Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSC and at ICE's exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now, welcome inside the ICE House, here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Lacrosse's Olympic journey is a story of fleeting glory, long absence, and triumphant resurgence. The games' initial appearance was during the 1904 Olympiad in St. Louis where 39 competitors comprising three teams, two from Canada and one from the United States competed for the gold. But despite that debut and a reappearance in the 1908 games in London, its failure to draw significant international participation forced the International Olympic Committee to sideline America's oldest sport. For the next century, beyond three demonstration appearances in 1928, '32 and '48, lacrosse disappeared from the Olympic stage.
Now I'm an old lacrosse player from Newton South High School in Swarthmore College in the D3 ranks back in the 1980s, back when long stick guys had wooden shafts. But since the start of the new millennium, the popularity of lacrosse has grown exponentially worldwide. From Guatemala to Greece, from Canada to Cambodia, the sport now has 91 members across four federations spanning the globe, a sport once relegated to a handful of nations with deep-rooted traditions such as the Iroquois Nationals representing the Haudenosaunee confederacy has now transcended borders.
As lacs gained momentum, its Olympic return grew closer. It wasn't until 2021 though that light emerged at the end of the tunnel. That's when the IOC announced it would grant full recognition to World Lacrosse. Fast-forward two years to October 16th, 2023, that's when the governing body announced the sport would return to the Olympics for the 2028 games in Los Angeles. What was once a dream of many kids picking up their first stick and hurling the pill against a schoolyard wall was now reality.
On the world's biggest stage, the game's most familiar faces and brightest stars will have the chance to shine and showcase their speedy sport. As our guest today, Premier Lacrosse League Co-founder and President Paul Rabil put it after the announcement. I'm going to quote Paul here, "The news further cements lacrosse as the next great global game. We are back." When Paul joined us on Inside the ICE House back on episode 90 in March of 2019, the Olympic dream and the nascent league Paul was hatching at that time both seemed like fantasies. Now, five years later, those two uncertainties have turned into big successes. Our conversation with Paul Rabil on the Olympic ascension, the growth of the Premier Lacrosse League and his new book, The Way of the Champion is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Even casual lacrosse players and certainly our longtime listeners know of this week's guest last joining us on Inside the ICE House five years ago, Paul Rabil is president and co-founder of the Premier Lacrosse League. When we last spoke, anticipation was building for the PLL's first season that June, and now, five years later, the league has seen explosive growth in popularity as it begins its sixth season in a few short weeks. Adding to the excitement as was announced last October, Lacrosse is going to be returning to the Olympics for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles marking the first time countries are going to compete for medals in that sport since 1908.
Paul, almost five years to the date since you last joined us on the podcast. Welcome back to the New York Stock Exchange. Glad to have you here once again Inside the ICE House.
Paul Rabil:
Right. That's again an amazing introduction and it's great to be here with you once again. There's been so much. I listened back to our show that has changed. One of the segments was on the American Alliance Football League and how their first game rated ahead of the marquee NBA matchup. And you and I were talking about the coming of the PLL that was going to launch three months later. And here we are heading into our sixth season where the biggest challenge for any startup league or emerging property or team is to make it past and build a sustainable entryway for the future beyond three years of playing. Most leagues just fail.
Josh King:
I've heard you tell on other podcasts that the graveyard is littered with startup leagues that have never got past three years.
Paul Rabil:
Littered. I mean, it's an incredible industry to be in because of several reasons. One is it's live IP. So we could sit and talk about the major studios and the challenges that the box office is having in film to some of the greatest perennial books of all time to Marvel. Intellectual property related to content is some of the most valuable things you can have. And in sport, it's live. So you add a layer to not only having a non-competitive environment featuring the best players in the world, but people are more drawn to watch it because the outcome happens in front of you in that moment, which makes it more valuable to advertisers and such. So that's one thing on the live IP. And the other thing is real estate. We've seen a lot of major sports league owners invest in stadiums and surrounding real estate around those stadiums.
Josh King:
And I totally want to get into that. And there's this other concept that I've heard you talk about too, which is compared to other leagues starting up, which is tonnage, which is if you're trying to sell IP, you got to be able to sell a lot of IP because buyers, advertisers, broadcast platforms, they want to be able to have enough stuff to put it on. And your sport sandwiching itself between college seasons, coaching seasons, high school seasons, finding this window in the pro sports window across the 12 months is a big challenge for you.
