Instead of building kids up, sports were often tearing them down.įrank set out to fix it. How can kids ever learn a sport if they are constantly told they are not good enough to play and are made to sit on the bench? Kids who didn’t have fun, or who didn’t get playing time, often dropped out of sports entirely. Frank discovered a destructively competitive, highly political culture that was turning sports into a negative experience for kids. The problems in youth sports ran deeper, and it was heartbreaking. In researching youth sports, he found the same problems. Disorganization, lack of communication, and inconvenience were cited as big problems.

And unlike adult players, kids play sports year-round and will typically play multiple sports.īut could recreational youth sports succeed as a business? Frank had learned from his adult leagues that it was the overall player experience that set his programs apart.

If you provide a great experience when the kids are young, you can count on renewals for years to come. household has two kids, if you get one child to play, you will likely get both. At face value, the youth sports business opportunity appeared much larger than adult sports. With a baby on the way, Frank began wondering if his concept could apply to youth sports. While continuing to operate his booming business in New York, Frank Fiume and his wife Nadine moved to Tampa, Florida, in 1996. ABA Sports grew to more than 900 teams in just six years. While most players wanted to compete, they also wanted to have fun and make friends – but fun often took a backseat. Other leagues were often disorganized and marred by hypercompetitiveness. “Adult sports leagues had been run the same way for 30 years,” he says. It paid well, but “I had no passion for it.” So Frank, a baseball fanatic from Queens, New York, decided to start his own men’s softball league. Before Frank Fiume started his first sports league, he was a medical sales representative who called on open heart surgeons.

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