15 times a year. It sells a 12-month sponsorship as its standard term, publishes no rate card, prices each package by placement, location and scope, and offers trade options for businesses that cannot pay cash, with inventory that runs from dasher boards, the low walls that ring an indoor field, to turf center circles, party rooms, league names and naming rights.

Repeat visits are the pitch Stars makes to a local business, and the same draw runs through Gust's account of Westmont Yard's partners. Renewal depends on proving it. Bigsigns writes on its site that sponsors renew on proof, meaning an end-of-season report with dated photos and impression math, an impression being one view of an ad by one person, and the Varsity Scoreboards explainer says a simple post-season report summarizing exposure and thanking sponsors improves retention.

A model with a long record at schools

Daktronics says schools have funded $320 million in equipment through its sports marketing arm. On its own site, Daktronics describes Daktronics Sports Marketing as a service it has run for more than two decades for K-12 schools: when a school purchases a video display from Daktronics, the marketing arm sells local business sponsorships at no additional cost and the school keeps 100 percent of the sponsorship revenue. Daktronics counts more than 1,400 schools supported since 2017 and an average of $50,000 a year raised, with South O'Brien High School in Paulina, Iowa, at more than $115,000 a year and Benton Schools in Benton, Illinois, at more than $91,000.

Scoreboard Media, on its site, offers high schools LED scoreboards installed at no cost and funded by local business sponsorships it says deliver millions of impressions to community fans. The sponsor-backed board is therefore an established category rather than a new idea, built in two different sequences. In the Daktronics version the school buys the display and sponsorship revenue repays it over time; in the Scoreboard Media version, the board arrives without the school paying for it.

Both of those programs are built around K-12 schools, with athletic directors, varsity seasons and student crews. Westmont Yard is a private facility whose turf fields host childcare and birthday parties alongside sports, and Stars Indoor Sports shows a facility of that kind can sell sponsorships on its own without a board vendor involved. What Gust credits Nevco with is the fit to her building.

For an operator weighing a sponsor-backed board, the terms that decide how the project pencils out follow from that difference: who sells the sponsorships, who manages the rotation and the content approvals, how long the contracts run, and what happens to the board at the end of the term. Gust's account is that Westmont Yard worked those questions through in the collaboration she describes.

Two more facilities come next

Westmont Yard is continuing with Nevco at two of its other facilities, Gust says, and she ties the follow-on work directly to the Westmont Yard experience.

Expansion is the path the Varsity Scoreboards explainer anticipates. In its March 2026 account, programs that mature add more sponsors, expand to additional venues and introduce new content formats, and the manufacturer advises planning for that growth from the start rather than treating each board as a one-off.

Gust's own measure of success is that Westmont Yard becomes a destination that athletes and families want to come to, and she says Nevco helped create that. The signal she points to is in person: whether the sponsoring businesses show up at Westmont Yard to engage with families in the months she names. The milestone after that is the next two facilities, and whether the sponsor relationships that started with banners in Westmont carry over to them.