Dick’s Sporting Goods Executive Chairman Ed Stack shares how the company is transforming retail through immersive experiences, digital platforms like GameChanger, and a commitment to youth sports and culture.
SIMEON GUTMAN (V.O.)
When Ed Stack took over Dick's Sporting Goods in 1984, his main objective was keeping the family business afloat.
ED STACK
We weren’t very well capitalized. Certain brands wouldn’t sell us at the time.
SIMEON GUTMAN (V.O.)
Today, Dick’s is the dominant player in sporting goods, with more than 850 stores across nearly every state in America. And it is one of the most innovative names in retail, connecting with customers through immersive experiences in the store, on the playing field, and digitally. Ed's vision.
ED STACK
To be the best sports company in the world.
SIMEON GUTMAN (V.O.)
As an analyst covering hard lines in broadline retail, I wanted to learn more about how Ed, whose father founded Dick's in 1948, has led the company through pivotal periods, and how he's setting the pace for its future. So I traveled to Pittsburgh, where I met Ed at a House of Sport for a fascinating conversation and some friendly competition.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Ed, thank you so much for doing this. Good to see you.
ED STACK
Yeah, good to see you, too. Thanks.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Let's get into it.
ED STACK
Sure.
SIMEON GUTMAN
So what was your first job at Dick's, and growing up, did you imagine yourself joining the family business?
ED STACK
My father put me to work here when I was 13 because he was going to teach me responsibility. So I worked in the warehouse, and I was unloading trucks and sweeping floors. And when I was 15 years old, he put me on the sales floor, starting to wait on customers. I hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing to do with the family business. And when I went off to college, I never expected that I would come back.
As I was getting ready to get out of school, my dad got really sick, and I came back into the business. And, somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the business. And it's a love affair that's alive and well today.
SIMEON GUTMAN
So you took over Dick's in 1984. What were your aspirations back then?
ED STACK
To be honest with you, it was a small family business. We had two little stores in Binghamton, New York. And the vision was really merely: survive. You know, we really weren't very well capitalized. We had a line of credit from the bank that we had to clean up every single year for 30 days. And Adidas wouldn't sell us, Puma wouldn't sell us. And they were the two hot athletic brands at that time.
SIMEON GUTMAN
How has Dick’s become more intentional about culture, and how do you scale that across 850 plus stores?
ED STACK
Culture is difficult to define because you can't pick up and look at culture. You can't kind of put it in a box and distribute it out to the stores. It's something that's got to be learned through osmosis. It's got to be led through the values that the company has.
And one of the things that I think helped with our culture: the easiest thing to say when you're having a business conversation of a new idea is to say, “No, you know, no, that won't work.”
And we made a change, probably, I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago, and said, whenever there's an idea—we're having a meeting and somebody comes up with a new idea—nobody can lead with, “No, because.” Every comment after that has to be, “Yes, if. Yes, we could do that, if we can do this, this, and this.” And it's made a huge change.
SIMEON GUTMAN
So we're sitting in this House of Sport. For those that haven't experienced [it], how would you describe it? And then what is the return on the experience here?
ED STACK
If you see pictures of it or you try to describe it, it's very difficult. You have to get into the space to really understand it, because of the—not only the size of it, but the products that are here, the interactivity that's here. This has really been a journey that's ten years in the making.
As we did that, we designed it and we walked through it. I said, “It's not different enough from what we're doing today.” So we scrapped it, put it on hold, and came back about six years ago and started the project again.
The first one we did was roughly 100,000 square feet. There is a field right next to it: have kids come and practice. You can have events there. We've got 25 now, we'll have 35 by the end of the year, and by the end of ‘27, we'll have somewhere between 75 and 100. We couldn't be more excited about it.
SIMEON GUTMAN
In a retail industry that's struggling to get people to come to stores, here’s a category sporting goods and a physical box that people want to come to and experience.
ED STACK
If you're an athlete, this is the place you want to come to. If you talked to an analyst five, six, seven years ago, they would say, “I don't really know how many stores you have, but you have too many. And I don't really know how big your store is, but it's too big, because you should shrink your store and have less stores.”
And when people would ask me, you know, six, seven years ago, “In ten years, what will your footprint look like?” I would tell them, “I think we will have approximately the same amount of stores, but we'll have a lot more square footage.” They didn't particularly like that because they didn't understand what House of Sport was going to become. When Nike first came in to see the store, they said, “This is the best expression of sport anywhere in the world.”
In 2016, we thought there was a huge opportunity to be the ecosystem of youth sports. GameChanger has been just terrific.
