The Reapers - Basketball Returns!

Good morning everyone,

I hope you’ve had a great week and are looking forward to a fantastic weekend!

In last week’s edition of Learning the Venture, I gave a personal account of my journey as a student-athlete in university and how I’ve used that experience to better understand and communicate with my current client-athletes today. If you’d like to have a read of that post, you can find it on the homepage.

Today, I’ll be talking about the upcoming season for our sponsored basketball team in the Bermuda Basketball League; The Reapers. For the new subscribers here, AceBoy Sports Group sponsors an amateur basketball team in the Bermuda Basketball League every year. This team is made up of myself and other players who I grew up playing with in the high school/club league and various national teams I’ve been a part of. Additionally, I like to include 1-2 younger “up and coming” players from the high school system so they can get some exposure against better/older players who are more physical.

This year, the Bermuda Basketball Association has ambitious plans for the league. The league will be running from September 2023 to March 2024, with six teams participating instead of five, with a plan to live-steam every team at least once over local TV and online during the course of the season. This is great news for the sport in Bermuda and shows a commitment from those at the head of the BBA to make the sport more accessible to the majority of Bermuda.

For those of you who already follow the team, you’ll know we’ve been livestreaming our own games on Instagram for the last two seasons. I welcome our new subscribers to follow along for this season and join in the fun!

The draft will commence in the next few weeks and I’ve got my eyes on some exciting players who will be sure to provide a few highlights this season. In the 2022/23 season we got eliminated in the first round of the playoffs with a record of 4-6. This was a far cry from the immense success during our inaugural season in 2021/22 where we finished with a record of 6-4 and won the championship. With new players set to enter the draft pool this year, they’ll be some new faces along with some Reapers veterans looking to make our way back to the promised land!

While these progressive decisions from the BBA regarding the 2023/24 season are encouraging for the sport of basketball in Bermuda, it’s also a great opportunity for us to capitalize on the growing engagement with the sport/league from the community.

With a few of the games now being livestreamed, we have the opportunity to condense/specialize our match content to focus more so on our team, rather than trying to capture the whole game. While I haven’t necessarily decided how we’d do this, perhaps our livestream would focus on the game from the perspective of our bench, capturing the conversations of the team during play and their live reactions to events in the game. This is just an example but would bring a whole different dimension to sponsorship in Bermuda that I want ABSG to be at the forefront of.

Sponsoring a team in one of Bermuda’s growing leagues allows us to grow with the sport and capitalize on that influx of engagement from new audiences. As most of you will know, we’ve hosted back-to-back editions of Bermuda’s first 1 versus 1 outdoor basketball tournament, with a third edition on the agenda for late 2023. At ABSG, we’ve always viewed local sponsorship as a solid way to engrain ourselves within the local grassroot communities and subsequently build our own audience base from there.

In addition to our bench side player access, I’ll be experimenting with a few more initiatives to drive engagement with our social media pages, which will hopefully result in new spectators for our games - and the rest of the league of course!

Thanks for reading this week’s edition of Learning the Venture, if you’re a new reader I invite you to subscribe and join the roster!

Until next week!

Jason