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Heartland Soccer: Managing Growth and Tech Innovations
77 Plays1 year ago
This week on the Facility Playbook Podcast, we talked to Shane Hackett, Executive Director of Heartland Soccer Association. They boast the title of largest soccer league and tournament host in the country, and they have the systems to back it. Heartland Soccer Association’s growth can be attributed to their commitment to investing in their community and continuing to stay up to date with the latest tech. In this blog, we break down some of their success stories of growth, how they handle training refs, tips for league management, and staying up to date on technological advancements in the industry. To hear insights from one of the top facilities Heartland built, check out our episode with Scheels Soccer Complex!
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https://www.heartlandsoccer.net/
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Transcript
Introduction and Leadership
00:00:00
Speaker
On this episode of The Facility Playbook, I got to sit down with Shane Hackett, the executive director of the Heartland Soccer Association. We got to sit down at Garmin Olathe Soccer Complexes, which is just one of the amazing things that come from Shane's leadership at Heartland Soccer Association. Although it started years and years ago, Shane came in and identified a way to grow and really grow this program over the Midwest and make it one of the largest and best soccer associations in the country. Hope you enjoy this episode of The Facility Playbook.
00:00:31
Speaker
Do you own or manage a facility? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Facility Playbook. I'm Luke Wade, founder and CEO of Facility Ally, and this podcast is about helping owners and managers learn from pioneers and veterans in the industries who have built and managed successful sports facilities, entertainment venues, and clubs. Did you know that most of the facilities I just mentioned use between four and six different softwares to manage their memberships, lessons, leagues, camps, clinics, and more?
00:00:56
Speaker
revolutionize your facility with Facility Allies all in one system. Learn more at facilityallie.com. And today we're in an amazing facility with an awesome club operator.
Growth and Structure of Heartland Soccer
00:01:04
Speaker
So I feel like we're knocking two of those industries out with one. Welcome Shane Hackett, Executive Director of Heartland Soccer Association. Great, thanks. Thanks for having us out of this amazing facility. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and what led you to Heartland?
00:01:16
Speaker
Sure, it started in the radio business. I was actually the executive producer for the Kansas City Chiefs, a little bit for the Kansas City Royals, and it was my radio background that kind of led me into sports, but I grew up playing sports like a lot of kids in America.
00:01:33
Speaker
but ended up specializing ultimately in soccer, went to school in a soccer scholarship, went to school and played overseas in England. And the two of those being in the sports business and soccer specifically got me here to to Harlan Soccer about 22 years ago.
00:01:53
Speaker
It's actually been around longer than that. It's been around since 1977. And it's a really unique structure. If you're familiar with the soccer fields out at Heritage Park, way out at 185th, way on the south side of town, in 1977, four clubs came together, kind of pulled all their resources so they could have interleague play. And it's really rare because a lot of times when you see, you know, the club, the soccer or anytime, whether it's volleyball, everybody has their own little facility.
00:02:22
Speaker
and this one all everybody came together put all their kind of fiscal monies together and had one facility and that's been a lot that's allowed us then as we started to build these truly world-class soccer facilities we now have multiple ones because you've got heartland kind of as a
00:02:39
Speaker
an aggregator kind of comes together and we can truly guarantee the play both on league and tournaments to support these big facilities. So 1976? 77. And so when did you get involved and how have you kind of been involved taking it over?
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, I wish I could tell you that I had this grand vision for becoming the largest soccer league and tournament host in the country. I didn't. I got involved when I sold radio stations back in the mid-90s, late 90s. We ultimately moved back here to Kansas City because this is where my family's from, my wife's family's from. So we moved back.
00:03:16
Speaker
And I don't know that my kids had much of an option, but because I was so excited to coach them as they were growing up. So all the kids were in soccer, five kids. And I came back to Kansas City and immediately started having people say, hey, listen, can you come help with this? You've worked in other areas in soccer and we want somebody with a business background, but also knows
00:03:39
Speaker
recreational and competitive soccer. And so I took Heartland over about 22 years ago. At that time, we were roughly 365 teams in a league, which is a very large league. And you compare that to now, 22 years later, we're almost 1,500 teams per season and multiple seasons and have turned into the largest tournament host in the country.
00:04:03
Speaker
So I didn't have the vision. It was one of those things. We just kept growing it and building it, trying to make a better product. And I think, you know, some of it has to do with Kansas City. As you know, we're a little bit of a crazy sports town. We don't have mountains. We don't have oceans. We kind of live and die through our sports. So luckily, you know, we have the second highest per capita of kids that play soccer in the nation here.
