Short term money men?

I came across a VERY interesting post on kickball365.com the other day. Interesting in terms of it's insight and the points made. Interesting because it seems to have stopped the normal flow of gushing retorts from people who play in WAKA with blinders on. Plus, I believe I can add a little to the post to make it even better.

Someone posted that companies should be salivating at the idea of sponsoring WAKA and that WAKA should be providing better shirts to its players, which led to this post:

WAKA has been in business for 6 years, essentially. They have no real sponsorships except for beer companies. Here's why: In order to be a WAKA sponsor or even associated with WAKA, they want a cut of the money you make. This is standard however after speaking to several of the reps that do business with them, their way of doing business is less than good. In fact it's pretty bad. Those of you that have been around as long as I have will remember when they switched from Miller Lite to Bud Light for a year as the sponsor beer for this area. Bud Light offered more cash so WAKA chased it. The problem (which the distributor told them in advance) is that Bud Light has awful customer service. They pay you big and then ignore calls for swag, etc after that. Thus they left Bud Light and came back to Miller demanding the same money they had received from Bud Light. When told they weren't getting it, they asked for the amount they had previously gotten, they were told no to that too. They had to start from scratch even though they had more members than before.

WAKA over values it's product. Claims of 10-15k players are not taken seriously by anyone looking to partner with them for one simple reason - they refuse to show anyone their books. Any real players (like NIKE) would want to see the numbers to check if a partnering with WAKA is even worth it. And they just refuse to show the numbers.

A sponsorship with NIKE would benefit WAKA infinitely more than it would benefit NIKE. Face it, most WAKA players rarely buy extra merchandise ($22 for a t-shirt that has NAKID's slogan on it?!) thus leading to less appeal for some place like NIKE. Also, WAKA would have to pay a regional licensing fee to NIKE (this is standard) and that could run as much as $10-20k per region. This would detract from the WAKA guy's profit. They are not going to do that.

Third, and lastly, despite the idea that companies "should be licking their chops" to team up with WAKA, they have PR troubles. In any national publication about them (and even the WaPost piece on NAKID from Sunday) the lawsuit gets mentioned. No matter who is right or wrong, that's not something a potential partner, especially a big one, wants to deal with.

While I agree that WAKA should be providing better shirts than NAKID and DC Kickball because of their bigger pool of money, they will not. In the end it all comes down to this: to get real companies involved WAKA would have to invest money to make things better for players. And in case you haven't noticed, they are not about to cut into the bottom line - even if it would be a wise investment in the future.

What I can add to this is that while the Kash guys take 80 percent of registration money for overhead and paychecks for themselves, they seem to be looking short term. If they were more aggressive in getting sponsor ships and partners, they would be able to take less (like maybe half), still make a pile of money, and make their customers much happier. But that would require more work, which leads me to believe that either they are too lazy or too incompetent to do that. I don't want to bore readers with the numbers but let's just say if they had a beer sponsorship that could fetch them 100k nationwide and a few big deals otherwise, they would be well over $1.5 million AFTER paying for overhead.

Making more money than the other leagues in just the DC area, the Kash guys should have top of the line everything - balls, bases, shirts, employees, etc. The facts are though that they don't. Other leagues have real bases, organized flip cup tournaments. offer free beer for rainouts, medals for winners, and on and on. With the Kash guys you get the same t-shirts, elementary school bases, and you get to do all the work too! All this and it's the most expensive one in the area.

The writing on the wall is this: there are independent kickball leagues popping up everywhere, and WAKA needs to deal with them. Thus far they have chosen lawsuits and intimidation as a way to try and squash their competitors. But at some point, they are going to have to make things better, unless I am right and they are just in it for the short-term money.