You can operate year-round with i9 Sports, which offers more diversity than some sports league, kid-focused franchises with our broad sports offerings
There are seasonal franchises, and then there are franchises that operate in all seasons. i9 Sports is the latter, because our kids franchise offers sports that will allow you to run multiple seasons year-round so you can always be generating revenue.
“We want to provide our franchise owners the avenue to make a really successful business by offering multiple options and being more diverse,” says Alli Wentzell, Manager of Sports Programming and Education. “But for our customers it’s really the right thing to do in terms of child development as well is providing multiple sports so they can try all the ones that they possibly want that we offer.”
The starting sports
We offer soccer, flag football, baseball, basketball, volleyball and ZIP Lacrosse, and some locations offer cheerleading as well. But we ask every i9 Sports franchisee to start off with at least three of our four core sports.
“The recommended formula for success has every i9 Sports franchise starting with soccer, flag football and baseball in their first season at one venue,” Wentzell says. “Soccer specifically is a really popular and growing sport, but also has a high female participation rate, more so than flag football.”
Our kids franchise offers something for everyone
Offering at least three sports has benefits for both franchisees and customers.
“Oftentimes, a franchise owner might come in and only want to offer one sport to see how it goes. But you just don’t know exactly what sport is going to take off in what season. So it’s really important to offer at least three sports in your first season to see what the community responds to,” Wentzell says. “And then just keep at it, building in size of those sports and adding more offerings, more often. There’s no reason that all four of our core sports can’t run year round and be very successful.”
From the customers’ perspective, multiple offerings allow for sport sampling. The average i9 Sports season length is around 7 weeks.
“A majority of our customers play multiple sports throughout the year,” Wentzell notes. “One thing that we’re really focused on right now and we feel is very important to children’s development is sport sampling and being able to try multiple sports and play multiple sports year round.”
Own an i9 Sports franchise
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