Sportball's "Fun-First" Approach to Business

Jason D’Rocha first came to Sportball over 20 years ago as a part-time coach who helped craft their adaptive program for children with special needs. He fell in love with the company and their mission and rose to Director of Training, partnering with the University of Toronto’s occupational science and therapy teams to ensure programs were evidence-based and developmentally appropriate. When Sportball launched in Singapore in 2010, he moved there for several months to help the new team get off the ground. After that, he transitioned into serving as Director of Franchise Development & Support.

We sat down with Jason to explore how Sportball has built a system that’s both incredibly purposeful and incredibly scalable, discuss why their mission is so timely, and uncover what kind of people they’re hoping to build relationships with as they continue to expand across North America and beyond.

I liken it to how we all probably grew up, just going out and playing and having fun and coming home when the streetlights come on. That was probably something that most parents of today’s generation could relate to, where it was more incidental learning, and it was almost sink or swim to a degree, where, “Here’s the sport, kids participate. Those who are great at that sport can have a longer journey in that sport, and those who are who don’t fall away and have to figure out what’s next for them.”

And unfortunately, the vast majority of kids back then, if they didn’t have positive associations with sport as they got older, it’s not the first place that they turn to. Whereas I think today, what we’re finding is there’s a growing awareness of the opportunity that exists when a child has an experience like their very first sports experience. And so people are starting to pay attention a little bit more to the purpose behind the activity.

How effective is this coach, and what’s my role as a parent, and how can I get involved into being supportive of my child? There’s just a lot more information that’s available to parents now, so you can make more informed decisions.

But in that same vein, because it’s just become front and center for everybody, there is an opportunity for bad actors to get into this space to either profit off this space or take advantage of parents and young children in this space. In the right hands, youth sports can be wonderful, but in the wrong hands it can go terribly.

We have this motto at Sportball. We say, “Everything we do with purpose,” where skill, game, activity, and instruction has a purpose. And our job really is to make sure that kids, for one, are safe, number one, most important. Number two is they’re having fun. We believe that when a child is having fun, that’s the opportunity to keep their attention and then create teachable moments.

So at Sportball, our goal is to make sure that children are having so much fun that they don’t even realize that learning is taking place. That’s like our secret sauce.

And because we’ve had that approach, we’re able to be very purposeful with how we train our coaches and then how we communicate with parents. Our goal really is to ensure that we can educate parents on how to properly interact and engage with their little ones, and how to, provide positive support and then making sure that our coaches also understand how to connect with a child. See the child first before the sport.

And even if they’re an amazing soccer player or basketball player, you have to still make sure that child is your number one priority. Make sure that they feel comfortable in their skin, that they feel self self-confident, that they feel safe. And then meet the child where they’re at and then build slowly so that child’s competency goes up and their confidence goes up.

Our goal really is to make sure that if a coach goes out to a program, you shouldn’t be able to tell who’s having more fun, the child or the coach. That’s the way that we approach fun.

I believe children learn what they live, and attitude is contagious. So, if you can see that this person is here not to evaluate my performance, not to evaluate whether or not I win or lose or hit the shot or miss a shot, but just to make sure that I have a smile on my face, that I’m enjoying this process, and that I wanna come back next week, that’s how we define fun.

This is just as much of a business as it is a wonderful program for kids. And so you want to make sure that the people that you partner with are sincere in their interest in the company. There’s a lot of ways that somebody can earn a dollar, but we wanna work with people who genuinely have an interest in making a positive impact in children’s lives — they have an affinity for sports and recreation and physical activity.

They believe in this whole concept of developing a child’s physical literacy and improving their social skills because they are essentially life skills that they can trade on as they get older. Everything that I’ve learned on a court has transferred into my corporate life as a leader at this organization.

So, our goal really is to make sure that there’s a lot of positive associations with kids at a young age. We want to make sure that, if we’re gonna be franchising this concept to somebody, that they also have that same type of mindset and approach. Once we’ve established that they’re passionate about this and they’re purpose-driven, I think the other piece is, what are the skill sets that they have that they can trade on as well? So, do they have a business development background or a sales background or a marketing background? Because essentially you are selling yourself, right?

This is a service business, and so, when you meet a child or you meet a parent or a program partner for the first time, they judge a book by its cover. They want to make sure that you’re safe to be around children and young adults. So we want to make sure that they’re, professional, their communication is on-point, and they’re genuinely interested in making a difference.

But also their organizational skills are there; they understand how to execute a playbook so that they can make sure that they are bringing value to a potential program partner, or value to a parent or a school or a childcare center.

Our motto is we look for people who are talented but imperfect. They get to bring all of their skills to the table, but they get to use the playbooks that we’ve developed over thirty years that have been proven across Canada, the US, and into Singapore.

Toronto and Calgary are both corporate operations. So, we don’t just sell this concept to other people. We believe in it so much that we actually run it ourselves in two major markets across the system. We hire our own coaches, we train our own coaches, we secure partnerships with community centers and schools and childcares and daycares, and then we send our coaches out for them to deliver these wonderful programs. We find coaches that believe in this mission, and they deliver this program for us.

We currently service 70,000 children a year. We’re trying to hit 100,000 children by 2028. We can only do that so much on our own. Our goal is to find people that are like-minded, that love this business, so that we can work together with them, whether they’re a franchisee or one of our coaches. We want to send them into new markets, and then they can build businesses and build careers where they can hire and train other coaches. So that’s how you scale.