Paul Rabil:
No question. So tonnage is important. Time of year for your tonnage is also becoming more and more important. When we last spoke, we had a deal with NBC and our games were on NBC Gold. So this was pre-peacock, and you would buy a gold pass to watch all PLL games and then you could watch us on NBC and NBC Sports, which is no longer with us. We then have transitioned to ESPN in this modern streaming environment where now Bob Iger painted a clearer picture of the four platforms now that will be available to us next year that you can watch your primary sports. But what they are looking at is LTV, and you've got to have a great game on so people are willing to tune in and watch. You got to have a lot of them. So they stick around and then you want to fill up the calendar.
So one of the things that we've done in addition to our summer season is after the note on the Olympics, this is a new format of the game, it's called Sixes. We started a new tournament in February every year called our championship series, which essentially our FA Cup meets the Champions League in UEFA. And that has enabled us to capture a lacrosse fan in February and then from May all the way through September, and then as our partner like ESPN looks at is fan segmentation. So the college game is sandwiched in between our championship series and the pro summer season. And so now all of a sudden you're looking at eight to nine months of lacrosse on their combination of platforms. So you'll see more and more. So it's not just tonnage, it's when.
Josh King:
And then there's the viewer enjoyment aspect. Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN chairman sat in the chair that you're sitting in now. We talked about a lot of things. One of the things we talked about was micing up a pitcher, catcher, battery, showing that live on Monday night baseball. And when you hear the catcher in whatever dialect he's talking, giving the pitcher encouragement, and then you see that curve ball coming in from the catcher's perspective through the mask, it's an amazing experience. So if you're thinking about the Sixes game and Jimmy's interest in giving an audience member something really cool to watch in. What about wiring up helmets for sound and camera?
Paul Rabil:
Yeah. Well, we tested that in our first year, and I think a lot of our value proposition that we're aware enough of is we can be a Petri dish because we're fully single entity owned and that gives us the agility to try new stuff. And frankly, we have to as a sport that's trying to cut through a really competitive, noisy environment. And things like changing the broadcast or innovating the broadcast or bringing people more deeply behind the scenes, something that the WWE's done really well for a long time has been a focus of ours.
Now, what we love about the championship series and speaking with Jimmy, who I absolutely adore, and Burke Magnus, who's the president of content who did our first deal a couple of years ago with ESPN, is that the champ series? A six on six version of the game. When we go back to your intro of one of the many challenges and why lacrosse bowed out of the Olympics after their 1932 participatory run, you were right on 1904 and 1908, there were medal count sports, is that there wasn't a lot of parity. So it was US, Canada, those were the four teams.
And so to gather parity, you need time and participation and good coaching around the world. And you also need to look at the game with an objective eye and say, "Okay, what are some areas that we can smooth out?" Daryl Morey famously said, "If you have an offsides rule in your sport, either the field's too big or there are too many people on the field at once." No offense to the inventors of games. They were brilliant, right? James Naismith and put two peach baskets. And originally there was no dribbling in basketball, that was-
Josh King:
The YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Paul Rabil:
Yeah, dribbling was started in the Ivy Leagues, which we might talk about NIL and what NCAA is up against. But dribbling started in Ivy Leagues because you could only advance the ball with a pass. So what they started to do is passing it to themselves and then spawn the idea that, "Oh, this is a dribble and we'll allow it." So sports evolve and what the championship series gives you in the Sixes environment is it's five on five players, two goalies, and they just go back and forth like basketball. There's not a face off after goals. If a team scores, the other team gets it. If they miss the net on a shot, the other team gets it. There's no offsides. So we created a version that simplified the game, making it more digestible to casual sports fans and we'll make other nations around the world more competitive.
Josh King:
And no one can say that beach volleyball isn't a great thing to watch at the Olympics, but it's not 9, 9, 9 player.
Paul Rabil:
Right. Yeah. And again, the native game, which you had mentioned created by the Haudenosaunee people, that was originally played with no boundaries, no time-
Josh King:
Hundreds of people.
