If you aren’t already dribbling basketballs on an NBA or WNBA court, you probably think your chance to don a jersey, run up your stat line, and make the highlight reel has long passed. Brodie Rec wants to give you another chance.
Connor Renton thinks the combination of Brodie’s technology, brand, and operational complexity solidifies its “dream of being the adult basketball league nationwide.”
The recreational sports app allows anyone to sign up and document their athletic journey by joining a local Brodie basketball team. Users can join a team at their skill level (from beginner to semi-pro), and when they do, they receive a jersey, their own number, and a chance to hit the court to compete in their own mini-league.
Brodie captures and streams all games with the help of videographers and photographers it has on retainer. Then, using open-source AI models, Brodie collects stats on each game and player performance, and crafts social cutouts that are posted on local pages to help drive engagement.
“You earn points, badges, rewards-just like you’re playing the video game [NBA] 2K or Call of Duty,” Brodie founder and CEO Connor Renton told BetaKit in an interview. “After every game, you see this many threes, this many steals, here’s how it compares against your average … We’re just proving that just because you get older doesn’t mean that your sports career has to die.”
Founded in 2021, Brodie blossomed from facilitating local games of recreational basketball in Toronto to running what it claims is the world’s largest rec basketball league. Brodie runs 600 games per week, across 35 cities, and has more than 50,000 active players. That’s helped its revenue nearly double every year since its founding, with the app already on track to pull in $10 million this year, entirely from player registrations. It’s also set to hit profitability next year, Renton said.
The league already has a lot of moving parts for Brodie’s core team of 35 to manage, but Renton’s looking to grow its footprint even more. Brodie is expanding west, with launches in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Winnipeg, as well as more cities across Ontario and the United States. His goal is for Brodie to be present in the top 100 North American markets by the end of 2027.
“We needed this year to just have that final year of just holding down the fort,” Renton said. “But like when we chat again … we’ll be in every country [and] every city in the US. The model we’ve gotten down, and we can drop it anywhere.”
While the company was bootstrapped for most of its life, Brodie got $5 million CAD in venture funding last December, evenly split between Toronto’s Golden Ventures and New York-based Lerer Hippeau. That funding, alongside its tech-forward approach, is helping the recreational basketball league expand before it considers applying the same business model to other sports, like volleyball.
RELATED: The social network that wants to help athletes succeed after sport
The tech makes it possible for Brodie to extend its reach and power its product, but Brodie has invested a lot in the brand identity to solidify its moat. Renton said he’s not just out to build a tech platform; he’s trying to build a recreational basketball machine that’s too complex and ubiquitous to replicate.
“Next week, Anthropic could copy 99 percent of startups if they wanted to, and then what?” Renton said. “The reason why Brodie works in this day and age is it’s sort of like the anti-AI bet.”
Renton thinks the combination of Brodie’s technology, brand, and operational complexity solidifies its “dream of being the adult basketball league nationwide.”
Feature image courtesy Brodie Rec.