SIMEON GUTMAN
It's grown into $100 million SaaS business with 9 million members. Did you always see it as a scalable platform, or did it evolve into something bigger than it is?
ED STACK
Every month we stream more baseball games—Little League games, high school games—than all the Major League Baseball games played since the beginning of time. We're doing this now with basketball. We're looking at soccer. Technology is an important part of our business. So we want to be involved with the customer, who we refer to as athletes. We want to be involved with the athletes and their entire journey, whether that's what they're doing from a research standpoint, what we can do from provid[ing] them suggestions on what they should buy or how they can get better, what we can do from a retail standpoint of the product, how we can interact with them. People love GameChanger. You know, the satisfaction level is extremely high. If you're a mom or dad and you're traveling for work, you can stream that game right on your phone. And that's why the business continues to grow at roughly 40% a year. And that's what we're really heading toward with this idea to be the best sports company in the world. We’ll be evolving more into a platform where you can research product, you can buy product, you can try product. GameChanger would be involved with sports throughout the entire journey. We continue to expand what this whole youth platform could be.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Youth sports participation has faced some headwinds in recent years. What do you see as the biggest barriers, and how is Dick's working to address it?
ED STACK
Sports and culture is at an intersection: it’s never been like this before. And that's happening all around the world. We're seeing our youth sports business on fire right now. Our baseball business has been great. Our soccer business has been great. The lacrosse business, basketball business. The World Cup is going to be the biggest sporting event this country has ever seen, and that's going to really help drive youth participation. What's going on in women's basketball right now? With Caitlin Clark and A’ja and Sabrina. Our number one selling basketball shoe is Sabrina's basketball shoe. Because boys are buying that shoe too. We run a camp every year for five and six-year-olds that they come and every day, they play a different sport. So we introduce them to basketball one day, golf another day, baseball, football. There's a groundswell of what's going on in youth sports participation, and I think we're right at the center of that.
SIMEON GUTMAN
The Foot Locker acquisition has raised some eyebrows. What's the rationale behind it? And what do you say to the skeptics?
ED STACK
Foot Locker gives us the opportunity to have a global presence, which we don't have today. It gives us an opportunity to engage with the consumer that we don't have today. And we've always talked about this, that we don't make investments from one quarter to the next. We make investments for a lifetime. And we think the Foot Locker acquisition is an investment for a lifetime. People are starting to understand that, starting to get that, and I think as we go forward and we get Foot Locker turned around, I think they'll look back and say, “That was a pretty good idea.”
SIMEON GUTMAN
Dick's made headlines in 2018 with its decision to remove firearms, a move that cost the company more than $250 million. Would you make the same call today?
ED STACK
Absolutely. You know, after Sandy Hook, we really started to look differently at how we sold firearms, how we marketed it, take a bit of a backseat. And then when Parkland happened, I was on Good Morning America with Stephanopoulos, and he asked me, “You know, will you ever put these guns back in the store?” And I said, “Never.” I just didn't want to be a part of that story any longer. We exited the high-capacity magazines, the assault style weapons. We wouldn't sell a firearm to anybody under 21 years old. And then a number of people were really upset with us, and it cost us well over a quarter of $1 million. We then said, “Okay, you know what? Let's just test if we take all firearms out.”
We looked at every store, what was selling, what would be best for that community, and the margin rates were so much lower in the firearms business. We only had to recoup 60% of the sales to have the same kind of earnings number. When we did this, the team did such a good job on this that we captured about 110% of the sales. So it was a huge win for the company. And yes, I’d do it exactly the same way again.
SIMEON GUTMAN
What do you hope your legacy will be? Not just at Dick's, but in how retail leaders think about culture, innovation, and impact?
ED STACK
I don't really think about the legacy that I'm trying to leave. I think about how the business will grow and survive going forward when I'm not involved any longer. When my dad was on his deathbed, and he'd been sick for a long time, I said, “If it's time to go, it's okay for you to go. And I know you worry about the business, but I promise I will take care of the business. We'll continue this business for generations to come and set it up to be able to do that.”
And so what I'd like my legacy to be is to be able to fulfill that promise I made to my father on the day he died. And I think we're in really good shape. And to be able to do that, you have to have the right people. And Lauren Hobart is absolutely the right person. I couldn't be more proud of the team. The legacy for our company and for me would be that this continues to go on for generations.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Well, it's been a pleasure to watch a retail leader take a business through all the phases of retail evolution. Thanks for doing this.
ED STACK
Simeon, thanks. That was great. Yeah, that's great. Let's walk around the store a little bit.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Yeah, I’d love it.
So this is what happens on the executive board?
ED STACK
[Laughs] Yeah.
