A summary of wins, challenges and the plan as we get ready to head into the 2025 Season.

Media Growth and Plan

The 2024 championship live stream has reached 386,000 views (all 100% organic) and continues to grow. This represents more than double the viewership of any previous livestream and exceeds the combined viewership of entire seasons of 2021 and 2022.

More importantly (to me) we dramatically improved the view-through numbers in the first week post airing of matches in 2024. This indicates anticipation and engagement beyond what is algorithm driven and shows progress on a big goal of ours heading into the 2024 Season.

Stats proving this:

• Total watch time increased 4x year-over-year in the first 7 days following the championship
• View duration (for all matches) doubled year over year in views pre-algorithm distribution

Based on this, and more direct feedback, we’ve decided to hold steady on investing in livestream production in 2025. We feel the quality serves the purpose and are prioritizing other areas of the sport with our current resource limits.

That said, there is still a ton of opportunity to grow and develop the livestream when we achieve the right partnerships to expand it.

Instead, we’ve decided to re-focus a bit on our media roots. Short form social media.

One of the primary advantages of the sport is the fact that it is perfect for the modern attention span AND for social media. Short, intense clips of extreme athleticism and high skill performance are our top-of-the-funnel awareness builders. We’ve been experimenting and expanding our focus on ways to present these moments. Here are the results:

• In just the last 30 days (as of May 17th), Grid League content has amassed more than 67 million views across social media platforms
• This represents 23% of last year’s total social media viewership (271m) in a single month—before the 2025 season has even begun
• Tiktok, in particular, has been crushing it. At nearly 9X the average monthly viewership of 2024 in the last two months it is far exceeding the views of even the CrossFit Games on the platform (we put more effort into the platform than they do, but still worth noting IMO)

All that said, I am much more proud of the following.

There are deeply influential characteristics of the sport that we have not focused enough on communicating to this point. We need to do a better job of that and have started to better work that into the strategy.

A recent post explaining part of the core identity of the sport has generated 500,000 views across platforms, and sparked clear understanding and debate about the important fundamental concepts behind our sport. This engagement demonstrates the impact of the sport that we always knew, but are better proving with these types of responses. The sport can intellectually and emotionally change how people think about sports and society.

Bold statement.

Let’s think about this from a “the impact this sport can have” perspective.

Imagine when a family of 4 is watching Grid League matches together as part of a major broadcast. The mom, the dad, the nerdy brother, and the tom boy daughter… all have a player that they see a bit of themselves in. That they relate to. That they are inspired by.

How much more powerful of a sport experience would that be? How much of a family bonding experience would that be? This is one example of many related to how much better the sport viewer experience can be.

I literally have chills as I write this. The response to that post (to me) is a representation of a broader amount of people starting to understand and appreciate the seeds of what ACTUALLY makes this sport different. It’s starting to show how f**king powerful that can be.

I need to take a break and calm down before I write the rest of this. Hold please.

Ok, I’m back.

We’re also:

• Enhancing our player-focused content to showcase the world-class athleticism on display and the incredible humans behind the performances. Stardom is the lifeblood of any sport.
• Better focusing on the interpersonal dynamics that make Grid League unique. These include not just romantic relationships (very unique to our sport) but also distinctive team dynamics around gender roles in coaching relationships, ownership structures, and leadership models.
• Developing better relationships with external podcasts and video content creators, establishing channels for them to access insider information and develop pre- and post-game shows. This is an important step in cultivating independent commentary and analysis around the sport.
• Rolling out a new stat tracking system to better show the stats of players throughout the Season

Strategic Media Partnerships

Following successful testing of pre-existing match content, we’ve secured an exciting partnership with a sports-oriented fast channel platform called Stadium. The test results exceeded expectations and are a great representation of the broader viability for the sport.

This partnership will bring a new avenue for additional eyeballs to the sport and our sponsorship partners.

We’re in discussions with other options for media rights partnerships and content distribution as well.

