Staying on the ball with Sportsyear

For a sporting nation like Australia, it can often be time-consuming tracking key sports events and making sure you don't miss them. Sydney startup Sportsyear provides its users with a detailed and personalised sports event calendar.

There are thousands of tournaments, championships, and games. For sports fans, planning life around it all can be hellish. 

Back in 2002, Patrick Galloway and Daniel Giorelando both worked in sports broadcasting for Channel Seven. That was when they dreamed up a way to help balance life and sport.

"There's nothing worse than agreeing to go to do an Ikea trip on a Sunday afternoon, only to realise there's preliminary rugby finals on," says Patrick

Enter the Sportsyear Diary - the who, what, when and where of world sports, small and large.

"Even back in 2002 it felt like, hey there's got to be a better solution out here than just pen and paper writing down a diary," says Daniel.

Daniel Giorelando (left) and Patrick Galloway (right), founders of Sportsyear. Source: SBS

Daniel and Patrick collated twenty thousand of the year's sporting events and listed them in order of importance.

Each day in the diary lists the five most important events.

By 2004, after close work with a graphic designer, the first planner was ready for shipping.

we just learned on the go, which back then was pretty scary, because you're putting all your money and your time into this thing and you don't know if it's going to succeed or not.

Sportsyear now sells around ten thousand printed diaries a year, and in the online era, the path to continued growth seemed clear.

Patrick says, "So we set out on the digital journey about three years ago. The first step was to build a database - a back-end system - that could house all of this sporting fixture information that we were compiling."

Sportsyear is available online or through a physical diary. Source: SBS

But, by their own admission, Sportsyear's digital platform took time to find its market.

"We thought the immediacy of digital will mean that a digital product will happen quickly but it doesn't happen that way. It's taken a lot of time to get to where we are," says Daniel.

Eventually, the hospitality industry emerged as the biggest responder.

Publican Bill Young is also a retired Wallabies prop.

He says the pull factor of sporting events it boosting his bottom line, and Sportsyear digital is playing a leading role in that growth.

"Since Sportsyear's become involved with us our staff have found it a lot easier to actually track the sport events," Bill says.

"If it's a finals game it's elevated on their sheet, if it's a basic club game it's a lower ranking game, they know we've got that sporting event on."

Sportsyear says the hospitality sector is one of the main target markets for the startup. Source: SBS

Bill says Sportsyear helps his staff identify and screen niche sports that might otherwise fly under the radar.

He's getting better value from his pubs' sports subscriptions and making better rostering decisions.

Sportsyear's story is one of ambitious but natural growth.

From the Sportsyear diary to corporate deals, then the shift to digital and now hospitality.

So, where to next?

"We see the hospitality industry as a really important market for us to work hard at and win over more customers, but we're always keen to help the traditional sports fans who have used the Sportsyear diary and hopefully in the future there'll be more digital updates tailored to them," says Patrick.

Sportsyear is now standing at the base of the digital mountain, with Daniel and Patrick eager to tackle the climb ahead.

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