The Future of Sports is 'Semi-Pro' 🔮

Happy Wednesday,

Rick Batenburg is a venture capitalist by day and the owner of both the Breckenridge Vipers and the Mountain Hockey League by night (and weekend, and whenever he can get ice time).

He started the Vipers eleven years ago with thirty-five people in the stands and a burning desire to play real hockey again after a career at Merrill Lynch took him off the ice.

This week, Jake and I sat down with Rick to talk about how you actually build a sports property that people care about, and why the whole thing only works if you stop thinking about the money.

🎧 [Listen to the full episode]

It seems counterintuitive, but stick with me.

Rick runs about $500,000 through his P&L every year. It costs him over $13,000 just to run a single home game:

He once gave a player his credit card number while driving a team bus to Texas so the guy could buy a last-minute $700 flight. The big, audacious financial goal, in his words, is to be cash flow neutral.

And yet, he just keeps going. More games, more gear, better travel, lights that go out when they score.

His framework for why it works is simple, and I think it applies way beyond minor hockey: you have to go in asking what value you're adding, not what you're getting out of it. The minute an owner starts taking a salary and pulling money away from the team, Rick says, they've already lost. Not because it's wrong to make money, but because the whole thing is held together by something money can't buy: the feeling that everyone involved is part of something real.

What Rick has built isn't a business in the traditional sense but rather a community asset. And community assets don't get valued on a spreadsheet. A mom came up to him at a game and told him her son plays hockey because she brought him to a Vipers game years ago. That's the ROI he's actually optimizing for.

1. Choose the right market before you do anything else.
Rick's first rule for anyone wanting to start a team: pick a limited market where you can be the biggest ticket in town. It won't work in San Diego. It won't work in Denver.

It works in:

Because in those towns, the alternative is the same bar you've been to eighteen times. There has to be an emotional relationship between the team and the town's identity, and that only happens when the town is small enough to actually have one.

2. You need 400-500 fans minimum before the economics work.
Rick lost money for the first three years. It took three years to land the first sponsor. The math is simple: below 400-500 fans per game, you can't finance travel and operations. The only way to get there is time, presence, and community engagement. People adopt what they help create, so get locals involved early and often.

3. The product on the ice is everything.
Rick has never paid a player, but nobody pays to play either. They get gear, travel, and (in the Vipers' case) hockey sticks and product from The Clear. What keeps elite players showing up for no money is simple: it's real hockey. NHL rules, real competition, real stakes. The fan experience follows from the product, not the other way around.

4. Running a minor sports property is like popping up a concert every weekend.
One home game: $13,000. Forty employees, concessions, bar, ticketing, security, live stream. The operational complexity of running a game is genuinely enormous, and it scales up in cost every year. Rick's advice: understand every cost center before you start, know your deal with the rink, and never go in thinking you'll make money. The goal is to break even and build something worth more than money.

5. Stakes are what sell tickets — not prestige.
Jake and I talked about this after the conversation. The reason people go to these games isn't because it's the NHL; it’s because the stakes are real.

These guys are playing for something existential: the chance to stay in the arena, to keep doing the thing they've done every day since they were three years old. You can feel that when you're watching, fans can feel it too. And it's something the sanitized, perfectly-produced world of major professional sports has largely lost.

This episode came to us completely by accident. Jake got a random FaceTime from a friend watching a hockey fight in Breckenridge at 9:30 at night and couldn't figure out what he was watching. A few weeks of digging later, we found Rick.

And I think that's kind of the point. The Mountain Hockey League doesn't have a PR team, it doesn't have a media rights deal (it barely has a website). But what it does have is thousands of people packed into a barn on a Friday night in a ski town, watching guys in their thirties play as hard as they possibly can because hockey is who they are, not just what they do.

I think about this a lot in the context of what makes sports worth caring about in the first place. The most memorable sporting events I've ever watched didn’t necessarily happen on the biggest stage. They were the ones where something real was at stake, and you could feel it. Rick didn't set out to build a sports business. He set out to keep playing hockey. And somewhere along the way, he accidentally built exactly the kind of thing that modern sports keep trying and failing to manufacture.

🎧 [Listen to the full episode]

📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.

See you then,
Tyler & Jake