Academy Sports & Outdoors: Comp Growth Returns, But the Market Isn't Buying It
First positive comp in years, share up everywhere, and a big loyalty/card repivot — while the stock languishes in a 19% drawdown.
ASO · Earnings Call · 2026-06-09
The inflection finally arrives
After a stretch of negative comps that management spent months explaining away, Academy Sports & Outdoors posted the positive number it has been chasing. Q1 FY26 sales hit $1.44 billion, up 6.7%, with comps up 2.9% — on the high side of the range flagged at its April Analyst Day.
We were pleased to move back to comp store growth in Q1... Both the comp and total sales were on the high side of the range we communicated in our press release issued on 04/07/2026.
The turn was broad-based: all four divisions comped positive, e-commerce surged 17% (another 100 bps of penetration), and management claims market share gains "across all of our businesses, both for the quarter and on a rolling 12-month basis." Outdoor led at +12%, driven by fishing and the shooting sports complex — with a big assist from geopolitics. conflict with Iran re-accelerated an ammo business that had been the single largest drag through most of 2025.
“Probably one of the bigger headwinds we faced was ammo.” — Steve Lawrence, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-03-17 — that was the punchline last quarter. Now ammo "turned positive in February and accelerated after the conflict," per Steve Lawrence, and sporting a mid-single-digit combined Nike/Jordan business on top of it.
The contrast with the tape is sharp: ASO is down 19% over the latest 17-week window and ~39% from its March 2024 peak, even as the company raises full-year sales guidance to +3% to +5% and EPS to $6.40–$6.80 adjusted. The market is pricing in continued struggle; the report argues otherwise.
Fresh, company-unique catalysts
Two genuinely new initiatives stand out — neither is sector boilerplate, and both have real margin/traffic implications.
First, the relaunched credit card/loyalty stack. The new myAcademy Rewards fuses the old loyalty and credit programs into a three-tier structure; the top tier — a co-branded Mastercard offering 2% back on all outside spend — is positioned as "the official card of fun." Cards are being reissued to every current holder by end of June, and early reads are encouraging: “We are already seeing an uplift in sales from this initiative, driven by increased enrollment and card utilization.” — Steven Paul Lawrence, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-06-09 Management frames this as the single biggest self-help lever for the back half, and it is deliberately timed to an environment where households are hunting for value.
Second, suppressors — a brand-new category for Academy that management calls "100% accretive," rolling from ~30 stores today to 100+ by year-end. It attaches tightly to firearms (where share has grown for eight straight quarters), carries high AURs, and feeds an ammo attach: “it is really for hearing protection... it is not just the suppressor. it is all the cleaning equipment and other things that you need to purchase when you buy a suppressor also has tailwinds into ammo.” — Steven Paul Lawrence, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-06-09
These are the kinds of suppressor-level niche, differentiated moves that competitors have been pulling away from — but with 8 consecutive quarters of firearms share gains, Academy is leaning in.
Macro: tariffs and gas are the script everyone else is reading
Gross margin fell 71 bps to 33.2%, and the cause is unambiguous. CFO Earl Ford put a fine point on it:
“110 basis points was driven by tariffs essentially having the full burden of that IEPA impact in Q1 of this year versus really nothing last year... offset by 20 basis points of good news in shrink and 10 basis points as it relates to shipping.” — Earl Carlton Ford, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-06-09
The company expects Q1 to be the peak tariff hit, with pressure subsiding through the year, and it has baked ~$10.5M of monetized IEEPA refunds into guidance — a theme that aligns with the tariff refund conversation rippling across the market. Several recent reporters (BARK, CPB, GIII, PVH) are flagging the same IEPA tariff recovery in the same week, confirming this is a shared sector signal, not an idiosyncratic one.
The consumer backdrop is bifurcated. Gas prices are "pulling out about $17.5 billion of consumer discretionary spending each month," and the exit from Q1 drifted from a ~+3% comp to more of a flat as tax-refund benefits faded. Momentum cooled through Memorial Day — tracking roughly flat comp — but management leans on a dense Q2 catalyst slate: the World Cup, America's 250th anniversary, Father's Day, and the card relaunch.
Financially, the position is sound: free cash flow up 14% to $121.6M, inventory dollars per store down 0.8% while units per store are down 6.8%, and a refinanced debt stack at 5.875% saving $2.5M annually. Gross margin on $1.44B revenue.
So why the disconnect? The market appears to be betting that consumer headwinds (gas, tariffs, a still-comping-negative low-income cohort) overwhelm the self-help. Management's math: initiatives alone get them to the 1% midpoint of the flat-to-+2% comp guide, and the range's low end depends on how quintiles 1–2 behave versus the "largest and fastest growing cohort" of $100k+ households trading into Academy. At ~7.6x trailing earnings in a deep drawdown, the market has priced in continued disappointment — the Q1 report argues against that.