Transcript
SIMEON GUTMAN (V.O.)
When Ed Stack took over Dick's Sporting Goods in 1984, his main objective was keeping the family business afloat.
ED STACK
We weren’t very well capitalized. Certain brands wouldn’t sell us at the time.
SIMEON GUTMAN (V.O.)
Today, Dick’s is the dominant player in sporting goods, with more than 850 stores across nearly every state in America. And it is one of the most innovative names in retail, connecting with customers through immersive experiences in the store, on the playing field, and digitally. Ed's vision.
ED STACK
To be the best sports company in the world.
SIMEON GUTMAN (V.O.)
As an analyst covering hard lines in broadline retail, I wanted to learn more about how Ed, whose father founded Dick's in 1948, has led the company through pivotal periods, and how he's setting the pace for its future. So I traveled to Pittsburgh, where I met Ed at a House of Sport for a fascinating conversation and some friendly competition.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Ed, thank you so much for doing this. Good to see you.
ED STACK
Yeah, good to see you, too. Thanks.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Let's get into it.
ED STACK
Sure.
SIMEON GUTMAN
So what was your first job at Dick's, and growing up, did you imagine yourself joining the family business?
ED STACK
My father put me to work here when I was 13 because he was going to teach me responsibility. So I worked in the warehouse, and I was unloading trucks and sweeping floors. And when I was 15 years old, he put me on the sales floor, starting to wait on customers. I hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing to do with the family business. And when I went off to college, I never expected that I would come back.
As I was getting ready to get out of school, my dad got really sick, and I came back into the business. And, somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the business. And it's a love affair that's alive and well today.
SIMEON GUTMAN
So you took over Dick's in 1984. What were your aspirations back then?
ED STACK
To be honest with you, it was a small family business. We had two little stores in Binghamton, New York. And the vision was really merely: survive. You know, we really weren't very well capitalized. We had a line of credit from the bank that we had to clean up every single year for 30 days. And Adidas wouldn't sell us, Puma wouldn't sell us. And they were the two hot athletic brands at that time.
SIMEON GUTMAN
How has Dick’s become more intentional about culture, and how do you scale that across 850 plus stores?
ED STACK
Culture is difficult to define because you can't pick up and look at culture. You can't kind of put it in a box and distribute it out to the stores. It's something that's got to be learned through osmosis. It's got to be led through the values that the company has.
And one of the things that I think helped with our culture: the easiest thing to say when you're having a business conversation of a new idea is to say, “No, you know, no, that won't work.”
And we made a change, probably, I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago, and said, whenever there's an idea—we're having a meeting and somebody comes up with a new idea—nobody can lead with, “No, because.” Every comment after that has to be, “Yes, if. Yes, we could do that, if we can do this, this, and this.” And it's made a huge change.
SIMEON GUTMAN
So we're sitting in this House of Sport. For those that haven't experienced [it], how would you describe it? And then what is the return on the experience here?
ED STACK
If you see pictures of it or you try to describe it, it's very difficult. You have to get into the space to really understand it, because of the—not only the size of it, but the products that are here, the interactivity that's here. This has really been a journey that's ten years in the making.
As we did that, we designed it and we walked through it. I said, “It's not different enough from what we're doing today.” So we scrapped it, put it on hold, and came back about six years ago and started the project again.
The first one we did was roughly 100,000 square feet. There is a field right next to it: have kids come and practice. You can have events there. We've got 25 now, we'll have 35 by the end of the year, and by the end of ‘27, we'll have somewhere between 75 and 100. We couldn't be more excited about it.
SIMEON GUTMAN
In a retail industry that's struggling to get people to come to stores, here’s a category sporting goods and a physical box that people want to come to and experience.
ED STACK
If you're an athlete, this is the place you want to come to. If you talked to an analyst five, six, seven years ago, they would say, “I don't really know how many stores you have, but you have too many. And I don't really know how big your store is, but it's too big, because you should shrink your store and have less stores.”
And when people would ask me, you know, six, seven years ago, “In ten years, what will your footprint look like?” I would tell them, “I think we will have approximately the same amount of stores, but we'll have a lot more square footage.” They didn't particularly like that because they didn't understand what House of Sport was going to become. When Nike first came in to see the store, they said, “This is the best expression of sport anywhere in the world.”
In 2016, we thought there was a huge opportunity to be the ecosystem of youth sports. GameChanger has been just terrific.
SIMEON GUTMAN
It's grown into $100 million SaaS business with 9 million members. Did you always see it as a scalable platform, or did it evolve into something bigger than it is?
