BACKYARD COMEBACK

Highland Park native and lifelong sports lover Lindsay Barnett’s company, Playground Productions, is shaped by her experiences as an elementary school teacher.

How many millennials remember the beloved ‘90s Backyard Sports video game franchise? If that’s you, hang on to your baseball cap, because Pablo Sanchez, Stephanie Morgan, Pete Wheeler, and the rest of the gang are back. Their return comes courtesy of Lindsay Barnett’s Playground Productions, a family-oriented film, media, and gaming company.

On July 9, Playground Productions will unveil Backyard Baseball, the first brand-new console game in the Backyard Sports franchise to be released in 15 years. The launch comes on the heels of Playground’s re-release of all six of the original titles: Backyard Baseball ’97; Backyard Soccer ’98; Backyard Football ’99; Backyard Basketball ’01; Backyard Baseball ’01; and Backyard Hockey ’02.

“We built the new Backyard Baseball video game as an E for Everyone experience, designed for long-term fun,” says Barnett, a decision that intentionally avoids the annual release cycle typical of sports titles.

And with the classics, “We didn’t just restore them, we enhanced them,” Barnett explains. “We introduced global leaderboards and live tournaments, fixed long-standing bugs, improved gameplay, and even created new characters and teams to expand the universe that fans love. We also brought these iconic games to modern platforms that didn’t exist when the games first launched.”

To create some Backyard buzz, Barnett and her team also produced an independent animated special, Backyard Sports: The Animated Special. The short knocked it out of the park, drawing more than a million views on YouTube before it headlined the children’s section on Amazon through March and April. Also fun, a partnership with Wilson, Louisville Slugger, and EvoShield produced a wildly successful product line of bats, gloves, and sports equipment.

Making the animated special even more fun for Barnett? “I got to voice several of the characters!” she laughs. “Which really takes me back to making silly voices when reading stories to my former students.”

Creating quality children’s content is a dream come true for Barnett, who grew up in Highland Park as one of the sportiest kids on the block.

“Basketball, baseball, tennis … I even played flag football in elementary school,” she recalls. “And if nobody was outside throwing a ball around, I was the kid knocking on doors to get something started.”

So, when Barnett discovered the Backyard Sports franchise in the ‘90s, she was smitten.

“I loved it!” she says. “Like the Peanuts comics, which I also adored, Backyard Sports showed equal representation for girls and boys in the games, which made playing any sport achievable. The brand was also full of comedy, made games accessible, taught the rules of sports, celebrated different cultures, and the girls in the game weren’t just playing—they were great athletes.”

Before founding Playground Productions in 2024, Barnett’s educational and career path included several essential stops. As an undergraduate at Northwestern, she studied radio, TV, film, and animation, and later pursued a graduate degree in elementary teaching.

“Because I wanted to produce children’s programming, I thought teaching was the best place to learn,” Barnett says. That decision led to an eight-year teaching stint in the Chicago Public Schools system.

Teaching second graders proved to be an invaluable foundation for the work Barnett does today. “Knowing what makes kids laugh, the lessons that are essential to teach, the popular play patterns, and so much more, all these experiences ground my everyday decisions,” she notes.

Teaching also helped galvanize her company’s mission: to produce meaningful content that not only entertains but also educates and inspires.

“Really, the biggest thing I want to do is to bring back a real sense of the joy of play,” Barnett shares. “The attitude that just being a kid is the best job in the whole world. Millennials like me grew up with that point of view. But that wasn’t the experience many of my students had—especially those who were coming up during the pandemic.”

In fact, trying to find a game kids could play while sequestered at home was what first planted the seed for reviving Backyard Sports.

“During the lockdowns, I kept trying to find worthwhile games the kids could play, but most sports-themed games were too complicated,” Barnett recalls. “I kept wishing Backyard Sports was still around.” When her search for the franchise came up empty, Barnett did some deeper sleuthing. She hired a private investigator to track down the dormant intellectual property and then acquired the rights.

The talented Playground Productions team includes Barnett, Chief Product Officer Christopher Waters, who has developed and produced for Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Netflix, and DreamWorks, Social Media Manager and writer Edward McDonald, Director of Operations Zack Oliver, and fellow Highland Park native Matthew Berk, who is Playground’s marketing chief.

Since founding Playground Productions, the focus has been bringing Backyard Sports back to life, although the future will bring other creative work. “We are also thinking about more animated specials since the response to the first one was so great. A regular Backyard Sports show or even a movie would be so fun. We are open to all of it.”