Paul Rabil:
... hundreds of people at a time. It was played recreationally. It was played to solve conflict and it was played as ceremony ahead of a long house. So the game's intention has always been to evolve and be shared, and that's what I think about often when we continue to take steps forward with the PLL.
Josh King:
Taking steps forward with the PLL. So you're coming up on your sixth season.
Paul Rabil:
Yup.
Josh King:
Going back to that first conversation that we had, the first time I met you, I would describe you as a confident person at that time, but also a very humble person. And that was what really struck me. You had Joe Tait in your corner, the Alibaba co-founder. You've also written that a champion understands that success is based upon a foundation of failures. You write in your new book about Vince Vaughn's failures to secure an acting role. You write about the archery master, Awa Kenzo telling his students to reflect and seek the cause of failure within yourself when they miss the target. Paul, were you prepared to fail with the PLL?
Paul Rabil:
You have to be. That's the only way through as an athlete, an entertainer, or an entrepreneur, all of or as many of those lessons that I have collected over my career, I try to share in this book. The secret is that there is no secret, but you have to be willing to jump off the ledge. And what a lot of people don't choose to do is take that is go all in. And as a result, they come up short. But going all in means that on the other side of it is a big chance that you're going to fail. And that means shame and embarrassment, and potentially what our worst selves tell us, no more opportunity. Our life is over. But I found that the best athletes, they don't win all the time. In fact, the greats, they lose a lot.
Bill Belichick has lost the second most of any NFL coach in history. When he gets his next gig, he'll probably become the losingest coach in NFL history. He's also won eight Super Bowls and he is the greatest coach of our lifetime. Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, they're all top 10 in interceptions thrown. Peyton Manning has the record for interceptions thrown as a rookie quarterback with 28. Cy Young gave away the most game-ending losses despite his prolific save career. Martin Brodeur has given up more goals. Van Gogh never sold a painting while he was alive. Metallica has several failed albums. Mark Zuckerberg had maybe up until two days ago, the single largest loss in one day to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, and I'm referencing Google and their challenge. So anyway, the greats all lose and what they're really talented at is persevering through that.
Josh King:
Talk about perseverance. When we last had Yan, you were getting ready to launch the Premier Lacrosse League with your brother Mike for the inaugural season with a 14-week season planned across 12 major market cities. The prospects that you were facing were full of uncertainties. So before we really get into the crux of our conversation, Paul, five years hence with the league's sixth season about to get underway, has the league's achievements and prosperity aligned with the initial vision that you and Mike set out?
Paul Rabil:
It has. And we feel really fortunate on one side, and we also know that it's really about culture and work ethic. We were just recognized by Sports Business Journal, which is our industry-leading trade as the number one place to work at, as voted by outsiders and insiders amongst leagues, teams, and governing bodies in all of sports. That is our greatest honor up to this point because you're not making progress as a company without the full buy-in of the company. And so I credit a lot of it to the culture and our important mission and our work ethic. But we've gone from six teams to eight teams. We've launched a new tournament, as we talked about via getting into the Olympics. Our impressions last year alone were 1.3 billion. Our first year, I think, it was 300 million. Our ticketing is up, our sponsorship is up, our viewership across network television and streaming is up, but none of that comes without really grueling day to day problem-solving mindsets.
I was talking about before we started recording that lacrosse has the richest history in America. It's the deepest, it's the first sport. It also has a product-market fit at the college level. It's been around the NCAAs since the '70s, and Hopkins has played for 130 plus years. And then from a participatory standpoint, it's been the number one participatory sport year over year growing over the last 15. But every year we feel like we're introducing the pro game to so many people and they've never seen lacrosse before. So it's this catch 22 that we have to balance internally and figure out how to thread different messages, one, to enthusiasts, and two, to people who've never seen the sport before.
Josh King:
I've heard you talk about as you begin the home basing of your teams this year, the particular challenges of finding venues that present the game the way you want it best presented, that give the fan the best type of experience when they show up. When you and I talking about Belichick, go to a packed Gillette Stadium and sit in Bob Kraft's box and eat Bob's food and watch Tom Brady play and coach Belichick on the sideline and watch the way that screen on either end of the field gives us the play by play and the replay. Not much better than that, but as you think about Nickerson Field and Harvard Stadium and Gillette for the Boston Canons, and you're talking about real estate and development and what you've seen even minor league baseball teams do in various cities, if you were imagining from scratch the perfect professional lacrosse field in any city, where is it relative to the city? What does it look like? How many people does it fit? What's the angle of the seating? Build it in your perfect mind.
