Tales of a Sports & Business Optimist: Episode 1--"Naivete Can Be Gold"

What do William Webb Ellis, Major League Rugby, and the Utah Warriors all have in common? A perhaps naive, but confident belief in a sometimes uncertain path ahead.

In looking back, on those years with the Utah Warriors and Major League Rugby (MLR), had I known what we were about to embark upon by starting a professional sports team and league, I likely would, or at least should, have had some serious second thoughts. But that, in essence, is the lesson I’ve taken from our work in the early days: That sometimes having a healthy dose of naivete can be a good thing, in life and in business.?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we live life with the brand of naivete that is completely “unhinged with reality” but I am proposing that healthy inexperience, the kind that stares into the void and sees something of substance in the darkness and, above all that has the daily courage to walk deeper into that void no matter what comes at them, is as valuable as gold.?

Allow me to recount some of the experiences with the Warriors and the MLR from 2015 to the inaugural season in 2018 that I believe will help elucidate this thought.?

THE GENESIS

In 2015, there was momentum for a new professional rugby competition in the USA funded and owned by a single person. The league was called “PRO”, short for “Professional Rugby Organization.” At the time I was in what would become my final year of coaching at BYU, where we were fortunate to have just won our fifth national championship in May of that year, working alongside some amazing players and staff including David Smyth, Wayne Tarawhiti and Justen Nadauld, among many other amazing contributors.

With Utah’s history of rugby success, including multiple high school, collegiate, and club national champions, and with my appreciation for what this state and this sport had done for me and my family up until 2015, I felt that Utah needed, nay it deserved, to be a part of this or some form of the forthcoming competition of professional rugby in the US.?

At the time, this community had already contributed so much to the American rugby landscape and if the evolution of the sport was to take place at a professional level, the Utah rugby community needed a seat at the table and, candidly I felt the insatiable pull, perhaps naively, to chase down this new and exciting challenge to put Utah on the professional rugby map.?

However, in our conversations with the owner of PRO, it quickly became clear that the concept didn’t have legs. It sounded and looked good on paper, but in the end, there hadn’t been any sustainable professional sports league that successfully used a single-owner structure that was sustainable (e.g., AAFL, XFL 1.0, etc).?

And, unfortunately, that is exactly what happened when PRO folded in the same year of its actual launch in 2016. Thus, in order for the next evolution of the sport in North America to take place, we knew that a new and different model needed to step in and fill the void.?

North America is widely considered the “Final Frontier” for the growth and expansion of rugby within the international landscape. With the USA being the largest sports and entertainment market in the world it comes with challenges that rugby has yet to crack. In fact, PRO wasn’t the first to make this attempt, the NA4, the Super League and others, have all tried but no one had yet found the “magic” to unlocking the power of the American sports and entertainment market on behalf of rugby.?

People, even “rugby people,” forget that while the sport is almost as old as soccer, it has only been truly “professional” since 1995. That puts rugby in its teenage years relative to soccer, NFL, NBA and other top-tier professional leagues or sports. In other words, professional rugby, both international and club versions, are still working out their respective commercial kinks and are looking to find the right models to live up to their full potential on, but especially off the field.

And the model most widely adopted in the early professional age of rugby has largely been a “union-based” model–not to be confused with a “union” in the context of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. In rugby, the national governing bodies are called “unions” or better stated, they were historically amateur-based entities to drive and administer the game on a variety of levels.

For rugby in North America to stand even a whisper’s chance of survival, the union-based model wasn’t going to fly given the capital outlay required to penetrate the market. And we had already seen that the single-owner model wouldn’t work either. We recognized that if we were going to find a better solution, we needed to have a model where the hundreds of millions of dollars of financial load required to crack the North American market could be shared among partners and sustained with a long enough financial runway to scale and eventually generate the value needed for investors to justify the capital required.?

In that vein, mimicry is the best form of flattery and we felt the Major League Soccer (MLS) single-entity model would provide that long-term stability. If the MLS had successfully used this model to finally crack the code of the North American sports and entertainment market with the world’s largest and most successful professional sport in soccer, then the MLR certainly could do the same with another global game like rugby.?

