A whole new ball game – More executives are filling weekends with amateur sports leagues

ONCE or twice a week, countless mild-mannered executives all over Singapore strip off their office attire and transform into hulking pieces of testosterone fuelled by competition and camaraderie – and sometimes, lots of beer.

Over the past 15 years, young professionals have been carving out a space for those who prefer their weekend exercise to be more intense than a round of golf, working hard to establish amateur leagues and teams for sports like football, basketball and softball.

For example, Lee Taylor and Matthew Boylen, co-founders and directors ESPZen, an amateur football league, say that they started it for ’selfish reasons’. ‘Lee and I were playing for our respective company football clubs in a local Singapore league,’ says Mr Boylen, who is also the chief executive of IT solution company Matador System Pte Ltd. ‘But it wasn’t well organised. Sometimes, the referee wouldn’t show up, or we would play the same team for four weeks.’

Their love and respect for the game made them want to play in a ‘professionally organised way’, which subsequently led to the birth of ESPZen.

For Ashish Manchharam, founder of the Usual Suspects, a two-year-old team comprised of mostly young professionals – about 90 per cent, he says – that plays in the ESPZen league, organising a team was a way to stay close to childhood friends and keep fit.

‘For me, it’s more social than competitive. Most of the team members are people I have grown up with,” says Mr Manchharam, an associate director of leading property consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle. ‘Also, when I have clients and friends in town, I ask them to come play.’

From its humble beginnings of about 10 teams in 2004, ESPZen currently boasts 78 teams. And with a fee of $2,100 per team per season, what began as two yuppies wanting to play football on a well-manicured pitch has become quite a lucrative side business.

‘The incredible success of ESPZen made us realise that there were a lot of people who wanted to play sports in a professionally organised environment,’ says Mr Boylen. ‘So we applied the same business model to basketball, another extremely popular sport in Singapore.’

The result was BBAXN, another highly successful amateur league launched in 2005.

While basketball is well known to be physically demanding, Brewerkz Iguanas Basketball – a team which plays in the BBAXN league and has won four championships in a row – has players ranging in age from mid-20s to late-40s. While there haven’t been any major injuries, ’some guys have torn ligaments in their knees, thus requiring surgery’, reveals David Blackmon, head legal counsel for Shell in Asia, who plays with the Iguanas and used to manage them.

He sees the ethnically diverse team – comprising mostly young professionals with nationalities that run the gamut from Filipino to Belgian – as ‘ambassadors for the sport’ that ‘bridges local and expat communities’.

Older, more established leagues and teams are also gathering momentum. Harris Vertlieb, marketing director of Maverick, started the Singapore River Rats softball team 15 years ago, and has witnessed the growth in the international community of professionals who play the sport, thanks to several competitions over the years in Jakarta, Bangkok and Manila.

‘I have definitely expanded my contacts,’ says Mr Vertlieb. ‘I met a guy from the Philippines and we are currently partners in a joint business venture; I’m sure other players have had similar opportunities. I also know of numerous occasions where people have been hired through softball contacts.’

Instrumental to sports-oriented networking is the socialising that occurs outside the tournaments and practices. ‘We play hard, and party hard,’ says Bharat Chopra, an independent sports marketer, who plays on both the Iguanas and the River Rats. Last year, Mr Chopra was able to combine his passion for partying and higher-impact sport by creating the Singapore Dodgeball Championships.

Far less regulated than older sports, the more casual nature of dodgeball allowed for equal amounts of revelry and exercise. What began as a tournament among 50 people has become a full-fledged event; with the help of B-Yond Sports, a division of the B-Yond lifestyle company, the Dodgeball Championships became a huge $75,000 event, complete with DJ and bar.

This new era of sports is miles away from golf, the traditional sport standby for young professionals. Now, there are several ways to meet and develop friendships in the business world, and they don’t require a handicap or exorbitant green fees.

This rise in popularity and availability of more democratic, team sports signals the emergence of a different kind of weekend, one that is more aggressive, louder, and dirtier, much like the younger workforce that they cater to.

Source:
Paper: Business Times, The (Singapore)
Date: June 22, 2007