Any parent with a child in competitive sports knows the logistical headaches of travelling out of town. “Getting multiple teams traveling from one destination to another in the same hotel takes a lot of logistics in the background,” said Eric Vardon, co-founder and president of Event Connect. “Tournament organizers want to do what they do best, which is run events,” said Vardon. With more than 100 employees and looking for more, the booming business partners with hundreds of youth sports organizations across North America. “We use our company to help with all things from registration to rostering, scheduling and scoring and our big component is helping families and participants get their hotel room sorted so they can have a fantastic experience,” he explained. Working with non-profit and private sports organizations, Event Connect books millions of hotel rooms each year for competitive sports families. But the experience doesn’t stop there. “We handle all the customer service, which is a big piece,” added Vardon. “Anybody has a question around extra pillows or a cot or extending their stay or they need support on the technology, they call us and we become their hospitality angle and their technology arm.” While they are working with some of the major players in youth sports in the United States, they also have several organizations on board in southwestern Ontario. They recently worked with the London Devilettes to house families at last weekend’s annual tournament. Other organizations in ringette, baseball, soccer and hockey are on board. “In St. Thomas with boys’ minor hockey, we are running three tournaments a year,” said Joe Doyle, past president of St. Thomas Minor Hockey. “Each tournament is 40 teams, so as you can imagine, when you got 25 to 30 teams from out of town all coming into the area for hotels, we’d be lost as an association on trying to house those teams. They do all the heavy lifting by securing all the hotels for us. The teams book in through them, so it’s really streamlined for us.” Tourism London worked with Event Connect when hosting the thousands of people for the Ontario Summer Games. “That’s a big event with a lot of participants,” said Zanth Jarvis, director of sport tourism at Tourism London. “To be able to streamline that service and being a technology company, they were able to build some new programs and software for us around volunteer registration that that wasn’t done before. They’ve now use that as something to offer to future events.” Launched in 2013, Vardon and his business partner John D’Orsay found an untapped market in youth sports. Now just over a decade later, the youth sports is now a multi-billion dollar, rapidly growing industry, generating billions annually for hotels, restaurants and host communities. It’s growing so quickly, Event Connect needs more help. “We can’t hire fast enough,” said Vardon. “Sports doesn’t slow down outside of a couple of weeks in August when people replan for the next year. We are hiring in positions from internships through for some of the programs that we work with all the way up to executive opportunities.” They specialize in the behind-the-scenes side of sport, which many people often don’t see. “It’s about the rate, it’s about the value proposition, the amenities and the closeness of the to the venue,” said Vardon. “All of those things matter. When you are juggling thousands of participants, that takes a big engine and takes a lot of teams, a lot of support, and a lot of software. Think about the hundreds of thousands of teams that are traveling at any point in time, in any airport or bus or car across 200 plus different sports, you name it, from sand soccer, foot golf, quidditch to obviously the big travel sports in volleyball, hockey, basketball, baseball, it is millions of room nights. The teams that are associated with it are coming from everywhere and it’s a lot of logistics, but it’s also a lot of fun,” he explained.
