In the world of sports equipment, it’s all about getting that next generation hooked. So we built a competition from scratch that ran entirely on social networks.
It asked a simple question—do you have what it takes to train with the pros? Teams were tasked with completing challenges online and on the ice. The top ten teams would then face off in a live Skills Gauntlet, where they’d get to put their looneys where their mouths are. From there, the top two would then spend a day at Air Canada Centre, home of the Maple Leafs, where they’d learn, train, and play a full game on Leafs ice. If you’re a kid in Canada, that's about as good as it gets.
We started the program in Toronto with nearly 100 teams competing. Two years later, the program added Montreal and included over 500 teams.
This is how the first program went down in Toronto.
And this was how it went down in Montreal—more or less the same, just with many more French hockey moms asking me all sorts of questions I couldn’t understand.