Community Impact and Operations
00:04:28
Speaker
And so we've got all of them that play split pretty much evenly, boys and girls. So we've got everybody playing and it's just continued to grow. I think another thing that's happened is kids are starting at a younger age now. We program Heartland it from nine to 19. But on the club side, kids are starting three, four years old, doing little mini kicker programs, just getting in.
00:04:53
Speaker
And ultimately, that's what it's about. It's about having kids get out, exercise, compete. There's so many great things that happens from sports, but really, it's about them just getting out, getting exercise, and having community with their team. Sure. That's amazing. And thanks for unpacking that a little bit of the whole story. I didn't know it's been around since the 70s. It's amazing. And so maybe somebody just asked you today, what is Heartland today?
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, so we actually run three leagues. We run the typical spring and fall, and then we have a winter league, which we actually play here at the Garmin Olathe Soccer Complex, and it's kind of for the older kids. And when I got involved with Heartland, we had leagues and we had three tournaments. Now, because of these
00:05:37
Speaker
complex is where teams can travel in. I'll just give you an example. So this weekend, we had a girls tournament. This last weekend, we have a boys tournament this weekend. We've got 400 and about 65 teams from 16 states and Canada coming into play. And we used to talk about Kansas City being a drive market. So I'm a NASCAR fan as well. You go out to the NASCAR, you're walking up to NASCAR and you're looking at all the different plates, Iowa, Nebraska, Dakotas.
00:06:04
Speaker
our soccer's a lot like that. So people travel in from drive-in from all these states, a couple flights, but it's a drive-in market. And they all come here to play. And one is facilities, but the second one is when you start getting the masses, you get competitions at all levels. So a lot of people go, oh, you know, only teams that travel are just the best of the best of the best. They're winning state cups. That's not who Heartland is. Heartland, we don't make a preference over
00:06:33
Speaker
the very top elite teams to teams playing division eight, nine competitive or recreational teams. We want everybody to come in. We want everybody to have a good time. And one of the things I'm proud of is so when my daughter was 12, my youngest daughter playing here, I looked up because she had a good friend under the same name who was playing a couple of divisions higher than her.
00:06:57
Speaker
And I looked up and I said, oh, how many teams do we have? So you 12 girls, under 12 girls in league, we had 124 girls teams playing. And what that means is when you think about a division, you played eight games, so you get divisions of nine, is all these teams get like competition.
00:07:16
Speaker
And so, you know, in a smaller market that didn't have as many teams, if my daughter's team tried to play one of these upper teams, they might lose 10-0, right? So they get discouraged. But they're having competitive games all the time. And that's true for the tournaments as well. When somebody's coming in from out of town, we go with through and we seed them.
00:07:36
Speaker
But they know if they come in, they're going to be in a division where they're going to get light competition. And that really, you want it to be a good experience, right? You don't want somebody to come down from South Dakota and give you 15 to nothing. That's not fun. And that would happen if you place the wrong teams in the wrong places. But because we have so many people that play, we can offer great competition at their skill level. Sure. And I mean, I have a million questions, all of that. But how do you do that? How do you make sure they're matched appropriately?
00:08:03
Speaker
Well, it actually is a testament to the staff that we, so every time someone signs up, we will go through, they submit their records, and then we go through and actually match them up. When we turn teams away, it's truly because they're either too good for the competition that signs up, or they just don't fit. Because you don't really want it, you get a
00:08:26
Speaker
We work against people having a better experience. Does it happen sometimes in the thousands and thousands of games? And to give you the scope of Heartland, we do about 15,000 games per year. That's how many we actually run. So it's significant. Obviously, there are a handful of blowouts, but they're pretty rare. So it has to do with really the diligence of going through and hopefully getting the teams in the right spots. And do you have anything that helps you manage that, or you kind of do that manually?
00:08:56
Speaker
It's a manual project collected, collected electronically, and then manual seating. That's amazing. So yeah, you definitely have a lot of staff going through there. Yeah. So it sounds like you're taking kind of the middle average, you're cutting the top best teams and cutting kind of the lower. In a best case scenario, we're attracting all the top best teams, but that's where it happens, right? It tends to be lower and higher.
00:09:20
Speaker
So leagues, several seasons a year, so three seasons a year. And then tournaments, are those year round or are those in the season? They fall on the same weekend every single year because people plan them out in advance. So right now we're at 16 tournaments.