A small group of folks including Joseph Hood, Jamison Davis, and Ken Rivera and I had already formed an initial “beta” entity called Rugby Utah Ventures (RUV; the future holding company of the Utah Warriors) early in 2015 to begin seeding some of these conversations.?

And while there could be a separate novel riddled with the many stories to be told from incorporating RUV in 2015 until the official launch of the Warriors and the MLR in 2018, including the formation of the Rugby Utah Selects team (which won two club national sevens championships in 2016 and 2017) and the experience of having a contract with the late great Jonah Lomu to grow his brand in the US before his untimely passing, the overarching theme of these years for RUV was an abundance of mistakes and paths explored that led to nowhere before the eventual path was found that led to the formation of the MLR.?

“HOUSTON, WE HAVE A LEAGUE”

So in 2016, over two hot and humid days on August 18th and 19th a few crazy but passionate daredevils decided it was time to start building this alternative option where approximately seven groups from the US rugby community members met in Houston, TX to initiate discussions.

Central to this Houston convergence of naive, but passionate rugby souls was Thierry Dauppin and Richard Osborn with the Austin Huns and the folks with the Houston Strikers (now the MLR’s Houston Sabercats), including Marty Power and Jeremy Turner, with Mike Loya operating that organization from behind the scenes. Others involved included representatives from other top domestic club teams like the Dallas Griffins, the Seattle Saracens, OMBAC and Glendale.?

Austin and Houston for their parts were at the forefront of pushing the domestic “professionalization” conversation. Austin was working to build its own facility and professional team, while Houston was well underway with rugby-centric stadium plans already in the works.?

So in the room on that auspicious day in Houston, Utah didn’t come to the table as a proven leader compared to Austin or Houston or even some of the other club leaders that were present; but, we did have something (or rather someone) the rest of the groups listened to: Dean Howes.?

Dean was present for that Houston meeting after having joined RUV as a consultant in early 2016 to support our planning and interest to professionalize the game in America. A former member of MLS’ board and a former partner and president of Real Salt Lake, Dean was uniquely positioned to support, not only RUV, but also, this loosely-formed gaggle of rugby enthusiasts to lay the foundation of this alternate North American professional rugby competition.

Even before this meeting in Houston, Dean repeatedly would do his best to caution me by saying something to the effect of “This is going to be the hardest thing that you’ll ever do. I don’t think you or these others fully understand what you’re about to get into.” And at the time, I was modestly successful, working and operating businesses in the human capital side of the tech sector and had tried my hand at other businesses with decent success.?

I had also been self-employed even before I graduated from college, so in my reasonably youthful self-assurance, when Dean tried to prepare me for what lay ahead, I would often shrug off his well-intended dowsings of metaphorical cold water. But in reality, Dean was above all ensuring that my personal resolve wouldn’t be extinguished in what he knew would be the dark days that he knew were ahead of us.?

Regardless, those same words from Dean and more were heard in that Houston meeting, and every party present in that Houston hotel conference room committed to begin working on forming a league modeled on the MLS single-entity model with Dean serving as the early Commissioner and leader of this band of rugby fanatics.

FAMILY & FRIENDS FUNDS

By this point in late 2016 and early 2017 the early founding partners of RUV were disjointed and phasing themselves into different directions for a variety of reasons leaving me the onus to adjust from being involved with one area of RUV’s business to supporting more, if not all, of RUV’s operational needs, and above all it’s fundraising efforts.?

Up to then, RUV was meagerly funded using what could only be described as pre-seed or pre-proof-of-concept funding.? We didn’t know how specifically we’d build an ROI pathway and overall value for investors given that the MLR was still, from an investor’s perspective, just an idea on a piece of paper. In the end, any investment in RUV hinged on the overall value of the MLR so building a clear “ask” for the investment pitches was tenuous at best due to the nascent nature of the league.?

Supporting this stage of growth, however, was my good friend Wade Sherman, an amazing man and leader at Adobe as well as a California-Berkeley and BYU rugby alumnus. Wade, along with some of my own personal savings and resources from my other businesses, would in essence help us prop up much of what RUV was able to do early on in planning and managing its growth in 2016 and 2017.?