Organizational Development and Culture

Late in the 2024 season, we experienced community conflict around communication and conduct issues. We recognized this as a great opportunity to deeply examine our organizational identity and values.

Through meetings among team owners and league leadership, we’ve made big progress defining who we are, how we think, what our core purposes are, and how we’ll handle situations.

This work has established a clearer “North Star” for decision-making. Always a good thing.

All major (and competitive) decisions around the sport are decided among the team owner group and voted upon as necessary. This has not changed, but is worth noting.

Sport Strategy and Roster Rules

A key focus for 2025 is improving how we communicate the strategic elements of our sport.

While Grid League is very simple — team executed races between a start line and a finish line — the underlying roster rules that make the strategy complex have been under communicated.

The more we can build awareness around them, the more we can develop that deep engagement that popular sports all have. The perfect example? American football. The simple idea of getting the ball in the endzone can be executed in millions of different ways. Grid League is similar in that way and we see it as a major advantage as the sport grows.

To address this, we’ve implemented a few things:

• Updated the “About Grid League” page to include a better description of roster rules
• Creating additional educational content explaining these rules
• Bringing in former players as color commentators who deeply understand the strategic nuances—comparable to having “our Tom Brady on the sideline” providing expert analysis
• Community days (see below) will help people better understand the nuances of the sport as they get exposed to playing it

This is just the beginning in this category of effort, but an important first step.

Team Developments

The 2025 season brings big team updates:

• Breaking news – we’ve signed a New York team. They will begin competition in 2026. Being an east coast guy (from Philadelphia) I am really excited to bring north east vibes to the League to diversify the geography and personality of the teams within the League.
• Houston is doing a great job bringing incredible talent into the league including substantial Texas-based and western U.S. competitors.
• Venom has successfully relocated from Daytona to Las Vegas which also expands west coast opportunity.
• The Aces and Lions have merged. This comes as Taylar Stallings steps back from playing while maintaining involvement in the league in a different capacity. Her significant influence on the sport continues despite lack of her competing (which we will sorely miss).
• The talent in the League is skyrocketing. There are several big named rookies coming in from other sports. This is great to see as the blend of different types of high level talent on teams is part of what makes it so intriguing.

New Initiatives

Our sport is designed for the spectator. As a result, we’ve found our fastest path to growth is through digitally presenting the highest level version of it (versus developing mass participation first like CrossFit or Hyrox).

Now that the highest level has significant awareness and is growing, we are working to start to build a model behind it to encourage participation at all levels. This will build a much more intimate understanding of the sport that will translate into true fandom and also (more importantly) leverage the natural characteristics of the sport to positively impact gym communities. We’re calling this – Grid Community Days.

In addition, the single biggest product demand we’ve had is training. It makes sense because Grid players do amazing things. People are naturally curious how they developed those abilities and want to do the same. We’ve leaned into that by starting a Grid Training program led by Taylar Stallings that offers a written program for competitive athletes looking to develop the same types of skills seen in the Grid League.

We hope to develop these initiates in 2025 into viable growth channels of the sport.

Challenges and Adjustments

While our original plan targeted expansion to 10 teams for 2025, we made the decision to maintain eight teams this season. We had plenty of interest—we received 38 applications for new teams last year—but if the situation isn’t right, we won’t force it.

In other news… The recent tariffs have significantly impacted our sponsors, which has consequently affected us. However, we are hoping for stabilization following the recently announced trade agreements and have some awesome possibilities in the pipeline.

Looking Forward

What I hope to see in 2025:

• Create a fun, valuable and meaningful experience for both the new players coming into the League and the returning players
• Create more channels for higher level fans like analysis, stats, and educational content
• Continue to polish our livestream presentation where possible with existing methods
• Re-focus on short form social media
• Create foundations of Community Days and Grid Training to have something to build upon for future years
• Signing of one more team in 2025 to get to 10 for 2026
• Continue to create opportunities for teams and staff to develop within the League

If we can do those things we will continue to grow as a sport and have new amazing opportunities for partners and media distribution heading into 2026.

Thank you for reading! What did I miss?