CBS Exploring Sale of MaxPreps, Popular High School Sports Site

CBS Sports is exploring a sale of MaxPreps, the high school sports and recruiting website, according to multiple people familiar with the process.

The company has retained Inner Circle Sports to assist with the sale, said the people, who were granted anonymity because the details are private. The process is still in its early stages, and there is no guarantee a sale is made.

Representatives for Inner Circle and CBS Sports, part of Paramount Global (Nasdaq: PARA), declined to comment. That said, Paramount is currently engaged in wider sale/merger talks, and CBS CEO George Cheeks said during last week’s stockholders meetings that the company was looking to streamline its assets and planned to use the proceeds to pay off debt.

“We also want to ensure we have the right asset mix to meet this moment,” Cheeks said. “In fact, we’re already in talks to divest some of our assets to unlock value. Now, the combination of a streaming strategy reset, cost reductions, and asset sales will set us up to deliver consistent earnings growth and will return the company to investment-grade metrics over time.”

The ongoing MaxPreps sale process does not include CBS’ other high school sports/recruiting platforms, 247Sports and Scout Media, said the people. CBS acquired 247Sports in 2015, then integrated Scout, which it bought out of bankruptcy in 2017 for $9.5 million.

Founded in California in 2002, MaxPreps was on the early edge of the internet radically upending local newspapers’ high school sports sections. It quickly became a go-to site for scores, schedules, photos, stats, rosters and stories, many of them crowdsourced directly from schools, athletes and coaches. Over time, that expanded to include national coverage and a more detailed focus on college recruiting.

CBS purchased MaxPreps in March 2007, part of a plan to bolster its newly acquired College Sports Television (CSTV). At the time, CBS touted MaxPreps’ large audience, its regional specificity and its coveted young demographic. CSTV is now CBS Sports Network, which has expanded beyond just college sports to cover events such as poker, soccer, mixed martial arts and various motorsports. 

Today, MaxPreps has about 366,000 followers on Twitter, 2.1 million on Instagram and 3.1 million on TikTok. Its main thrust is football, basketball and baseball, but the site has specific landing pages for more than 60 high school sports, including boys judo, co-ed bass fishing and girls bowling.

The MaxPreps talks come amid much larger sale and merger talks for Paramount, formerly ViacomCBS. Shari Redstone, the company’s controlling shareholder, is mulling multiple proposals—one from Sony and Apollo Global, and another from Skydance Media.