But, as noted above, given the lack of an actual proof-of-concept comparable league domestically or even internationally, investment at the levels required for a venture like the MLR and RUV was slim to none, and slim had left the building. We were a true “start-up” of professional sports that had a vision, but we had scarce resources to make that vision a reality.?

Ahead of the inaugural 2018 season of the MLR we neared the first large capital call in late 2017 for the newly-announced MLR and RUV had no money. The resources between Wade, myself and some of our smaller investors had gotten us to this point, but the next level of this business was something neither one of us were able to tackle alone.??

This was a key moment in RUV’s history: I was fighting the fight externally to drum up investors, while also finding ways to internally solve partnership issues within RUV. There was a likely chance that because of either set of issues, RUV would fail.?

All in all, with the internal legal issues of RUV as well as the lack of investment dollars my own personal savings and mental reserves, were beginning to dry up and one of those “hard moments” Dean kept speaking of was now front and center.?

We had to make a choice: find a way to make the first major MLR capital call or be sidelined to the launch of the MLR in 2018, which would mean RUV would be unlikely to return to the MLR mix, and thus lose our “seat at the table.” And if that was the choice, it also meant the likely loss of large sums of friends’ and personal capital along with the hard work contributed by many for the last two-plus years.

While laboring through the countless investor meetings and the countless pitch decks and presentations, my faith, along with my financial and emotional optimism began to wane heavily. I had not taken a paycheck in the years I was working on RUV and my personal time and resources along with my other business resources were nearing empty. We were able to bring some small-figure investors to “keep the lights on” so to speak, but I was beginning to genuinely believe that we had failed at what we set out to do: to help build professional rugby in America and to ensure Utah’s amazing rugby community was sitting at the table.?

Personally, I was at what I believed was my breaking point along with what I also thought was the impending end of RUV.?

While commiserating to my father and mother on all of this and sharing my on-going frustration that these possible investors “just didn’t see it” and that I was more than befuddled as to why no one was buying what I was selling, I recounted to them the personal financial and emotional toll this was taking on me and my family to which my parents asked me a question that I never expected: “What can we do to help?”

I sort of shrugged off the question at first thinking they were suggesting they’d bring my family and a casserole or something. But after I nonchalantly said, “Nothing, just needed to vent to someone,” my mom followed up and asked “What if we helped you financially? What would that look like?” I can’t even begin to describe how someone could feel so elated and simultaneously sick to my stomach after I heard that question. It was hope wrapped up in the worst kind of fear and I genuinely didn’t know what I should say or how I should respond. So I just told my mom, “Thank you, but I’ll see what else I can sort out.”

Now, my parents aren’t overly wealthy, but they’re also not struggling and were on the cusp of my dad’s retirement after decades of running his own successful medical practice.

And I've never considered seriously mingling business with family, let alone asking my parents to be major financial contributors to this extremely risky business. And with no other options presenting themselves, along with a looming MLR capital call deadline, the avenue offered by my parents was one I tossed and turned over for days.?

After a lot of sleepless nights and what can only be described as some of the most anxious moments of my life up to that point, I hesitantly went back to my dad and asked if he and my mom were serious and if they knew what this would mean for all of us. He assured me that they both had discussed the concept and were willing to support me and RUV however they could.?

So, with the permission of my parents to share this story, in order to fund the capital required for RUV’s survival and launch in 2018, my parents would mortgage their home, the home that they raised their family in for over 30 years, and contribute that money as a loan to fund that first MLR capital call and RUV for the initial part of 2018.

While my anxiety was at an all-time high knowing the risks I had just exposed my amazing parents to with no full guarantee of follow-on investment or funding, on the eve of my father’s retirement, I kept coming back to my belief, dare I say, my naive optimism, in the opportunity ahead: the MLR and RUV truly had the chance to finally crack the nut of North American professional rugby and we were going to be there for the launch of it all.

