Belle River catches the Floorball Bug

How a small Ontario town of 5,000 can go from 'what's floorball?' to a 10-team league in just 4 weeks

This Easter weekend Belle River kicked off a brand new 10-team youth floorball league for 9-10 and 11-12 year olds. Instrumental to the founding of the league was local Source for Sports owner and hockey community leader Dave Bellaire.

Under Dave's leadership the small Ontario community that had no prior floorball programming now 'sports' an up and coming floorball youth league. I sat down with Dave after hosting a clinic at his league's kick off session to ask him a few questions.

What motivated you to start a floorball league?

For me it was a number of factors.

When I saw the sport at the Source show in Hamilton I was immediately interested. I always value the chance to get involved with kids sport. Starting something for the kids is a community service. All the players and their parents are already my customers so bringing in floorball and having the registration in store generated a lot of store traffic.

Because the parents and kids are already my hockey customers floorball will keep them engaged in the off-season and coming back to the store. The business side of selling sticks will take care of itself...

Would you recommend that other Source for Sports stores start a league?

I would absolutely recommend that other stores to give this a try - the early indications are that this will be a huge success on many levels.

How would a store get a league started?

It is a pretty simple process, really. Here are the steps we took to get a league started from scratch:

First we made a promotional video about floorball and the league which we shared with everyone: we played it in the store and sent it as an email to everyone. We would be happy to share this video with other SFS stores.

We found that the most effective promotion was to show the sticks in store and talk it up to our customers. We also set up a booth at the local hockey arena during the last day of the hockey season. Through these promotional efforts we already found an initial pool of players.

The next step was to rent gym which we found for just $40 for the entire Saturday morning. I had to find a school board that was interested - which in our case was the French board - but it wasn't too hard as school boards these days want to generate extra income.

I called my insurance broker and set-up a policy for $500 for an entire year of floorball activity.

We set a registration fee of $50 per kid to cover basic sticks, staff, insurance, gym rental. We also have some prizes and incidental stuff in the budget. Our staff person, Will, works in store for us and I hired him to run the league and officiate the games.

Once we knew the fee, we created a product code in store for the league -- we do running clubs and stuff -- and people bought it just like a regular product and paid for it at the cash register. The product came with a form that parent's filled out - this again is something we would be happy to share with other stores.

Overall, we promoted for 3 to 4 weeks and at first it was very slow. But people are like that, they register at the last minute. We needed 50 kids to break even and we got 65 - so this morning before our first session I was turning some away. We now plan to run the league in September too.

How did you find the floorball clinic you booked with FloorballPro and Floorball Ontario?

I loved it and we could not have got the league going without their help. Booking a clinic is a must, as we learned so much even though we had read up on the sport.

It was also important to get our referee Will trained and that was completed during the session.

Will we see a team from Belle River at the Canada Cup?

We'll see what happens, it is only our first year so we will put it out there as an option. The timing is tough with May long weekend. We are very interested though and in particular want to get Will to some of the officiating clinics.

Thanks for your time Dave!

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