Paul Rabil:
Oh, that's a great question because it's something that Mike and I are sitting with our strategy team on and have been for the last 12 months. As we look downstream and you called out that our teams are now in cities or affiliated with cities, there was a major shift for us. So if there are three phases of the league, it was launching under the touring model with six teams, we expanded to eight. Phase two is connecting those now eight teams to home cities and adjusting our schedule around that. Phase three might be teams in market playing home in a way, so no more tour model and potentially individually owned.
And so we are constantly planning for 20, 30, 40 different versions of the sport, like we did on a micro level when the pandemic hit and we were able to pull off our month-long bubble tournament. But one of which is stadium build and a stadium mandate, something that Don Garber did when he was beginning to catch traction and MLS and bring on a lot of interest from individual owners. So for us, we think that it's 10 to 12,000 seats a venue that's state-of-the-are, of course, from a fan experience standpoint that is surround sound technology compatible, that has a roof, and the roof could be retractable pending costs, but the world isn't getting any cooler. And we play in the summer, and we looked at major league baseball history, they've built their ballparks around where the sun rises and where the sun falls.
It's an amazing experience to go to a baseball game or go to a PLL game in the summer, but bring your sunscreen. So we think about that as a component and then obviously all the additional revenue streams that come for sports owners around their venues from parking to concession to merchandise, making sure it's seamless. That's why I mentioned the technology.
Josh King:
Are you well-matched with a MLS type offering in terms of what a fan would want to have in a particular stadium?
Paul Rabil:
Yeah. Don and the team at MLS have done a fabulous job, I think, of their structure and their mandates around new stadium builds. Those go from 25 to 35,000 seats. There's probably smaller ones around the 20,000 range. So when I mentioned 10 to 12, I'm thinking about our total addressable market, and I'm thinking about supply demand. I'm thinking about where ticketing revenue nets out in the end. It's probably the fourth revenue stream for most leagues around the world now, behind media, behind sponsorship, behind merchandise, all 365 businesses now. And your tickets are capped. And most of the revenue when you sell tickets is tied to luxury suites anyway, so what becomes important is sellouts. What becomes important is building an environment that is just really powerful, loud and engaging. You mentioned minor league baseball. I'll mention Savannah Bananas.
Josh King:
I love the Savannah Bananas, one of my favorite Twitter followers.
Paul Rabil:
They're fantastic. And their founder and CEO is...
Josh King:
Billy has gone and tossed for the Bananas.
Paul Rabil:
Yeah, he's a special individual and their business continues to grow year over year. They haven't raised a dollar and they've built a lot of their progress around supply demand.
Josh King:
I mean, Jason Freier owns a Hardball Capital in Atlanta, owns a couple minor league teams, and he's done incredible stadium builds and great real estate development right along them in minor league baseball for that level of games in a season.
Paul Rabil:
Yep. Yep. And you mentioned markets as well. So when we announced our eight teams into our eight markets and we have an Eastern and Western conference, that was an arduous 10-month process of pulling external data, internal data. We had the benefit of reviewing essentially five or four and a half years of attendance and viewership data around the country. And the reality is with only eight teams, we can't cover the map. And so when we expand a few of the markets that are attractive to us that were left out, call it Texas, the Midwest, Pacific, Northwest, Florida, and the Southeast will be there soon.
Josh King:
On that point, Paul, figuring out when you have eight teams where you're going to put them, and we think of, I'm a Boston Bruins fan, so I'm a member of the original six of the NHL. Now they're talking about Atlanta and Utah coming into the league, which would bring the NHL to 34 teams. But the PLL in November when you were working with Whirlpool, that's NYSC-Turkish symbol WHR unveiled the permanent home locations for the now eight teams, Boston, thank you very much. New York, Philly, Maryland, North Carolina, Denver, Utah, and California. I want to just listen to a clip of the PLL's announcement revealing the locations late last year.
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Josh King:
Paul, I've heard you say that you could successfully have three teams in Washington DC, Annapolis, and Baltimore just within a one hour's drive of each other, but you got to cover the continental 48 states. How do you decide how to do these eight?
