40+ Best Business Ideas For Athletes & Sports Lovers (2021)

I knew in college that I wanted to do something within the fitness space, but never had any interest in being an entrepreneur.

I started my career in the personal training space, only to recognize that the number of hours I put into training was a direct correlation of how much money I could make.

I started my career in the personal training space, only to recognize that the number of hours I put into training was a direct correlation of how much money I could make. This meant to make money I had to continue working at 6:00 am and 9:00 pm until...Did I switch careers? This was a no-go for me, so I started to brainstorm ways around it.

In 2014 my friend, partner in other initiatives and one of the most brilliant tech managers I know, Vicente Vara, finished his job as CTO of one of the main ticketing companies in Spain convinced that there was an opportunity in the market and we started to shape it.

Vicente called two people from this industry: Carlos Lara, a UX Manager obsessed with perfection and Alfonso Uribarri, a tireless Project Manager. All three had the mission of developing a revolutionary ticketing software and meanwhile I was transforming our dream into an enterprise.

It's easy to go with the flow and pursue quick success, big numbers, immediate visibility - but the important thing is just to do your best every day, have a solid structure and the other things will come sooner or later.

I graduated from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut with a film degree in 2014. Growing up in a small farm town in Woodstock, CT, my dream was always to make it big and become a famous horror movie director. I had such a strong passion for directing and cinematography, but after one cold morning in Chinatown at 4 am on the set of the HBO show GIRLS, I knew that I wasn’t cracked up for that life.

I then took my first sales job in 2015 at a software company in New York City called Contently to pay off my student loans. It ended up being one of the most important things I ever did as I learned invaluable sales and outreach skills that would help me later land deals for CROSSNET with retailers such as DICK’S, Target, Academy, Walmart, and Scheels.

After a lovely layoff in the spring of 2017, I got offered a gig as Uber’s first-ever external Account Executive in their NY HQ helping launching UberEats in Boston and Providence. Through Uber’s relaxed start-up culture and demanding sales quotas, I learned the value of providing autonomy and trust to my future employees and freelancers. Who cares if you take a 20-minute coffee break and take an extra day off if you are hitting 150% of your quota. I have that same mentality for all of my employees, as long as we are hitting our deadlines, putting out high-quality work, there’s no need to add extra stress in anybody's life.

For as long as I can remember I have always been attracted to the idea of being a business owner. I’ve tried many businesses starting with my own DJ company. I got some business cards, printed them at Staples, passed them out, and waited for the calls.

It took a bit of time, but eventually, the calls started to come in and bookings started to happen. I did that for a couple of years until one of the DJ gigs some gangsters got into it and I was almost in the middle of a gang fight. Thank GOD things calmed down, but after that, I started looking for another business!

During this same time, the whole tech bubble was growing and I wanted a part of it. I took some coding classes in college and started using HTML to code my website from scratch. I kind of borrowed a lot of ideas from Yahoo but it was going to be mainly focused on my local city. I visited some businesses and got some of them to advertise. Things seemed to be going well when the bubble burst and I was once more left to venture out and look for something else.

The story of PushPress actually predates my involvement in fitness in any way. I was a coder, working for startups in the early 2000s. “Startup Culture” back then was unlimited free sodas and nightly catered dinners. Both of which lead me to be about 30 pounds overweight by 2008.

In late 2008, I joined a CrossFit gym looking to shed some weight as fast as possible. While there, I was exposed to their gym management platform which was an absolute nightmare to use. This platform was the 800-pound gorilla in the space, they were operating on antiquated technology, seemed too big to move quickly, and their customer experience ended up making gyms look terrible.

Doing a deeper competitive analysis, I realized that every other solution in the market was basically replicating what the market leader was doing. There was very little innovation in the space.

Several years ago, my husband and I read the 4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and were really intrigued. We started doing a lot of thinking about changing our lifestyle.

We have two children, and at the time, we were both working full-time outside of the home. It didn’t feel quite right. We wanted to be able to spend more time with our children, so we discussed moving from working outside of the home to figuring out a way one or both of us could work from home.

I had a hard time dealing with failure in the beginning. Over time, I realized that I learned the most from my failures. Even though my subscription box failed, that actually made it easier for me to launch the next products I created.

This sounds terrible and I mostly accredit that to being a 19-year-old college kid, but I was bored and wanted a challenge.