00:09:36
Speaker
which includes a couple of college showcases. And you hold them exact same time so that when teams hold their tryouts in June, they kind of know, hey, this season we're going to go to two tournaments. We're going to travel to Kansas City twice. We're going to get an end to the season, early season, you know, wherever that will start.
00:09:54
Speaker
Sure. That's really cool. And so you said when you got here, there was only how many tournaments? Three. Three. Yeah. So now 16. Yeah. So when you got here, maybe talk about what Heartland was at that time and how you, like you said, you didn't see the vision, but how you kind of manage the growth and maybe, you know, obviously we've gotten to facilities now. So maybe just walking through that journey of like, hey, I started helping here and there. Sure. And what was the kind of transition that taken over?
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, you know there there's just talking about use words in general. You know there are kind of history like when I grew up. I just had a dedicated German coach who was phenomenal who worked with a lot of us and a lot of the guys I played with all ended up going to school playing soccer. You know played at very very high levels playing the Olympic program, which we're all lucky enough to do.
00:10:45
Speaker
But those were like volunteer moms and dads, right, who were part of small, either they were independent or they were small little nonprofits, because you got every dollar going in, just taking care of kids' jerseys and getting them on it. And so now, I actually would say, for better or for worse, to be able to afford a facility like this, which is
00:11:10
Speaker
right out of $40 million, soccer-specific, you know, a facility, there are business metrics that have to be applied. You know, nobody's going to make a $40 million investment if they don't know that it can be filled up, or at least I should say they shouldn't do that.
00:11:25
Speaker
And so it was really putting both the business side together with an understanding of what kind of happens at a club level. And so Heartland was, and I say it was unique because it really is. I talk to people all over the country and the world because people want to know
00:11:44
Speaker
Why does Kansas City have so many of these? And, you know, especially for I know markets by media market size. We're like the 30th largest media market. How can Kansas City have more of these world class soccer facilities than anybody, not in the country, but in the world?
00:12:01
Speaker
And I think it's a couple things. I think we draw people in from around the Midwest to come in and play. And we are a sports-centric market. We love sports. I'm a big Kansas City Chiefs fan, Kansas City Royals fan. I was just at the sporting game this weekend. We love our sports and we support our kids in playing sports. So a lot of it has to do with that market.
00:12:25
Speaker
but we were but but harley was a unique position where it kind of pulled in all the top clubs and um we're here this is johnson county kansas and johnson county is uh it's a terrific spot and um we the the facility before this was the shields overland park soccer complex that was kind of the big one that's the one where
00:12:46
Speaker
We got the first one built and immediately it was all sold out. We have a sister, or I shouldn't say sister, they're actually a member club of ours called Sporting Blue Valley. 6,000, 8,000 kids that play in that club, so it's filled there with us. We work on that together. And then we have this one where we do everything here at the Garment Complex, but actually
00:13:08
Speaker
for for heartland to run we actually have four complexes like this that we fill up on a on a weekend basis every single week so it started before shields which we've actually interviewed and before garman you know what was the location he would play an app and i know you mentioned the south
00:13:24
Speaker
Yeah, the grass fields at Heritage, and obviously the issue, first of all, grass is awesome, unless you play on it from 7 a.m. in the morning to 11 in the night and hit off. Well, yeah, you're right, right, right. You gotta, you know, and there's a couple things. One, we call it little kids, right? It's called herd ball. They go right up and down the middle of the fields. And so you overplay them. And if you want grass to look great, you can't overplay them. And ours, we're all about,
00:13:51
Speaker
getting kids out there and just having them play. So synthetic works great. I don't advocate this for pro games. I don't like seeing pro games played on turf. I love seeing them played on great natural grass. It's getting one game a week. But for what we program, this is phenomenal.
Economic Influence and Affordability
00:14:09
Speaker
because you can play on it. And as you said, rain, the only time we don't have games is when there's lightning. I mean, if you get a downpour, the strains and, you know, lightning goes away and we're back on, which you couldn't do on grass. You're tearing up and ruin it. The main fields was the grass fields down south and then expanded the shields after that.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yes, and we were running both complexes and then the migration was we opened up Swope Soccer Village that has five youth fields on it. That's where Sporting Kansas City trained in the beginning. And so they were there and then we built the compass mineral fields out in the UNG with Wyandotte County. And then this was our next one.