Paul Rabil:
That's a great question. So we look at external data points, former attendance figures, not only through the PLL but through MLL historicals. It's one thing among probably a lot that I missed when we started this, and you asked me how it's gone since we last spoke. We acquired Major League Lacrosse in 2020 and when we were last sitting here, we were competing head-to-head with them. And they had 20 years of history.
So when we look at pro sports, we think about history as much as we do present play, and then we talk a lot about future play. So adding that history to our data set was important. Looking at things like MRI Simmons report that now has started lacrosse at 45 million fans up from 15 million, looking at our owned and operated data through our app, through our web, through social, defining the regions of former success and potential growth and threading that needle. So there is no blueprint for how to do this. We're the first league to have started tour then attached to cities, and I mentioned phase three. So the best we could do was use the data in front of us and have as many conversations with players, coaches, and fans as we could.
Josh King:
You mentioned potential individual franchise ownership. We talk about the NHL beginning with six teams. We were talking pickleball in here and staged a professional pickleball match. And you look at those two leagues that have started out and what a disaster and mess it's been as a lot of money has jumped in and bought the rights or bought franchises in various cities, but with two competing leagues and without having the slow build that you did. A lot of people would love to own a Premier Lacrosse League team and bring it to Miami or the Pacific Northwest or other cities that you haven't tapped yet. How will you know when it's time to expand?
Paul Rabil:
I often think about being ambitiously patient, and that's the way that we not only manage our output financially, but also how we dream big and try to grow outsize to our year to year. We wanted to do what the UFC and MLS have done over the last 30 years and half the time, and we pointed to a lot of macro environment trajectories as to why we think we could times our work ethic and culture that we're building. When I think about where we are currently at, it is how much pound for pound value can we drive at any moment on any size screen, because the media environment has evolved the way it is and Gen Zs and Gen Alphas, they prefer to consume on their phone.
We spent so much time analyzing smart televisions in homes as a means to push from our phone to our television. Literally the younger generation will have access to a television but prefer to watch on their phone. That's what being native to the mobile device means. It's not me. I'd prefer watching on a big screen or in person. So how much pound for pound value? So you have to keep an eye on the macro environment of total participants and lacrosse fans. You cannot expand too quickly. You have to build your star value. You have to build tension so that people tune in and watch or pay for a ticket to attend a game. And I think where the challenges for pickleball were was there weren't any stars that were defined yet. I love the investment if I'm getting in on the certification level or the participatory level of pickleball. But at a pro level, they don't play it in college. They don't really have systems at the emerging youth level. So unless you're going to get Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal playing pickleball, and they've tried with retirees.
Josh King:
Agassi and Michael Chang and... Yeah.
Paul Rabil:
Yeah. McEnroe, you're just not going to get people to watch. So we have to keep in mind the lessons and failures going even back to what you asked me about the book, try to be preventable. No one wants to fail, so you try to learn as much about history as possible and be prepared to, because you got to make that wager, but no one wants to fail. And the last thing I'll say is on the geographies, XFL call it 3.0, I think one of their mistakes was that they put most of their teams in Texas. And so while it made sense from a supply-demand or a P&L standpoint, there wasn't enough interest around the country and enough availability around the country. So we thought about that as well.
Josh King:
On the topic of what MLS has been able to do, totally enjoyed Fisher Stevens-Beckham documentary, understood for the first time what his movement to the La Galaxy really meant for soccer in the United States. Also, of course, watch in middle of COVID not long after we talked the last dance, which helped me-
Paul Rabil:
So good.
Josh King:
... appreciate the greatness of Michael Jordan. And at some point, that external validation is going to do a lot for the sport of lacrosse and the person who was the founder of the professional game, and you got that with the fate of the sport. I just want to hear a little bit of a clip from that film when a big piece of news broke.
Audio:
No. No, I talked to Pete. Pete's good.
Sasha just pushed it on his Twitter.
Two years after the premier lacrosse league launched, creating a split in outdoor lacrosse on the men's side, the PLL and Major League Lacrosse have merged once again, leaving us with just one league now under the Premier Lacrosse League banner.
Yeah.
Are you pushing to social? I think you go now.
Josh King:
You're such a social tactician, Paul, but how much did fate of a sport affect your fate?
