You are starting up and growing your rec sports league – What do you focus on ?
Fun of course!
Everyone likes playing sports, hanging out with friends, inviting grandma and grandpa to watch a youth game, maybe even going to a sponsor bar afterwards for an adult recreational league.
When you first get going, you might have some very specific ideas – maybe like most people you played in a city league or another rec league, and you thought one of the most basic small business/ entrepreneurial ideas of all time:
“I can do better than this….”
Maybe the communication or customer service staff was lousy, maybe the price was too high, maybe the quality of gear or fields was just not very good.
“I can do better – I will give better customer service, more perks, more sponsors, more parties, more FUN!“
Sure go for it.
Or think about a different idea.
If you are getting your new sports league going … maybe focus on a different aspect:
Focus on what people hate!
Many great businesses have begun by first focusing not on what people love – which is easy – but rather by focusing on what people hate.
One of the best blog posts we have ever read “Invisible Asymptotes” by Eugene Wei, talks about how Amazon came up with the idea for Amazon Prime, one of their biggest money makers of all time.
The idea was pretty straightforward:
“People don’t just hate paying for shipping, they hate it to literally an irrational degree.“
It didn’t matter how much they showed the savings, even with paying for shipping, that a customer would receive on an Amazon order versus walking into a retail store, people just hated paying for shipping.
Enter Amazon Prime – because Amazon focused on what people really hated.
You pay a yearly subscription, and you never have to look at shipping costs ever again.
Are you so old that you remember how lousy it was to order a taxi cab?
We aren’t talking about “hailing” a cab in downtown of a major city, we mean ordering a cab.
It was an awful, terrible experience, normally dealing with a surly dispatcher who seemed to care less whether you actually got where you wanted to go, and always seemed annoyed that you were even calling in the first palace.
Enter Lyft and Uber.
The dispatcher is your phone, you don’t have to worry about them writing down your address wrong, or reversing a street number, its all right there with GPS.
So when you look at your sports league, maybe start thinking about what people hate.
When we first started running sports leagues way back in the day, there were a few huge ideas, most for the leagues and 1 big one for the technology platform.
People might have hated dealing with city leagues, faxing in forms, and mailing in a check to the same place you pay your electric bill …
but they really hated … Captains Meetings.
Some city leagues required that you go to a 1 hour meeting before the season started, where someone would drone on about the rules that were the same every year, along with a few “new adjustments.”
People really hated these meetings – So when we started Underdog, we made one thing very very clear:
No Captains Meetings – Spend your time playing, and not in meetings.
Other city leagues to this day, along with some competing private leagues, force you to actually bring your own gear to the league.
We don’t mean cleats, or a football, or your lucky glove.
We mean they make you bring cases of softballs to give to the ump, or they make you go to a particular store to buy the specific leagues flag football belts. [Don’t forget to ask for Jimmy!]
People really hate that.
Another point of emphasis: we will always have the belts and softballs, that’s why you play with us and not someone else.
<of course you have them unless someone forgets them – hence the packing list options built into League Lab!>
Some leagues would even go a step further, and require that you leave 2 players behind to referee or umpire the next game.
Reminds me of the old joke that has become even more relevant today, about the comedian who goes to the grocery store and says “Oh no I was just going shopping, I wasn’t looking for a job at the checkout line.”
People sign up to play, not to ref. Yet many leagues require teams to provide their own refs, and then require those people to take a test or attend a ref meeting (another pre-season meeting?) to give them a base level of education.
Great for margins … but how many people do you think hate playing in a rec league, and then having to stay and referee someone who just waxed your team earlier in the season ?
You had to watch them beat you on the field, now you have to listen to them complain about your calls ?
Fun …
<Don’t get us wrong, if you are able to pull off the miracle of self-reffed leagues, League Lab does support all the tech of captains reporting their own scores! Good on you. >
By far the biggest innovation we started with is actually built into the DNA of League Lab.
It’s called TeamPayer
Born not out of what people love, but what captains HATED.
The number one reason people quit being captains was not schedules, or being bad at sports, or not having enough subs.
The number one reason that people quit being captains was that they got stiffed by their teammates for part, or sometimes all, of the league participation fee.
They signed up to get their friends or co-workers together for fun = what they loved
and they ended up having to be a treasurer and a bill collector = what they hate.
TeamPayer can be a revenue generator for a business on League Lab, but it didn’t start out that way.
It was born to solve what people hated … LOSING MONEY when they signed up a team for a rec sports league.
Captains are gold – you don’t want to lose them – you will have enough trouble hanging on to them even if you do everything right. So we gave them a powerful tool to ask for money electronically, have it go straight to the team balance, and maybe more importantly … gauge whether that 9th or 10th player was actually going to commit early to the team, or was gonna flake out, and ghost the captain.
If they keep ignoring your TeamPayer request before the league starts, they were probably gonna flake on you once the season started, unless of course, you let them play for free.
This idea is carried out through most of League Labs tools, because most entrepreneurs and league owners also hate wasting time on repetitive tasks like scheduling staff in a 3rd party program, or running payments, or communicating weather alerts.
But it started with TeamPayer, it started with what captains HATED. Because captains are the lifeblood of your future success whether youth or adult, rec or club or semi-pro.
When you start your league or scale your league, think about what players, captains, parents, and coaches HATE, and you just might end up creating a league they love.