00:14:51
Speaker
So that many players and families, how do you effectively communicate with everybody? All electronically. Yeah, email text. And have you been doing that the whole time? Or did you, what was it like before essentially email and all that stuff? Yeah, email text became later. Yeah, website updates, those type of things and weather lines. But yeah, and our communication for the most part is directly to coaches and admins for our communication piece.
00:15:21
Speaker
Do you run into any issues with that, playing telephone that goes through the coach and then the players and the families? Not so much. They're pretty good because most of them are on, like Dick's Sporting Good, they have Game Changer, which is a terrific team management piece. And so they're usually communicating through those.
00:15:40
Speaker
So maybe talk about your, you have a family code of conduct. Is that right? Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about, has that been around forever? Did you implement that? We've implemented it, right? We have spectator code of conduct. We have coach's code of conduct. We have referee code of conduct.
00:15:55
Speaker
With me being in my position as executive director, I probably have a better holistic vision of what this is, and it's truly a community. None of us can exist without the others. Ideally, when parents come out and we're all cheering on our kids,
00:16:15
Speaker
It's all positive reinforcement. We know realistically that doesn't always happen. I've been a coach. I've been frustrated with referees. But that's realism. But we do expect everyone, everybody on the sideline from the coaches and parents, we expect them.
00:16:38
Speaker
to be respectful. And when they don't, we have a code of contact and they have to be within that. You know, sometimes it's just, you know, you diffuse the situation and so that people can move on and realize it truly isn't life or death and everything moves on. And honestly, it's really rarely ever the kids. It's usually adults, right? That's where the issue is like. So,
00:17:05
Speaker
How did you originally you know when shields came along how did you start figuring out it sounds like you worked a lot of different cities and governments was that kind of your you know you're using city fields and then was that how you decided to go after more fields? Well see yeah so we've had we had a long-standing partnership with Johnson County Parks and Rec and you know this is before me but it the heritage soccer part started out it was like six fields and expanded to 18 over time
00:17:29
Speaker
And then we were working with multiple municipalities to build soccer fields, not specifically turf fields, but to build soccer fields. We didn't know this was—that's where I say I didn't have this great vision to build all these. I wish I did, but I didn't.
00:17:46
Speaker
Once we actually got the OP fields built, then it gave a model. And when we built those fields, Luke, I had people flying in from all over the world, Germany, Brazil, because that was the largest number of turf fields built anywhere in the world when those 12 went up. And so people came in all over, how did you guys do this? And none of them were the same. When we finally opened this complex here,
00:18:12
Speaker
I had been working with Olathe on a complex for 15 years, and I started on the land next door, then it popped over to Lenexa, then it ended up over back here, and you need the stars to align. They're super expensive, but by that time the model had proven itself out.
00:18:30
Speaker
because we had built shields, we did it with the hotel and entertainment acts there and it worked. And it's been, and these are huge economic drivers. And you're in the sports business and you know how this works. I mean, we, like this weekend when we have the boys' heritage invitational tournament, our impact will be well, real close to about $10 million between hotel rooms. And that's just over a Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
00:18:59
Speaker
And so for the local economy here, it's unbelievable. So that was kind of a great niche to get in with the city already had a partnership. And so you're like, hey, if we can prove this actually going to improve the community around us. That's awesome. Yeah. And and did you do the same thing here? I use the hotel.
00:19:14
Speaker
Oh yeah, well, no, there's a little bit different. This was a private developer, but they have what's called a TIF or a tax increment funding. So believe it or not, out of the four that we operate, each one was financed a little bit different, but with similar tax pieces that were put together. And the one thing I'll say about these, I'm talking from Heartland's perspective, but I've been the person to,
00:19:39
Speaker
kind of help put the pieces of the puzzle together. So I do, like, if you look at it, what does it take to get a world-class complex like this? So first of all, we serve the local community. So we're in Olathe, Kansas. So Olathe kids are playing here so that we've got kids, you know, ages three, right, that are getting involved playing. So we're serving the local community. Everybody's playing here. Then Heartland does an overlay where I'm bringing in then
00:20:05
Speaker
people from all over playing in league and then we of course bring the tournaments in as well so you're you're really hitting this at multiple levels and that's how that's how the shields overland park complex works as well as you've got um it's an overland park so you've got sporting blue valley which is overland park and overland park soccer club
00:20:22
Speaker
they're running all of their recreational program, which is huge. And if every kid gets to play, so it's serve a local community, then Hartling kind of, I kind of call it the overlay of league and tournaments then comes in after that. So obviously, you know, expensive facility, Garmin's got the name, you've got a lot of banners around. So maybe talk a little about the business side of things and all the partnerships that you have and how those work.