Most of my summer at the time was wasted on video games, carbonation, and junk food. I wanted to do something that challenged me, be a good learning experience and hopefully make some money. After deleting all my games off my computer and phone, I fired up Google and got sucked into the wild world of making money online.

Not all of your competitors are bad, everyone is just trying to make it out there in a competitive world. Instead of trying to steal value from each other, see if you can find ways to create value together. At the end of the day, it’s always about the community and your customers.

I came up with TeamFFLEX seeing the massive trend of everything turning online and want to help as many people as possible achieve results. In a traditional gym format trainers job, there are only so many hours you can work in a day and a limit on clients you can actually work with. For example, if a client does a 60-minute session and you work an 8 hour day you can see 8 clients within that day. There are also of course training teams, and classes as well as small groups but still even if I could have worked with 100 people a day in a gym it would not have been enough.

I wanted to find a way to help people all around the world. The people that couldn’t get to the gym or didn’t have the money to hire an expensive trainer. I wanted to make sure that no matter where people were at the gym or at home they had the ability to take action on their health and fitness and get results.

Seeing in today's world how basically kids are born with an iPhone in hand it all just made perfect sense. Take personal training online and help people all around the world. The thing about today's society is that we want it now. We don't want to wait. We don't want to go into a building, meet with some trainer, get sold on all the different expensive packages and then pay basically to have a really expensive cheerleader. I honestly believe that within the next 10 years we won’t see trainers in gyms anymore. The quality of training in gyms continues to drop due to the fact that not enough people get training and also that trainers can’t even make enough money to sustain a living. I knew that if I could go online with everything not only would I be able to impact people to a much larger degree, I would also be able to live a life on my terms.

I feel like I have always had an entrepreneur sense to things. During my junior year of high school, I started a business to help provide protection and accessory products for sports facilities. We sold products such as those large tarps that are laid out over baseball fields when it rains, and even did padding and other products for football fields and running tracks. My family has always been in the field of the construction of these facilities and an opportunity came along to push me to start my own little business in this niche.

Throughout the end of high school and into college, I continued working on this company as a way to make money while focusing on my studies. I never really felt like it was something that I wanted to do forever, so I used it as a way to learn about the business world and to manage my own hours.

I have always had an interest in design and the psychological way people interact with brands. After college, I had initially planned to go into Product Design or Industrial Design because of my interests in how things are built (was always into Legos at an early age). This never panned out, though, as I could never get my artistic portfolio up to a standard that was acceptable in the industry. I loved the concept of design, but I couldn’t get myself to be passionate about the artistic side of it.

As an athlete and coach myself, I have experienced many situations that left me feeling dismayed at the state of affairs for women and girls involved in sports. I recall one such instance where I was playing at a very competitive level and the head coach screamed at me from 2 inches away with every expletive he could think of in front of our entire team because I asked him a question about the drill that was being done. I still vividly remember the spittle flying out of his mouth and hitting me in the face and not knowing what to do. The powerlessness I felt at that moment, coupled with the lack of appropriate response by the system when I reported him left me feeling hopeless for my future in sports. I ended up quitting soccer and refused to touch a ball for an entire year.

On the coaching side - as someone with 16 years of experience now, there are still instances in which I am treated differently than my male counterparts. One such example was when I was on the sideline waiting for the referee to come over and check my team prior to the start of the game. I was dressed in my coaching attire, had the whistle around my neck, the clipboard in my hand, and the player cards ready to be presented when the referee walked over to our sideline. He made eye contact with me and then proceeded to walk over the dad who happened to be on our side tying his daughter’s shoe and assumed that he was the coach.

Take time for yourself! Being an entrepreneur is hard work and you can’t do it to the best of your ability if you haven’t taken time for yourself to rest and rejuvenate. Self-care is integral to success.

I loved playing baseball, but felt that the hard athletic cup I was required to wear was, well, a pain in the crotch. I tried almost every youth athletic cup on the market and nothing felt comfortable.

Starting a business seems like a really hard thing to do, but it is really just lots and lots of tiny steps in the direction you need to go.

Honestly, I threw a fit about wearing it before every practice and game, but I had to wear it. During one of my pre-game frustrations, my mom said, "If you don't like something. Quit whining about it and come up with a solution!"