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FeedTeam Mentality
What’s it take to run the region’s go-to organization for adult sports leagues and social events? Ingenuity and energy (lots of it).
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Lauren McGlennen never thought there would be a coed touch football league, but four years ago, she made this post:
“Athletic girl looking to play coed football.”
Soon after, a phone call led to her joining a Philadelphia Sport & Social Club team. “I remember driving up to my very first game,” says the Glen Mills native. “It was almost like your first day at a new job. You know no one. You don’t know how the team works or even what the rules are; it’s basically learn as you go. I walked up and introduced myself, and that was it—I was instantly hooked. Everyone was so nice, and their stories are so similar to mine. We’re all a bunch of athletes looking to get back into sports. Some never stopped playing.”
A 31-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative by day and a sports junkie by night, McGlennen has always been a tomboy. In high school, she swam and played volleyball and softball. She still plays on a USA Volleyball team out of New York. She’s even played football with the boys in her neighborhood. Now, she’s the ultimate “weekend warrior.” Last year, she was even named Ms. PSSCY.
“Mr. and Ms. PSSCY (the Y is added to mock ESPN’s ESPY Awards) is someone who embodies what the PSSC league has to offer,” McGlennen says. “They have a lot of heart and love being active in the leagues. Randomly, I still get asked, ‘Hey, weren’t you Ms. PSSCY?’”
The title—and the celebration—are thanks to Tim Horan, PSSC’s co-owner and director of business development, who today is between appointments and bar-side at the Radnor Hotel (though he’s drinking iced tea). Once a sports reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, where he bought his childhood home, Horan, 41, partnered with 29-year-old Dan Feeney, PSSC’s director of operations, and bought the business in August 2008 from Worldwide Sport & Social Club in Chicago. A third full-timer, 26-year-old Eric Long, is league manager. There are also 50 part-time employees—mostly coordinators, referees and officials.
PSSC has become the Delaware Valley’s largest and most popular organizer of recreational adult sports leagues and social events. A 12-team coed touch football league that began in the spring of 1993 at Waldron Mercy Academy in Merion Station has grown into 1,400 teams comprised of 17,000 athletes playing basketball, flag football, floor hockey, soccer, softball, volleyball, touch football, dodgeball and kickball annually. There are 30,000 active young professionals on PSSC’s e-mail list. Its new social networking site (phillysocial.com) gives participants and attendees a place to interact.
“All we have done is grow,” Horan says.
When Horan came on board full-time in January 2004, there were 400 teams. Today, with an office in Manayunk and one in his West Chester home, Horan has serious plans to expand. In the beginning, PSSC opened its headquarters on Bryn Mawr Avenue in Bryn Mawr, but then shifted away from the Main Line. Now, Horan has every intention of returning to—and reclaiming—the Main Line. And he plans to expand even deeper into Delaware County by the fall.
Right now, PSSC’s growth has been linear, stretching from Center City down the Schuylkill Expressway to King of Prussia, and into and around Manayunk and Conshohocken. Recently, though, the West Chester Sport & Social Club made its debut. There’s also a Delco Sport & Social Club, another in South Jersey and one in Delaware.
“We’d like to grow from 1,400 to 2,000 teams, and from a $1 million business to a $2 million business,” Horan says. “Route 422 services 60,000 cars a day between King of Prussia and Pottstown. Then there’s Bucks and the Lehigh Valley. We want to have [a club] in almost every neighborhood in the Delaware Valley.”
There’s a “dearth of space in Lower Merion,” Horan says, adding that fields and gym space and towns bustling with college populations drive the business. “Where we can find both is where we go.”
He mentions traditional Main Line haunts like the Baldwin and Shipley schools, along with the new Haverford Reserve, a 55-plus community with field space and artificial turf on former state hospital property.