00:20:46
Speaker
Yeah, so partnerships are big and it's probably one of the things when I got involved coming from a radio background, the way you make money in radio is you sell advertising, right? So I was excited to take this game that's played such a big role in my life and my kids and family's life and be able to tell that story. The tough part is when I was in the radio business, if I go to an ad agency,
00:21:14
Speaker
there's a media buyer there for radio. So like I, one of my first jobs here was with the KCMO radio and you'd go in and there's an ad buyer there and they look at your arbitron radiance and they're like, okay, well, this client will make an ad buy. And that's how that business works.
00:21:33
Speaker
When it comes to the sports sponsorship and everything else, there is no ad agency. You walk in and they go, hey, here's our sponsorship group, right? So you're making individual connections. And so it's a much longer process, but it's a really important piece of the puzzle.
00:21:52
Speaker
And this is something that we don't really talk about, but I'm actually very proud of it. So I mentioned that I've been here a little over 20 years. We charge the exact same amount for League as we did 22 years ago for Heartland Soccer.
00:22:09
Speaker
Now, since that time, we've added all these very, very expensive complexes, world-class complexes. We've added medical. We've added all these extra expenses. So how do we do that? And we've done it a lot through the sponsorship side. So we brought in multiple sponsors to be able to do this. And, of course, tournaments have grown.
00:22:29
Speaker
And we're a nonprofit, so there's no money going out to stakeholders. It's kind of all being plowed back in. So the whole idea is to keep it as inexpensive as possible on the on the league side, and it's worked. And so you see Garmin everywhere, and I really advocated when Garmin was doing the naming rights. It's like, listen to it.
00:22:52
Speaker
If we could put windscreens up, let's say Garmin everywhere, it'd be awesome. I want them to get the biggest bang for the buck that they can and also they're paying for all these great windscreens up here at the same time. I've never seen this man. I was actually walking through and I'm like, it's amazing that you have so much space and there's so much wind and those are different types of things and you see them everywhere. I mean, the second you walk up.
00:23:14
Speaker
Yeah, and this sits up on a hill a little bit. So the windscreens are practical, and it gives them great visibility. But the sponsorships are so important. They're not easy, though. It's difficult. That's really, really cool. So kudos, kudos to you for doing that. Was that something you were like, we're never doing this? Or was it just like, we got sponsorship, we don't need to do it. We got sponsorship. And so did it just eventually be like, hey, we don't need to raise them?
00:23:42
Speaker
I think it was a little more organic. We've never said that. We actually reduced the rates of recreational play along the way, so we've actually gone down on the rec side. But it was more about, I remember the first year that I took over both league and then tournaments. Tournaments actually used to be
00:24:00
Speaker
kind of outside of Heartland and I pulled them in and then started bringing in some sponsors. I got the Toyota dealerships and we started pulling stuff in. And there was a year where Heartland went from losing money to making money. And I remember a president who was an attorney at that time, Dale saying to me, he goes, you know, Shay, we don't really need to, we made 120,000 and everything's public. So it's like, he said, we had 120,000. He goes, you know, we don't really need to make money
00:24:29
Speaker
It's great that we are. Now let's figure out how to redeploy that money back into, right? So that we started investing into fields, we started making those type of investments. And so the goal is, hopefully at the every year, we just break even. Yeah, sometimes we're up a little bit, sometimes we're down a little bit, just depending on how attendance goes. Really, tournaments have the most significant, you know, if we're going to make money or lose money, but we're always within a range.
00:24:58
Speaker
So how many refs do you employ and work with and manage at any given week to
Challenges and Future Focus
00:25:03
Speaker
month? So I mentioned that we do about 15,000 games per year. Pre-pandemic, we had about 2,300 referees. And so the pandemic was brutal for our referee pool. When we came back from the pandemic, we started with about 600.
00:25:22
Speaker
And so we're building that back and we're now up in the 900 to 1,000 range. And it used to be, you know, going back 15 years ago before we built shields, it was, our biggest issue was fields, fields, fields. And it's not, we've got incredible fields now, but our biggest, single biggest issue is referees. And so we're constantly recruiting.
00:25:46
Speaker
constantly training and and trying to get people in and you know there's an age out process to a lot of kids we have a lot of youth referees they'll go off to college and it's it's keeping as many as we can try to get them to return when they come play for college and also trying to keep as many adult referees. So any specific tips or tricks you have around finding hiring and training referees?
