Jon Patricov
Jonathan Soros
c/o Athletes Limitless
888 seventh Avenue
New York, N.Y.
Gents:
To start with, I have to commend you to your collective service to girls’s sports activities in america because the launch of Athletes Limitless in 2020.
It was a horrible time to start out 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 may have spawned two softball promotions, one other for basketball, one for volleyball, and, till yesterday, one for girls’s lacrosse.
The suspension of the lacrosse league, I really feel, offers you, your advisory board, your traders, and your advertising and marketing companions a beautiful alternative to open a brand new chapter in your portfolio.
It’s the sport of subject hockey.
This straightforward recreation has taken many varieties over the centuries, from Native Individuals in southern Arizona to varsity college students in Massachusetts within the mid-1870s. However the historic path right here within the U.S. might be traced to the work of Constance Applebee, who, just like the historic character Johnny Appleseed, planted the sport in varied locales all through america throughout her century on this earth.
It was a sport with a powerful presence via the Nineteen Seventies, when the U.S. girls’s nationwide staff was top-of-the-line on this planet, medaling within the 1979 FIH World Cup and the 1984 Summer season Olympics. However the overwhelming success of ladies’s soccer on the grass roots right through to the skilled stage 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 prime of the soccer pyramid, subject hockey doesn’t have that.
Too, the variety of organized varsity subject 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 colleges.
Jon and Jonathan, that’s the place you are available in.
There must be an Athletes Limitless subject 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 high quality 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 subject hockey competitors sponsored by the Harrow stick firm introduced collectively quite a few 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 facet, competed.
Athletes Limitless is an idea which, I feel, can remake the best way subject hockey is offered 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 you want to 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 facet is, I feel, a straightforward factor to do.
The marketplace for the sport of subject hockey is, to borrow a phrase, limitless. The event equipment within the U.S. has led to a few of the biggest technical subject hockey gamers which have ever been produced stateside. All they want is a solution to develop their expertise and their intangibles in a aggressive surroundings.
How about it?
Yours in hockey,
Al Mattei
Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com
