We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Luke Kania a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Luke, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our mission at LENZ Sports Group is to provide families with a tremendous experience in youth sports. We do this by being a one-stop-shop for sports organizations, helping in three key areas.

The first area is marketing / brand management consulting, to help better connect these organizations with their audience and be easily discoverable by families that would be a great fit. The second area is merchandising. The merchandising process can be a pain for coaches and organization leaders. We want coaches to focus on coaching the youth athletes, while we deal with the process of outfitting a team with fully custom uniforms and athletic apparel. What’s nice too is that through partnerships, we are able to provide high quality athletic gear at a lower cost for these organizations and families. The third area is events. Tournaments and events need to be a positive experience for everyone in attendance. We provide an atmosphere where parents can enjoy watching their child shine, coaches can teach valuable lessons, and the youth athletes can develop and grow.

Everything we do at LENZ is so meaningful to me because I remember growing up watching my father volunteer for our local little league with the same mission in mind. Whether it was waking up before the crack of dawn to prep the fields after a night full of rain so that games wouldn’t get canceled, or setting up sound systems so that both the home and visiting teams could have walk-up songs and hear their names announced… he always worked hard to find ways to provide families with a tremendous experience in youth sports. That is why I love being a part of LENZ Sports Group.

Luke, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am the head of marketing for LENZ Sports Group, a company that does merchandising, events, and consulting in youth sports. Our goal is to have the entire youth sports experience centralized to a LENZ service, providing a better overall experience for the young athletes and families participating.

I knew I wanted to work in sports when I was in high school. I was the student manager for my high school’s basketball team, when we were undefeated state champions in 2019. I was passionate about doing all the little behind the scenes things to assist the program, and promote the basketball team to the community. However, everything really started to take shape during my college years at Villanova University. I got right into coaching during my freshman year of college, helping out with middle school athletics. The following year I moved up to coaching high school basketball and baseball, and I took a job at Philadelphia Baseball Training as an events director which required working 30-40 hours on the weekends. I was not the typical college student. My junior year was a busy one as well. Still coaching two high school sports, coaching a 13U travel baseball team, and interning for the newly established LENZ Guide (named at the time). And finally, during my senior year of college, I worked for the Philadelphia Phillies in their promotions department, and I coached high school varsity baseball.

I definitely missed out on a ton of college functions. I loved all my courses at Villanova, but outside of going to class, I was not involved in much on campus. However, the leadership skills developed through coaching, and all the experiences I had in different roles in sports business during my college years were extremely beneficial. But most importantly, it led to me crossing paths and connecting with two important people. I coached high school baseball with Mike Palumbo, Co-Founder and CEO of LENZ, and he brought me to Philadelphia Baseball Training, which is where I met Matt Wray, COO, and Co-Founder of LENZ. When the two of them started their company LENZ Guide in 2021, they brought me on as their first intern.

I spent my first year out of college working in marketing and fundraising for this extraordinary organization called hope+door, which provides rent relief for families experiencing a financial emergency. I encourage everyone to check it out and consider helping out with their mission of preventing homelessness.

The decision to join LENZ Sports Group was an easy one, because of how much I believe in the leadership of LENZ Co-Founders, Mike Palumbo and Matt Wray. They have been extremely beneficial mentors for me, and I enjoy every second of working with them.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Mike Palumbo and Matt Wray are big on relationship building. For our events side of the business, as co-founders, they position themselves as the main tournament directors and are there for the entirety of the event interacting with everyone. When we do merchandising deals, we organize custom fitting sessions to get each player’s sizing, and we have even been there for a few deliveries. So when we have all these moments where our customers are interacting with the product and the faces of the company, my job is simple. Capture it! That is how I’ve learned to best build an audience on social media. Graphics are necessary for getting certain information out to an audience, but no one is going to follow a social media page full of just graphics. Diversifying the content type and showing versus telling are crucial.

Lastly, come up with ideas that both showcase your business and are entertaining. Our most viewed content are our mic’d up clips of youth athletes at our events. Normally, parents, coaches, spectators, etc. do not get to hear what the kids are saying when they are out there playing in a game. This mic’d up content showcases an extra element that adds to our event experience, and we end up capturing the youth athletes making great plays, saying something funny, and having fun.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’ve experienced it a ton at first with the marketing side of the company, because I built campaigns and calendars around certain projects. Especially in the start up environment, there is a lot of pivoting and everything is super fast-paced. I’ve had to do a lot of adjusting to plans. I remember when we first launched our events, we released a very detailed graphic and a video advertisement. This was a big moment for the company, and releasing it to the pubic just felt so great. Luckily, no email marketing was released yet, but within five minutes of posting to social media, I received a call from my boss telling me to take it down because some details were about to be changed. “Of course!” Anyways, I’ve learned that while it is important to stay organized and follow a plan, always being ready to pivot and adjust with a positive mindset makes a huge difference.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lenzsportsgroup.com
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/lenzsports_
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lenzsportsgroup/