My First Venture: SHSA Soccer League
My first "venture" was a soccer league for high school kids in Shanghai, China. I never viewed the SHSA Soccer League as a startup. It was more of a non-profit organization, rather than a business. And to me, it was really just a fun thing to do...
My first 2 years of middle school was at a local Chinese school (上海世界外国语中学双语部 - 徐汇校区) in Shanghai that didn't even have a soccer field. As a die-hard soccer fan, it was extremely rough for me since we didn't even have the conditions to play soccer at school. So on the weekends, I liked to go to some public parks to play soccer with random students from different schools or even people that were 20+ to 60+ years older than me. That was how I made many soccer friends from different schools and how I gradually learned that many schools (more than I had imagined) in Shanghai had their own unofficial soccer teams but did not have soccer fields or soccer coaches for students to train with. But the young players were all eager to play.
When I was 14, I transferred to another public middle school's international division. Guess what? The school has a soccer field! A big one. After months of training, I finally got to be a bench player on the U15 soccer team in Eighth grade. I had so much fun enjoying soccer on REAL grass and with REAL soccer coaches. But while I was having the best time playing soccer at my new school, I caught up with my old friends from other schools and I realized that many of them were still suffering from the poor conditions of school soccer.
So I thought, why don't I just invite them to play soccer at my school? My old pals were interested. But how? How can we get these random kids from different schools to play soccer at our school? I knew the answer: I had to start a soccer league.
But at first, I didn't know how to start one. So I asked around and also did some searching online and found the necessary ingredients to start a soccer league:
people who want to play,
a place for these people to play,
referees that keep the games fair,
and medical staff that takes care of injuries.
That's it. The rest was just a matter of organizing and executing. And I invited a few friends of mine (Max Yang, Michael Peng, and Francis Zhang) to join me to help organize it.
Soccer players, the first ingredient of a soccer league, were easy for me. I had the natural advantage of being a student who had transferred between schools and made friends with kids from different schools over the past few years by playing soccer at different locations almost every weekend. So I knew quite a lot of players who wanted to play but didn't have any soccer team or field to play with. And I asked my friends to help me find these players (friends of friends) from different schools and invite them to join the league as school teams.
But the next three ingredients were all pretty costly. A proper soccer field, the most expensive ingredient, was not easy to come by. How on earth could a 15-year-old raise enough money to rent a whole soccer field for the whole season? I went to my old man for advice and he gave me a great one: "Why don't you start with your own school? Try talking to your principal." Several days after I sent the email to my high school principal, he replied with a very positive note saying that he was very interested in having his own student start a soccer league at school and he inferred that we could use our school's soccer field. I was thrilled! Because the school's field price was much much lower than renting a field from the outside.
What about referees? I was lucky enough to have enough upperclassmen friends at my school who were good at officiating soccer games. And they didn't charge me much.
What about the medical staff? This we had to figure out on our own. So I contacted JoffreLab, a student organization angel investor/partner in Shanghai, who referred me to some local medical sources. It wasn't cheap compared to our previous two ingredients' cost. But we didn't want to put our players' health and safety at risk for booking really cheap and sketchy medical supplies & staff. It was one thing that we could not "be cheap" on, despite being extremely cheap for everything else.
Then I searched online for the structure, rules, and schedules of different soccer cups and leagues at different scales. And we came up with our versions of them. After spending countless amount of hours adjusting the league's schedule with 12 school teams in the middle of my midterm exams, we were finally ready to go!
And boom! There goes the first season of the SHSA (Shanghai High-School Soccer Association) Soccer league in 2016!
Images 1-2: Emails between me and my first high school principal; Image 3: Season 1 League Schedule; Image 4-9: First game day of SHSA Soccer League For all the costs (it was extremely low considering how much a professional adult league operation would cost), we covered (1) mainly with registration fees collected from over 130+ individual players and (2) my own money from the red pocket money I saved from Chinese new years. Well, technically that (2) money still came from my parents. Because the logic here is that at each Chinese New Year when you visit other relatives at their homes, elders from each side are supposed to give red envelopes filled with RMB cash to the other side's kids. So without my parents giving red pocket money to the other relative family's kids, I wouldn't be able to receive my red pocket money. But instead of spending that money on buying Play Station/Wii/Xbox gaming stations (yes I never owned any of them growing up as a kid), I spent them on creating beautiful memories for allowing die-hard soccer fans like me to play soccer at our own soccer league. I think it was well worth the money and time that I spent. And believe me, I spent way more time on building and keeping the league alive than everything else (including studying, which was bad) back in my freshman year of high school.
And of course, my parents wouldn't be so supportive if it wasn't for the "extracurricular activity" and "leadership" bullshit requirements from US undergraduate college admissions. But thanks to that too. It gave me a very good excuse to do what I genuinely enjoyed doing - identifying problems and solving them with people I like, instead of being forced to memorize mathematical equations and the order of the chemistry elements from the periodic table just to get higher grades on exams (years later I realized that math and chemistry are actually not that boring, but most middle/high school teachers taught these subjects in such boring ways).
This was the start of my adventurous "startup" journey. This experience drastically influenced me and my thoughts on life. It was at the age of 15 that I started to be observant about the problems (in this case, it is the mismatch of students who were eager to play soccer and the poor conditions they were provided with) around me and gradually started to enjoy solving these problems with friends. The process was extremely tedious. But the ultimate reward was satisfying and long-lasting.
It was the moment that I saw the smiles on these young players (my very own friends and peers)' faces on the soccer field that made me think all my time, energy, and money spent on it was well worth it.
Huge shout out to Max (Yifei) Yang for securing sponsorships in the next few seasons of our soccer league, Michael (Luozhou) Peng for helping with anything related to design, Francis Zhang for getting us all the media exposure, and Angelina (Yiyun) Zhou for doing a phenomenal job at expanding and continuing operating the league!
Thanks to everyone from JoffreLab that provided us with great help with everything!
And of course, huge thanks to my open-minded parents who gave me enough freedom and support to do this.
Without the help from everyone mentioned above, there will never be SHSA 上海高中生足球联赛⚽ League️, the very first high school soccer league in Shanghai that was able to bring in players from international schools, local Chinese schools, professional schools, and local amateur soccer clubs altogether.
(The league kept on going for the next five years and remained the largest and most diverse student-run high school soccer league in Shanghai, China. But we've made many mistakes along the way, some of which led to the discontinuation of the league. I'll share these mistakes and the lessons I've learned from them in the future.)