Sports Leagues are just another business … and small business is always about one thing:
People.
When you first start you will want everyone to like you … heck you will want everyone to love you!
The reality is – out of 10 people 1 or 2 will love you, 1 or 2 will hate you, and the rest will think you are cool some days and not care at all about you on most other days.
This is how people work – Doesn’t matter whether you are selling coffee or ice cream or co-rec kickball leagues.
You will have a few raving fans, a few people that hate you, and also some people who will hate certain things you do, and still keep showing up as customers.
We don’t mean they will hate you for raising prices, or ignoring them … everyone hates high prices, everyone hates being ignored.
We mean that in every small business you will realize that you cant make everyone happy, because in life you can’t make everyone happy.
So as you evolve as a small biz, you need to learn and understand how to make the right people mad.
We used to follow the normal setup for a bracket – 8 teams or 16 teams, just like march madness, just like brackets are supposed to work.
And when you follow the right formula for a bracket, most of the time you end up with really lousy first round games – sure once and a while there is a big upset, or a cinderalla story – but when the 1 seed plays the 8 seed, well … normally the one seed wins.
If you have 10 teams – have the 1 play the ten seed. If you have 12 – well you get the idea.
After a while of watching this, we thought, man this is a silly setup, and also what a lousy way to end the season. You make the playoffs, get absolutely waxed by the one seed … and then we say … “Hey would you like to sign up again next season!?!”
So 15 years ago we started experimenting – Instead of the 1 vs 10 and 2 vs 9 setup we moved things around, now the 7 seed played the 10 seed, the 8 seed played the 9th seed and then the winners of those two games would go back into the normal doom that awaited them in the bracket.
This way 2 of the 4 worst teams in the bracket were guaranteed to win a playoff game, even if they got waxed in the next round.
More importantly, these 7 vs 10 and 8 vs 9 matchups proved to be some of the funnest and most entertaining games that refs and umps would be involved with.
It was just such a better experience, you know it must be good because the NBA started this play-in format years later, expanding the playoffs with play-in games … you are welcome NBA.
Well … it was a better experience for almost everyone. One group sometimes got mad …
The 1 seeds !
“This isn’t how a bracket is supposed to work …”
“This is unfair to us …”
“The team playing us now has all the momentum …”
We heard a lot of complaints about this new format from teams that still won around 80% of the matchups.
So in your sports league, do you have the confidence to make the right people mad ?
When you make calls on banning certain bats in your softball league, you are going to make someone mad who might have spent $300 on a softball bat, and that might be ok.
When you change your league rules to penalize teams for the playoffs who have forefieted during the regular season, maybe dropping their seeding or maybe keeping them out of the playoffs alltogether, you make one group really mad …
The team that forfeited twice during the regular season … and might forfeit again … especially if they are playing the one seed !
You will have tons of formulas and tie-breakers for your league, but at the end of the day its all people. People who will be happy, and sad, and mad –
Sometimes they will be mad when things go wrong, when games get rained out, when you have to cancel games because you have a scheduling conflict with a school or a youth league … that’s never fun.
But sometimes they will be mad when you make the league better because it doesn’t necessarily make things better for them. Maybe they found a flaw in your rulebook, and it takes a couple of seasons for you to fix it. Maybe they are used to always being at the top of the leaderboard, and you implement changes and rules that flatten things out … for everyone.
When you roll out the new rule, and they get mad, how will you respond. Will you buckle, will you change your mind? Or will you say “You know, maybe we made the right people mad…”
Sometimes in order to grow a league to hundreds or thousands of teams, you need to protect certain teams, make certain rules for fairness, and definitely make the right people mad.
– League Lab