00:26:07
Speaker
You know, we, I would probably say that is, and I would expand that to just everybody involved is where we get our greatest participation and retention. It's within the community. Like most of it, like every kid that's out here, that's, that's roughing, that's 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, they, they're, they either played or they're still playing, right? So it's a great way for them to be able to
00:26:34
Speaker
be involved in another aspect of the game, but also get paid for it. And if there's one thing where we've seen rates go up is what we pay referees, right? It's a constant upgrading and trying to make sure that they're getting adequate play. And it's, by the way, I don't know if you've ever reffed games before, it's difficult, right?
00:26:55
Speaker
I had a whole different appreciation when I got my referee badge and my daughters and my son got a referee badge and we went out and repped a couple games. I'm like okay. I started refereeing like kids t-ball games when I was in high school and I mean I had parents yelling and screaming. I mean I'm like 17 years old.
00:27:14
Speaker
And then, yeah, I started reffing with Casey Group very early on, and people, man, they take the game seriously. Very serious, yeah. So I can definitely relate to that. So any tips on, it sounds like most of your refs are youth. But there are really two specific groups, kind of the adult referees, and then we have, we kind of have a lot of the kids that are players that continue to play. And just as an aside, I'll mention that we have, there are two referees right now
00:27:41
Speaker
that are in their Major League Soccer referees that came through Heartland. It's always interesting to talk about pros like a Matt Beazler, right? Matt's a household name here in Kansas City. Matt came up through Heartland and became a pro player as multiple players have. And then we actually have multiple referees in Major League Soccer. Oh, and by the way, one of them was on the World Cup Final this year, men's World Cup Final, Kyle Atkins.
00:28:06
Speaker
Yeah, that was awesome. So do you have a specific training program for them? So if I came in and said I want to become a soccer ref, maybe walk me through. Yeah, yeah, wait. Yeah. So it's a combination. I say we as Harlem and Tuck Grader is the soccer community. We have the Kansas referee association and we we work with them. We put on classes and then we hold separate trainings as well. So you have to get certified.
00:28:31
Speaker
you know, to make sure you know the rules of the game. And then you go through, you know, usually you'll start on an assistant referee right on the line, right, where you're not calling everything. It's out of bounds and offside and those type of things. And then we have a progression. And then for the kids and adults that want to pursue it to the next level, we actually have kind of a
00:28:54
Speaker
pathway to the pros and so they can go kind of the next level up from a heartland is is getting in our state cup pool for for state cup and then of course you know part of that progression is is some people got to do high school and college games and and now that's a natural progression.
00:29:11
Speaker
Awesome. So outside of referees sounds like that's the biggest problem that you're handling or I feel like it's a lot of people's problem finding staff that can actually appropriately manage it the way you'd like it to be seen. What is the next biggest problem you feel like you face day to day as Heartland managing the club?
00:29:26
Speaker
We're pushing the boundaries just on growth again. We're kind of in a maxed out piece at the moment. Part of one of the reasons that we did extremely well, we're Johnson County Bay, so I've obviously got this facility. I've got offices in OP. I'm actually a Missourian.
00:29:48
Speaker
And so I worked really hard to kind of pull Missouri in and get everybody to play together. And now, just talking about for League, where we have about six different states that travel in to play League, and we accommodate them. So let's say that somebody's coming in from Des Moines. They can come in and they can play their eight games over three weekends. So it's almost...
00:30:10
Speaker
and probably affordability, it's a lot cheaper than if they were gonna do three different tournaments, right? They just get one lean feet. And so, we're at that tipping point right now where we're kind of maxed out in terms of field availability, and we need to keep it kind of here. We have, thankfully, we got new fields that were built up north, but that's, for Johnson County people, that's a long way.
00:30:40
Speaker
So you feel like it is the goal to just really keep refining what you have now or do you think you will try and grow to another level?