Paul Rabil:
Oh, gosh. It was really hard to balance being the subject in this film and also having media and storytelling come into me as the entrepreneur. So I say when we were building that story, which you mentioned the Beckham Dock and the Jordan Dock, and you have things like Drive to Survive and Hard Knocks. You also have the Ultimate Fighter, which helped raise the UFC's profile. You have scripted films like Rudy and Field of Dreams and Remember the Titans and all of that.
Josh King:
You did a lot of your own training camp stuff for PLL.
Paul Rabil:
All of that helps the casual sports fan or the fan who isn't aware of lacrosse become familiar and that gets them into the top of the funnel. So when we launched the PLL, we were always recording. We didn't know how to compose a film or how to package it, and that's a credit to our director Michael Doniger and our producer Matt Tolmach and the Spring Hill folks who got behind it and they scored it so well. I was feeling a little emotional listening to that scene, but I think that it is very much a piece that will be our staple and will be the league staple for a long time to come in that it's our origin story and I wanted to capture that visually and share that for a lot of reasons.
Josh King:
Our conversation five years ago included some clips of you winning your national championship, one of your two national championships with Hopkins. I talked about my play and it's easy even in our conversation to focus on the game involving men, but you are focusing a lot on women as well. This past February, the PLL held the Unleashed All-Star game, world-renowned women's professionals from across North America competed in a north versus south exhibition. I had Val Ackerman on the show a couple of weeks ago talking about how the WNBA was successfully hatched within the NBA. Is one of the goals of the PLL to support a women's league? How do you maybe achieve that goal?
Paul Rabil:
Yes, and it has been since we launched. We partnered formally in 2019 with the Women's Professional Lacrosse League was a WPLL. They unfortunately folded after the 2019 season and then we work with Jon Patricof and the Athletes Unlimited folks that span four different disciplines and one of them is lacrosse in the summer over a two-week tournament.
Josh King:
We've had John Soros in here. He is a good friend.
Paul Rabil:
There you go. Now, on the heels of our championship series bet we wagered last year and the success of getting lacrosse back into the Olympics. One of the big pieces was that the rules six on six as well as the gameplay rules are mirrored in the men's and women's game. That's the first time that's happened. The women's game was actually started in Scotland in the late 1800s and it's why it's 12 on 12 to the outdoor game, in the men's it's 10 on 10. Men play with pads, women don't. There's just shooting space. There's all these different rules.
I love that the game is the same for the men's and women's in sixes. And so looking at this property in year two, we said, "Hey, I think it would be great to build up to a place where we can have four men's and four women's teams potentially or extend a series amongst several teams on the women's side. Let's start by having an inaugural all-star game," and that's what we did this past February and it was aired on ESPN+. We just about sold out the place. It was a ticketed event as it was a sponsorship asset. Our partner's ticket master got behind it, and that was even more proof than what we thought we needed to see the trajectory of women's lacrosse and continue to allow us to have conversations in board meetings around resourcing and investing in women's lacrosse more.
Josh King:
You told us about how as the Olympics looks forward to 2028. The important difference between then and now is parity and the ability for so many different lacrosse organizations from different countries to be able to participate. As you think about how PLL looks outside of the US borders, the four major sports have been expanding their games. NFL plays annually in Europe. Major League Baseball has a series this year in South Korea, the Dominican Republic, and other locations. NBA headed to France and Mexico. NHL in Sweden. That's a lot of potential merch to sell if you can get into foreign countries. Does the PLL have international ambitions?
Paul Rabil:
Yes, and we did in our first year where we structured a relationship with a group called in [inaudible 00:36:01] across in Japan. We sent two all-star teams, one men's, one women's over to Japan and had a fantastic first event. Then the pandemic hit and we weren't able to go back for two years. Last year we went back for the first time just ahead of the Olympic News. This year we're going back again and we're bringing a men's and women's all-star team. It is a wildly successful event for us because we play against the best players in Japan. We get in front of thousands of fans. We take our players to do free clinics and camps at local schools. We're introducing the sport to many and it's created a template for us to do that in other markets around the world. So we're calling it PLL International and I expect us to in 2025 and beyond be in other markets in addition to Japan.