There’s only so much you can do on your own. But if you partner with like-minded individuals, they have the opportunities to reach more children, or they can hire more coaches, secure more franchise opportunities for themselves, and add to the units that they own.

So, for example, I have a franchisee in Quebec who owns six different franchise markets, from Quebec to Winnipeg to Ottawa, all the way over to Boston, and he continues to grow his business. So, this does really give you an opportunity to leverage the team that you build and get them to also continue to build a career that they’re happy and can and proud of.

I think that this might be the greatest evolution that we’ve had at Sportball. When we first got started, there was a lot that we learned through trial and error, which is wonderful because you can’t replicate that. You can’t train that. You have to actually just get into the arena and get your hands dirty and learn the lessons that way.

But over the course of the twenty years that I’ve been here at Sportball, and considerably since it was purchased by GoodCapital Partners in 2023, the support systems and the infrastructure that has been integrated into this model has just been incredible. So, right now at Sportball, if you were a franchisee and just joined, not only would you get all of the playbooks for business development and marketing and hiring and training, we have an online learning management system called Acorn, where every one of our franchisees and coaches around the world can dial in, and they can see how a class is delivered. They can hear what it sounds like.

They can see what it looks like. They get all the manuals, the workshops.

There’s a mentorship program for coaches so that they get hired. They start as a rookie, but then they turn from rookie to lead, from lead to mentor, from mentor to master. And we have a Manager of Program Standards who’s been part of the company for 28 years, who actually trains coaches around the world virtually and in person here in Toronto.

We have a full marketing team that works really closely with our franchisees so that franchisees have all of the marketing assets that they need for social media and LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They can just make sure that it’s market-specific. They can take our template, make sure that it’s market-specific, and then they can post those.

We also have a growth coach that works together literally week after week with our franchisees to make sure that they’re moving the needle in the ways that they need to, whether it’s, revenue-driven calls or hiring and training calls or business development. The growth coach helps the franchisees stay grounded, stay focused on their business plan, and then hopefully hit their targets.

We also have quarterly franchise town halls where we’re very transparent system-wide with how our business is doing. We talk about the improvements in any individual playbook that we have in the company, from marketing to technology to even systems and training. We make sure that we bring franchisees together for growth labs.

Every three or four weeks, we have a growth lab where franchisees dial in and they share ideas with one another. And in October, we’re actually gonna be having our first franchise conference celebrating 30 years being in business. And we’re gonna be bringing all of our franchisees out for a cruise to The Bahamas for four days.

So, anyone that joins the system now, we’re gonna get a chance to do our next town hall in the fall on a Regent Cruise Line. It’s all gonna be about setting goals, setting targets, and working towards those targets as a team.

I’ve give a lot of credit to the CEO, Quinten Griffiths. He’s a visionary, and he’s also a dad and he has young children. And so, he really appreciates this whole concept of developing a child’s physical literacy and a love for sports. But the one thing that he said was, “We want to make sure that we’re not here just to generate profit for ourselves. We wanna invest and make this organization better so we can scale effectively.”

I’ve been here for 20 years. I met my wife at Sportball. Both of my girls have gone through Sportball programming. So, I would love for Sportball to be as much of a household name as karate or swimming. I wish everybody who wanted their child to be exposed to sports would say, “The first thing you gotta do is put them in a Sportball class, ’cause they’re gonna get a multi-sport experience, and they’ll find out what they love.”

We’ve been very opportunistic with international expansion overseas outside of North America, such as Singapore in 2010. We are gonna be opening our doors in Gurgaon, New Delhi, India on June 15th. The franchisee there has built a state-of-the-art facility with a beautiful gym and air filters. Right now, it’s 48 degrees Celsius in New Delhi outdoors, so kids can’t even go outside and play. So, he’s built this phenomenal facility in India so that children have a place to congregate and explore multi-sport.

But in North America, we have the infrastructure. We leverage all of the gymnasiums in schools, in childcare facilities, in community centers, and our focus initially was making sure that we expanded right across Canada, but the US is our number one priority. We’re in five states in the US. We see that there’s a growing awareness in youth sports for children to be exposed to multi-sport at a young age, and just for the fun, not for performance, not for any kind of outcome-driven success where winning matters most.

Our goal really is to make sure that we expand methodically throughout the US, purposely throughout the US, partnering with like-minded individuals to the point where we are also considering opening another corporate territory in the US because we just believe so much in the opportunity that exists there.

And so, if there are individuals who are interested in franchising with us in the US, we are more than happy to chat with them. Right now, we’re in Texas, Arizona, New York, California, and Massachusetts and we wanna grow from there.

We’re also looking to collaborate with other like-minded organizations in the US. It’s not just about finding individuals who wanna buy a business or buy a franchise or to coach. The goal really is to partner with places like the Aspen Institute, who just put on Project Play. We’re bringing awareness to the Children’s Bill of Rights and so many other organizations that just believe that children have the right to fun and safe environments.

We also need to work together to make sure that all the adults around the table are making responsible decisions. Not just adult decisions that benefit us, but decisions that actually benefit the kids. We’re looking to work with those kinds of individuals as well.