00:30:51
Speaker
There's not a growth plan like if we were a public company and we're trying to hit certain growth metrics, that doesn't exist. I think what we continue to do is just try to put out a great product, and that's where the focus really is. There was a time right after we built the Overland Park complex,
00:31:13
Speaker
it wasn't as if there was hockey stick growth and it's like, oh, there's new fields and everybody clambered to them. It took about a year for people to know they existed, even with us kind of promoting it. And then once people came, they're like, oh, oh, I get it. I'd never seen anything like this before. Now people know when they travel to Kansas City, what kind of experience they're gonna get. So we're seeing growth in tournaments. We're still seeing growth in league, but it's, you know, it's a couple of percentage points annually. And so that's manageable growth. If we were growing by,
00:31:43
Speaker
10, 15, 20%. Honestly, that wouldn't be a little bit unmanageable. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I can only imagine 15,000 games a year, all the referees, like, it would be hard to manage that growth. Have you ever, so, you know, kind of maxed out soccer, have you ever looked into growing other sports, right?
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm a big football fan. It's hard to live in Kansas City and not be a Chiefs fan right now. So, you know, we've looked at for a couple of other facilities that are kind of on the drawing board. We've looked at flag football.
00:32:15
Speaker
But Heartland Soccer is a 501c3 nonprofit and our charter is soccer. So Heartland won't ever deviate from that. I would think if we ever expand beyond where we're at and we've got empty fields that we would probably partner with somebody. But at the moment, the only time these fields are available are
00:32:40
Speaker
you know during the summer which is our only downtime you know I'm talking um July really you have tryouts you've got a little bit of time in July there's camps and there's things like that but I'm talking about I mean most people don't know this but our games kick off at 7 15 a.m. in the morning and we close down at 11 at night and there's every single field is field all the time
00:33:03
Speaker
So, and that's so incredibly rare. But that is the business model. I mean, that's where we're at. But there's just not a lot of open fields. So, it's kind of in those off, you know. Now, if you come out here in January, when we'll run a winter league, that's not the case, right? But we're talking about main seasons, spring and fall.
00:33:24
Speaker
So, is Futsal included in your charter? Have you tried to do anything with Futsal? We actually have the largest Futsal league in the country. Yeah, so we're heartland Futsal. And so, yeah, we have that here. And so that's one of the indoor places, one of our indoor pieces. And it's not uncommon that the older teams will play Futsal and then they'll also play here. We really, for our outdoor league, we only do a full-sided game, so 13s and above. And so, yeah, and it's smaller, like we,
00:33:53
Speaker
I think our largest has been about 180 teams, you know, compare that to 1,500 teams. And all the games are played here in Gorman. Was Futsal always a part of it or did you add that? No, we added that about eight or nine years ago. Yeah, I love the game of Futsal. I've had my kids have played it and I've coached it and taken teams to Nationals. So much more challenging as far as foot skills go, controlling the ball. It's amazing.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, the balls for them people aren't familiar with. You plan on a basketball court with a weighted ball and the ball rules so quick so they kids really have to get their foot on top of the ball so that's what's going to roll away. And so like you said, the ball skill side. And so I know from my kids specifically when they played food solve when they came back that next season, their their small ball skills were were always
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah, so it's gone pretty well 89 years ago. So that's awesome. What advice would you give to like a new sports facility that's maybe opening up? What's the number one thing you would tell them to kind of focus on?
00:34:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if it's something like this, you know, obviously having the programming where you're serving the community and then seeing what you can bring in from outside, you know, I talk to different cities, especially here in Kansas, that are looking to bring people in and it's always like, you know, focus on your local community. What can you do there?
00:35:16
Speaker
And I think if Harlan wasn't so big, this type of facility, I'll give you the perfect example. When we were building the Shields Overland Park complex, it was myself and Peter Vermees, who's the coach of sporting. Peter's also the technical director of Sporting Blue Valley. We were working on that, and we knew it was gonna be 12 fields. We're like, okay, can we fill those up? Yeah, we can get there. What else are we gonna do? So when we built that,
00:35:43
Speaker
We made it so there would be soccer, field hockey, lacrosse, football, rugby. You can play all those sports. Now, by the time we got them built three years later, we filled it up with soccer, right? And we filled this one up with soccer, but...
00:35:59
Speaker
I would say make all of these multi-sport, and a lot of the ones that I'm consulting with or working with now, we're also trying to figure out how you can incorporate baseball, tee ball, softball, everything into it. And as you know, with baseball, now you literally pull a mound out, right? You drag a mound out.
00:36:21
Speaker
It's amazing how different it is. I played baseball growing up in soccer and it's just so different the field setups and everything like that and just the you know the thought process and like you mentioned like being able to play year-round whether you know whether all that stuff goes into it and when you're not operating the kids aren't playing and so I think it's really cool to see the transition of all that stuff that has happened but it's also interesting you said you know to focus on the community clearly the community wanted soccer.