OPENING DAY: MARCH 30, 2018

RUV had just launched the Utah Warriors brand in and around the time of my parent’s loan in late 2017 and we were excited to take some of Utah’s rich rugby talent and launch it onto the professional stage of the MLR. While finding good players wasn’t the hardest part for the Warriors early on, the real issue was how to pay for all the needs of a first-year professional rugby team on the meager funds that we did have, largely from the loan my parents had made to RUV. We had no facilities, stadium, offices or commercial staff, let alone we didn’t have an established culture nor brand upon which to lean on. All of that had to come from scratch and with some serious creative thinking on how to solve problems without money.

As such, we continued to just make it work using, what the world of professional sports would especially consider, strange and unorthodox solutions. We held team meetings at Silicon Slopes’ offices and meeting space in Lehi, UT. We trained at a soccer field across the street from those offices and our staff, including our medical staff, helped transport equipment to and from training in their own vehicles to treat and help players in parking garages or on sidewalks next to the field before and after training.?

When we traveled, we ate PB&J sandwiches as a team because we couldn’t afford more. And if a $100 match ball was kicked over the stands in the stadium at games, you sure as hell knew I kept an eye on if the ball boys got it back. With four to six match balls in circulation each game, you can only imagine how anxiously trained my eye was on watching where those balls flew, but above all if we had a full complement at the end of each home game.?

Said differently, if there was a nickel on that ground, you can best believe I picked it up and put it in the RUV checking account. Nothing was out of bounds when we considered how to pay for or, in many cases, early on, trade for the item or service needed. In other words, we just had to make it work, all of us including the players, the coaches, and the other staff we had along for the ride.?

2018 and the years leading up to it, have countless more stories riddled within them that won’t be told here, including a high-dollar title sponsor balking at their sizable bill for no legitimate reason, players and staff members skirting the boundaries of what “appropriate” off-the-field interactions were, and many more. But the one that means the most to me and the one that reminds me of the reward that came from naively setting out on this journey is the very first game of the Utah Warriors.?

The Warriors’ inaugural game was set against the Glendale Raptors in an exhibition match on March 30, 2018. Glendale was arguably one of the top sides entering the MLR given their success at the elite amateur level leading up the MLR’s formation. And I knew winning that game was likely out of the question.?

But in the midst of the lead-up to this launch of the Warriors officially on the pitch was a small kink in the planning two weeks before this inaugural game. We were slated to host Glendale at the newly built Zions Bank Stadium in Herriman, UT, but due to an elevator not being included in the design and buildout of the stadium for ADA access, the owners of the venue, Real Salt Lake (RSL), were not able to get Zions Bank Stadium cleared in time for the March 30th game.?

As such, RSL moved us over to what was then called Rio Tinto Stadium. The only problem was, they were moving us from a 5,000 seat stadium to a 20,000 seat stadium and we wanted to ensure that the Warriors’ first game ever had the presence and feel of a top-tier professional event. Even if we sold out Zions Bank Stadium and just moved those people to Rio Tinto Stadium, 5,000 people would look like nothing inside of a 20,000 seat venue.?

Again, we had to get creative and find ways to just make it work. We needed to get people to come and experience rugby and to experience the Warriors brand for the first time. The game would have all the trappings of a major league sports experience that American fans were used to, so we pulled out the stops as best we could. But I worried if that would be enough? Would anyone show up? Would the Warriors get blown out by Glendale? My anxiety was minimally at a 5 or 6 Xanax pill level.?

As the game approached, the staff on all fronts rallied and we prepared for the March 30th match. As the kick-off time of 7pm rolled around, I hovered anxiously around all of the entry gates to see what the crowd size would be. And to my surprise and relief, people began to trickle in. And then the trickle grew and lines began to form and by the time of kick-off lines were wrapping around the stadium because the stadium staff wasn’t scaled large enough to handle the size of the crowd.?

The attendees of that game blew past what the Rio Tinto Stadium staff expected and eventually we just had to start letting people in because they wouldn’t have gotten in before halftime. In the end, close to 10K people came to this game and completely blew away my expectations.

On the field, I was similarly still hopeful for a good showing, but, as mentioned, didn’t expect a win in our first game. With all of the years, hours and veritable lost sleep and lost money, my stomach and emotions were on a knife’s edge to say the least. By the time kick-off came, despite my relief at the good crowd size, my fingernails had been eaten raw and while sitting in my seat my leg vibrated worse than a teenager’s smartphone as I waited for the rugby to actually start.?

