“PLAYERS DID ELBOW BUMPS INSTEAD OF HIGH-FIVES”

Jam Sport and Social Group founder KRISTI HEROLD brought back 15,000 players to her intramural leagues

“BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, we were operating leagues in 11 cities in Ontario and Michigan. We had about 40 fulltime staff, 350 part-time staff and about 150,000 people playing with us annually. When Covid began, no one could gather indoors or outdoors, so our leagues shut down. We had to temporarily lay off 90 per cent of our full-time staff. It was tough, but we made do: by May of 2020, we’d launched online bingo nights, trivia nights and speed dating. Businesses were hiring us to host virtual corporate team-building activities. We’ve since run 1,500 virtual events for companies in more than 23 countries.

“When reopening was finally announced in June, we started registration for the summer season. We have a massive email database of 100,000 people who have played with us over the years, and we started emailing them and using our social channels to get the word out. We quickly brought back about 15,000 players playing on 1,250 teams across 12 different sports.

“I was out at games for the first few nights of our season. At ultimate Frisbee at Sunnybrook Park, I saw players bent over on the sidelines, huffing and puffing, saying, ‘Oh my god, I’m so out of shape.’ I heard people saying, ‘Wow, did I ever need to get back at this.’ There were veteran players who hadn’t seen each other in a year and a half and newbies who signed up by themselves, doing a new sport for the first time and making friends. Some of our games got rained out that evening—people were drenched, but they were still thrilled to be there. The next night, I was down at Polson Pier watching beach volleyball, and later in the week, a few members of the Arkells joined us for softball. That was fun to see.

“We’re encouraging people to stay six feet apart on the sidelines, and when teams score, there are a lot of elbow bumps instead of high-fives. It’s amazing to see everyone back out and playing sports again. There are lots of smiles all around. People keep saying, ‘We’ve missed this so much. We couldn’t wait to get playing.’ ”