Jon Patricov
Jonathan Soros
c/o Athletes Limitless
888 seventh Avenue
New York, N.Y.
Gents:
Initially, I have to commend you to your collective service to girls’s sports activities in the USA because the launch of Athletes Limitless in 2020.
It was a horrible time to begin up any enterprise, a lot much less one involving sports activities, which had been having to make some sacrifices within the wake of the worldwide COVID-19 shutdown.
But, 4 years later, your imaginative and prescient has grown. You’ve got spawned two softball promotions, one other for basketball, one for volleyball, and, till yesterday, one for ladies’s lacrosse.
The suspension of the lacrosse league, I really feel, provides you, your advisory board, your buyers, and your advertising companions an exquisite alternative to open a brand new chapter in your portfolio.
It’s the sport of discipline hockey.
This easy sport has taken many varieties over the centuries, from Native People in southern Arizona to school college students in Massachusetts within the mid-1870s. However the historic path right here within the U.S. will be traced to the work of Constance Applebee, who, just like the historic character Johnny Appleseed, planted the sport in numerous locales all through the USA throughout her century on this earth.
It was a sport with a robust presence by the Nineteen Seventies, when the U.S. girls’s nationwide group was probably the greatest on the planet, medaling within the 1979 FIH World Cup and the 1984 Summer time Olympics. However the overwhelming success of ladies’s soccer on the grass roots all over to the skilled degree has led to an general stagnation of the sport within the final 25 years.
Whereas the variety of golf equipment enjoying organized second-division girls’s soccer quantity almost 200, with two professional leagues on the high of the soccer pyramid, discipline hockey doesn’t have that.
Too, the variety of organized varsity discipline hockey groups has modified little since 1998: round 80 in NCAA Division I, about 25 in Division II, and a bit greater than 150 in Division III, fed by about 1,950 U.S. secondary faculties.
Jon and Jonathan, that’s the place you are available in.
There must be an Athletes Limitless discipline hockey promotion, one by which a gaggle of about 80 athletes will make up 4 groups on a weekly foundation and play their video games on one of many many tremendous water-based synthetic turf pitches situated not solely at Division I universities, however even on a number of high-school campuses. I can present you good turf installations at a few membership amenities in Frontenac, Mo. and Spring Metropolis, Pa. There are additionally multimillion-dollar amenities in Midlothian, Va. and Glendale, Ariz.
There are, I feel, sufficient gamers and umpires who could make this work. Just a few years in the past, an expert discipline hockey competitors sponsored by the Harrow stick firm introduced collectively quite a lot of groups over the course of a weekend at Temple College, resulting in a champion successful a money prize on the finish. Lots of people, together with potential members of the U.S. girls’s nationwide aspect, competed.
Athletes Limitless is an idea which, I feel, can remake the way in which discipline hockey is introduced and seen right here within the States. The factors system utilized in different athletic pursuits within the Athletes Limitless portfolio can be utilized within the sport; all it is advisable do is use the identical sorts of metrics that had been first exhibited within the mid-2010s throughout an FIH competitors. Throughout halftime, gamers’ passing numbers had been proven, and culling these figures collectively right into a system to price gamers on their efficiency in the direction of a successful aspect is, I feel, a simple factor to do.
The marketplace for the sport of discipline hockey is, to borrow a phrase, limitless. The event equipment within the U.S. has led to among the best technical discipline hockey gamers which have ever been produced stateside. All they want is a method to develop their expertise and their intangibles in a aggressive atmosphere.
How about it?
Yours in hockey,
Al Mattei
Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com