ED STACK
Every month we stream more baseball games—Little League games, high school games—than all the Major League Baseball games played since the beginning of time. We're doing this now with basketball. We're looking at soccer. Technology is an important part of our business. So we want to be involved with the customer, who we refer to as athletes. We want to be involved with the athletes and their entire journey, whether that's what they're doing from a research standpoint, what we can do from provid[ing] them suggestions on what they should buy or how they can get better, what we can do from a retail standpoint of the product, how we can interact with them. People love GameChanger. You know, the satisfaction level is extremely high. If you're a mom or dad and you're traveling for work, you can stream that game right on your phone. And that's why the business continues to grow at roughly 40% a year. And that's what we're really heading toward with this idea to be the best sports company in the world. We’ll be evolving more into a platform where you can research product, you can buy product, you can try product. GameChanger would be involved with sports throughout the entire journey. We continue to expand what this whole youth platform could be.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Youth sports participation has faced some headwinds in recent years. What do you see as the biggest barriers, and how is Dick's working to address it?
ED STACK
Sports and culture is at an intersection: it’s never been like this before. And that's happening all around the world. We're seeing our youth sports business on fire right now. Our baseball business has been great. Our soccer business has been great. The lacrosse business, basketball business. The World Cup is going to be the biggest sporting event this country has ever seen, and that's going to really help drive youth participation. What's going on in women's basketball right now? With Caitlin Clark and A’ja and Sabrina. Our number one selling basketball shoe is Sabrina's basketball shoe. Because boys are buying that shoe too. We run a camp every year for five and six-year-olds that they come and every day, they play a different sport. So we introduce them to basketball one day, golf another day, baseball, football. There's a groundswell of what's going on in youth sports participation, and I think we're right at the center of that.
SIMEON GUTMAN
The Foot Locker acquisition has raised some eyebrows. What's the rationale behind it? And what do you say to the skeptics?
ED STACK
Foot Locker gives us the opportunity to have a global presence, which we don't have today. It gives us an opportunity to engage with the consumer that we don't have today. And we've always talked about this, that we don't make investments from one quarter to the next. We make investments for a lifetime. And we think the Foot Locker acquisition is an investment for a lifetime. People are starting to understand that, starting to get that, and I think as we go forward and we get Foot Locker turned around, I think they'll look back and say, “That was a pretty good idea.”
SIMEON GUTMAN
Dick's made headlines in 2018 with its decision to remove firearms, a move that cost the company more than $250 million. Would you make the same call today?
ED STACK
Absolutely. You know, after Sandy Hook, we really started to look differently at how we sold firearms, how we marketed it, take a bit of a backseat. And then when Parkland happened, I was on Good Morning America with Stephanopoulos, and he asked me, “You know, will you ever put these guns back in the store?” And I said, “Never.” I just didn't want to be a part of that story any longer. We exited the high-capacity magazines, the assault style weapons. We wouldn't sell a firearm to anybody under 21 years old. And then a number of people were really upset with us, and it cost us well over a quarter of $1 million. We then said, “Okay, you know what? Let's just test if we take all firearms out.”
We looked at every store, what was selling, what would be best for that community, and the margin rates were so much lower in the firearms business. We only had to recoup 60% of the sales to have the same kind of earnings number. When we did this, the team did such a good job on this that we captured about 110% of the sales. So it was a huge win for the company. And yes, I’d do it exactly the same way again.
SIMEON GUTMAN
What do you hope your legacy will be? Not just at Dick's, but in how retail leaders think about culture, innovation, and impact?
ED STACK
I don't really think about the legacy that I'm trying to leave. I think about how the business will grow and survive going forward when I'm not involved any longer. When my dad was on his deathbed, and he'd been sick for a long time, I said, “If it's time to go, it's okay for you to go. And I know you worry about the business, but I promise I will take care of the business. We'll continue this business for generations to come and set it up to be able to do that.”
And so what I'd like my legacy to be is to be able to fulfill that promise I made to my father on the day he died. And I think we're in really good shape. And to be able to do that, you have to have the right people. And Lauren Hobart is absolutely the right person. I couldn't be more proud of the team. The legacy for our company and for me would be that this continues to go on for generations.
SIMEON GUTMAN
Well, it's been a pleasure to watch a retail leader take a business through all the phases of retail evolution. Thanks for doing this.
ED STACK
Simeon, thanks. That was great. Yeah, that's great. Let's walk around the store a little bit.
Audio version: Dick’s Sporting Goods: A New Arena for Retail
November 10, 2025
Dick’s Sporting Goods Executive Chairman Ed Stack shares how the company is transforming retail through immersive experiences, digital platforms like GameChanger, and a commitment to youth sports and culture.
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