00:36:45
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. And so it's great that you were thought about those sort of things. When it comes to these other sports, you know, what are some of the things you're thinking of when you said, you know, obviously, you'd have to line it differently for baseball. Do you ever get to a point where it's too much on the on the ground, too many lines or? Well, hopefully, you're thinking through that. So if you look at this facility, and if
00:37:05
Speaker
There's a lot of them and I've used shields kind of as the comparison. So those lines are sewn in. So this is Shaw turf and so at OP it's actually green turf sewn in a white line green turf.
00:37:20
Speaker
I did these different and I helped design these and you've you've had Vance Repka on your on your your podcast and Vance I used Vance as the sports architect on this but I wanted all this green so for those very reasons is that we can literally take a power washer and those will come up and so you can reline them any size that you want so we move so you know for for the older kids
00:37:44
Speaker
13 and above they're playing 11 v 11 they're loving kids versus 11 when you're going in the smaller they're going 7 v 7 9 v 9 and we're running the fields the other way and Versus having all kinds of extra lines. We this is more work the way we're doing it here But we actually pressure wash it off and we put those lines on there. So cool I don't think I knew that that they were the difference I didn't realize that the other ones were sewn in and that these actually weren't yeah How long does that typically take and I'm assuming you guys don't do it very often
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, ideally you're not doing it often and it depends on how much paint you're putting down and like we'll know whether or not we're like as an example this is a pod of six full-size fields up here and then we've got of those six we've got two of them that are converted to small-sided and so that means that there's there's two fields on two small-sided fields on one field and so ideally we're painting these about two to three times a season.
00:38:41
Speaker
Cool. Yeah, that's not too bad. And you could put down even more permanent thicker paint, but we do rotate it around because of the wear on the field. We're trying to get hopefully a full 10, 11, 12 years lifespan out of these. So if you started all over today with Heartland, what would you do?
00:39:01
Speaker
I want to give credit to the people that actually started it. Harlan was started about the time I was playing as a kid. I don't think they knew what they created when they pulled all of these clubs together. It's so rare, Luke, because
00:39:22
Speaker
Clubs, as you know, clubs compete against each other. They're competing for kids, everything else. But these clubs were smart enough to put this umbrella kind of governing body in as heartland so that it's kind of for the greater good. And because of that, instead of having
00:39:41
Speaker
this owned by one club and they're kind of playing home games here and then maybe traveling to other places now everybody gets to benefit and they've kind of pulled all their finances together through heartland and now they've got these incredible world-class complexes so um i wouldn't change it i'd like to give credit to them i don't even know who ghoul was that came up with it but it's brilliant because i i talked to people in new york and other places and they're like
00:40:07
Speaker
how do you get like these clubs won't even talk to each other and like it's kind of the nature of the beast right they're all competing they're competing on the field they're competing for kids they want to grow their club like and it's understandable yeah i think it's a lot of it in my opinion has to do with the midwest i think we have a lot more people here that care about the greater good and care about the competition so not sure what it worked anywhere other than kansas city so happy to hear that so what in the next three years look like for heartland
00:40:32
Speaker
I think we continue kind of incremental growth.
Innovation in Sports Technology
00:40:36
Speaker
One of the brand new things, and this will be the first time I've actually ever talked about it with anybody outside of staff, but every single one of these fields has new AI cameras on it. So we have brand new technology with VidSport. We've been testing it all season. So every single game can be live streamed anywhere.
00:40:56
Speaker
they can also are also recorded and then you got back in software and you could go multiple levels deep right you could just go but when so as a parent what i would love to have is i'd love to have my five kids where i've gotten game footage of them playing for all the nostalgic reasons and i'd love for them to be able to see it show their kids when they when they were there you know hopefully when their kids are up and playing
00:41:18
Speaker
but all the way down to being able to freeze frame and going, oh, how far is this defender from this? Look at the shape of the defense. We're the midfielders, right? And you can look at how plays develop and how the team from a coaching standpoint. So there's all these different levels.
00:41:34
Speaker
And this is the largest deployment of AI camera systems in the world. And it's on every single field, both full-size fields and the small fields. And we'll actually be announcing this and we'll have everything. We're actually starting out with our Winter League. And every single Winter League will be livestream broadcast. Yeah, that's really, really cool. Well, thank you so much for having us out today. And thank you so much for what you've done in Kansas City. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks, Luke. Thanks. We'll see you next time on the Facility Playbook.