Following the kick-off and short period of play, the Warriors were awarded a penalty which was kicked to touch (out of bounds) giving the Warriors the line out near mid-field in the 2nd minute of the game. After the lineout and a few phases from the Warriors some deft interchange between twin brothers and former BYU All Americans Josh and Jared Whippy saw the Warriors find some space with the latter Whippy slicing through the Glendale defense. Before you knew it Whippy had the support of another amazing Utah-product, Ben Nichols, on Whippy’s inside shoulder. Whippy would make the inside pass to Nichols who would go on to outpace the covering Glendale defense to notch the Warriors’ first ever try and the first try of the game .?

Needless to say, I literally just about leapt out of my body when I saw Ben finish that amazing 40+ meter team try. I ran down to the end of the Rio Tinto Stadium owner’s suite that we were sitting in, pumped my fist and screamed so loud I think my kids were frightened of the apparent Mr. Hyde that emerged in full force.?

The raw emotion of that moment was my own personal exclamation point on what started in 2015. I didn’t fully know what we were setting out to do three years prior, but for that one moment in time and in front of a crowd that blew past my expectations, I celebrated as a man possessed for the excitement and relief of finally seeing some of the proof of what we had only begun to dream about up, perhaps naively, to that point. Needless to say, I was on a veritable cloud nine while at the same time of being on the verge of crying like a baby.?

In the end, Glendale would go on to win 42-15, but the Warriors had made a respectable statement on and off the pitch: That a group of people, who set out to build something special, whether they fully knew what they were doing at the time or not, learned that they can succeed and do hard things in spite of the many reasons people say they shouldn’t or can’t.?

SUMMARY

The underlying lesson of my experience from 2015-2018 with the Utah Warriors and the MLR is that we can often let the fear of failure or uncertainty get in the way of just getting started.??

If I had known I was going to expose my friends and parents to the financial risk we did or if I’d have known how much personal stress and debt I would incur in the lead-up to the launch of the Warriors and the MLR in 2018, I believe, in all honesty, that I’d have not likely started this journey in 2015. I would have likely stuck with other paths that were more lucrative and certainly more stable.?

In other words, I believe true innovation requires a dose of naivete, which is founded on an overarching optimism and belief that the venture has true value for yourself and for others.?

I know the proverbial waste bin is piled high with companies that have had some form of naive hope and no staying power or substance. But without someone starting or without someone taking the risk to go where others have never gone, we’d never have many of the modern marvels that we have come to take for granted” like electricity, the internet, cars, TV, and planes.?

It’s not lost on me in all of this that the modern game of rugby comes from a similar place of naive desire to do something different when a young man, named William Webb Ellis, in Rugby, England would youthfully pick up the football and start running with it in 1823, and thus, inventing the game of rugby. Little did Webb Ellis realize what his unique and risky move would do for countless men, women, boys and girls: all because he wasn’t afraid to do something no one had done before.

I am grateful for the experiences that the early years of RUV, the Warriors, and the MLR has offered me. Without them, I wouldn’t be the person I am today and without having naively taken some of those first initial steps I wouldn’t have started out on this amazing, but still, extremely challenging path that I’m on today.?

And it's my hope that anyone sitting on the fence of whether they do or don’t start a new business or if they do or don’t go back to school or whatever the challenge that is ahead of you might be, then I hope you’ll see from my experience that it’s ok to not have all of the answers. In fact, it can work in your favor, so long as you remain committed to that goal and the daily effort required in even the hardest of times.?

The Warriors and the MLR are far from being a finished product. But with both entities heading into their sixth season, we’ve shown the sustainability never before realized in North American professional rugby.

And while 2015-2018 years were hard in countless ways, little did I realize that 2019 would be like going from the frying pan and into the fire and that it would literally almost break me emotionally and physically and, above all, fundamentally change the future of the Warriors. More on that in Episode 2.

I look forward to connecting with you and hearing some of your own life lessons that you’ve learned from taking that naive, but brave step into the void. See you next week in Episode 2 of “Tales of Business & Sports Optimist.”?

To read the prologue and the other future episodes please CLICK HERE .