New Ballgame?

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New Ballgame?
Chief Executive Lane Soleberg at kids’ sports site Weplay in Santa Monica.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been changed from the print version to correct the name of Weplay Chief Executive Lane Soelberg.

In its rookie season, critics said social networking and youth sports management site Weplay Inc. wouldn’t make the cut.

The site, backed by LeBron James, Peyton Manning, Derek Jeter and other sports stars, was created to provide a fun, safe place for kids to interact online and talk about sports. It’s also a tool for parents and coaches to organize and manage youth teams.

Even so, skeptics said the site’s offerings were already abundant on the web. Plus, they contended, a social networking site needs more than big-name athletes to make it work.

“I was thoroughly unimpressed,” sports blogger Darren Heitner wrote at the time. “I think this is a wrong move by all parties involved.”

Yet Chief Executive Lane Soelberg said the site is thriving today now that it has ramped up its advertising. After joining Weplay 18 months ago, he has brought in advertising from big names such as Microsoft Corp., Gatorade, American Family Insurance, Cartoon Network and, most recently, Benedryl.

Previous online ventures backed by famous athletes had failed, most notably online sporting goods store MVP.com. Even with the likes of John Elway, Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky on board, the $65 million project went bust in 2001.

When Weplay founder Steve Hansen moved on to other entrepreneurial challenges, the company brought in Soleberg to drum up ad business.

Ad sales were key to the turnaround, the new chief executive said.

“They needed someone to come in and focus on modernization and to work with big brands,” Soelberg said. “Most of our relationships are strategic partnerships. We spend the majority of our time looking for things that are a win for all parties. A lot of times that requires some creative thinking about how we make the best fit happen.”

Gatorade, for example, shows up as a banner ad on the site’s nutrition section and on snack-duty reminders. Microsoft’s motion-sensing game-controller Kinect is advertised through the website’s calendar features, reminding kids on Friday evenings that it’s time for family game night.

American Family Insurance advertised on Weplay by sponsoring subscription services to the site for 1,000 high school football teams across the country. The insurance company is the only advertiser to appear on those teams’ pages.

The site launched an Allergy Alert mobile app earlier this month that updates parents on pollen and weather conditions and offers seasonal how-to’s for managing allergies. The new app coincided with Benedryl advertising on the site, as well as an announcement that Olympic swimmer Summer Sanders, one of the site’s athlete investors, will be the public face for Weplay’s new allergy awareness campaign. Sanders, who trained in outdoor pools in Northern California during her youth, overcame pollen and grass allergies to medal four times at the Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain, in 1992.

Today, Weplay hosts more than 50,000 teams and represents at least 60 different sports. Soelberg said when he joined the site, it had a monthly audience of about 500,000, which has now more than doubled.

Athlete investors

Hansen founded the company in 2008 with Creative Artists Agency in Century City and Major League Baseball Advanced Media in New York. The social networking company incubated in the offices of Major League Baseball Advance Media for its first two-and-a-half years, and is now headquartered in Santa Monica with about 10 employees.

The company secured more than $13 million in its first six months from investors, including venture capital firms FirstMark Capital LLC in New York and Deep Fork Capital in Menlo Park; angel investor Ron Conway; and professional athletes Tony Parker, Jennie Finch, Shaun Alexander, Ryan Howard, Brandi Chastain and Sheryl Swoopes, in addition to James, Manning, Jeter and Sanders. Hansen, CAA and MLB Advanced Media share ownership with investors.

CAA Sports, a six-year-old division of the talent agency, represents many of the athletes who invested in Weplay.

The athletes contribute to it in various ways, though none is paid for his or her work. They participate because they have equity in the company and an interest in seeing it succeed.

In the months leading up to the site’s launch, the athletes put together videos and other multimedia content. They dug through old boxes to find photos and videos of themselves in youth sports leagues. Each athlete has a personal profile page on the site where the kids can interact with them.

“If LeBron James plays a great game, he’ll have a ton of props coming in from the kids,” Soelberg said.

“Props” are badges kids can give on the social networking site to recognize the stars and each others’ athletic accomplishments.

Soelberg said the company wants to make subscriptions to the site a bigger portion of its moneymaking efforts. A subscription to Weplay costs $10 a month and allows access to more organizing tools and games than are available on the free version.

Soelberg declined to disclose revenue, but said his efforts to bring in advertisers have paid off.

“Before I joined 18 months ago, there really wasn’t any focus on how to monetize the platform,” Soelberg said. “Since then, we’ve done multiple six figure deals with blue chip brands.”

But while advertising is the company’s main source of revenue, Soelberg said Weplay doesn’t use targeted ads that mine personal information to generate ads.

“We are very limited in the way that we do ads,” he said. “We don’t barrage kids with them. Teams might see only one ad on their page all season long.”

Less action

While many of the athletes were actively involved on the site to start, now their contributions are less frequent. They occasionally host training clinics, write blogs and update their profiles.

Sanders, though, is an exception.

Soelberg said she’ll start blogging soon on Weplay’s parent advice section about her experiences as both an Olympic athlete with allergies and as a mom with active kids who also have allergies. He said she’ll draw from experiences of everyday life, which may include things she’ll pick up during the Olympics this summer. Sanders will be one of the athletes to run the Olympic torch through Windsor, England on its way to London this July.

Sanders said when her CAA agent approached her about Weplay in 2008, it brought back childhood memories.

“I just think that even at the highest level of any athlete, we all used to be kids playing youth sports and loving it,” she said. “That’s the passion behind every pro athlete involved in this site.”

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