Josh King:
As we talk about the growth of lacrosse leading up to the 2028 games, the PLL and seven other leading lacrosse brands formed Elevate 28. I've heard you talk Paul about how maybe one of the greatest deficits of the game right now is the availability of coaching and getting kids into the game and having them love and enjoy the game at younger ages and to be able to stick with it. I would just want to hear a little bit of the conversation when you were here last. Marc Riccio of USA Lacrosse talk to Judy Shaw to discuss the collaboration that you're all working on. Let's listen to Mark describe the purpose of Elevate 28.
Speaker 4:
Elevate 28 is coming off the announcement of LA 28 meaning lacrosse getting into the Olympics. Elevate 28 is the coming together of eight organizations in the United States pro leagues, collegiate to grow the game of lacrosse to get more kids playing the game to double annual participation in the game of lacrosse by the end of the decade. It's an unprecedented transformational partnership.
Josh King:
Doubling annual participation. How do you actually do that?
Paul Rabil:
Well, year over year, we just got great news from the SFIA that lacrosse participation is up almost 6% and then 13% on casuals. So more casuals are playing the game and they define it by competitive leagues or just picking up a lacrosse stick at a public or private school or just out in the park. So how do we do it? You mentioned coaching. I think coaching is so critical and underpinned in the right organic growth, especially for stick ball sports that are complicated and challenging to play. You need great coaching so you can learn how to catch and throw. So the eight groups that Marc Riccio referenced, we are collaborating in ways that we can share our individual youth efforts and grassroots efforts and community efforts with each other such that if there is overlap or if there is potential conflict, we can smooth it out immediately.
I think all of us want to see more sticks in hands and more goals on field. So that's part one. Part two is collective investment. So one of the things that we do at the PLL is we are, I should say two things, is an initiative that we're getting ready to announce called PLL play, which is expounding on our youth business right now, which is largely just instruction from the best players in the world down to the emerging participants. We've added a incredible tournament business called Summit Lacrosse Ventures to our company, and they run the Lake Placid Tournament among a number of other tournaments. So we're going to have now owned and operated shops on tournaments and we're going to continue to partner with operators like 3Step and Dynamic Sports and Team91 on co-hosting tournaments. And the third thing is juniors. So one of the benefits that we get with having teams in markets is that we can more acutely drive interest to the Philadelphia water dogs or the Maryland Whipsnakes. And one of the things we believe will lead to greater participation lift is to revitalize rec or town lacrosse.
I think, generally, no matter the discipline, we need a revitalization effort in rec sports. That's the only line of sport I played growing up, my brother the same, most people we know. It's become so privatized and I think there is space for a private environment from if you want to pay more for better jerseys and better coaching and that's your perceived investment as a parent, go for it. And I think it's good to have higher price points in any industry, but we can't allow ourselves to diminish the value of introducing any sport at a low price point. So what we're doing is launching our juniors program, which would look like the Junior Boston Canons, the Junior Philadelphia Water Dogs, and they will-
Josh King:
Just like Beckham started with Junior Manchester United.
Paul Rabil:
And they will function as leagues though, so slightly different than European football or the MLS where it's not like a tryout team and we're doing the same stuff that the club programs are. We're actually bringing the low price point back to life and injecting it with a lot of powerful branding because of the aspirational component of young kids Up to the pros.
Josh King:
Before we transition to your new book, The Way of the Champion anticipation as we've been talking about is building for the start of the 2024 PLL season. Of course, the 2023 season couldn't have ended on a more exciting note, I just want to listen. As the league MVP, Tom Schreiber scored the championship winner with a 1 37 left in regulation as the Archers defeated the Water Dogs, 15-14.
Audio:
And on Scarpello rolls back, got it back to his right hand. He can't get the shot off as he drops to his knees. Shot clock down to seven. Schreiber's going to have to make something happen here. He shoots and scores. What? What?
You talk about taking matters into your own hands. The MVP late in the shot clock, just a tick of a second left karke. Unbelievable.
Josh King:
You couldn't have ended on a higher note on the last season. What do you do for an encore? What should a viewer on ESPN be looking for to match that action and intensity?
Paul Rabil:
Oh, God, that was such a great ending. So you have your league MVP scoring the game-winning goal for the number one against the number two team in the league for a championship with under two minutes left. When we talked about live IP to start, one of the reasons why sports is the best form of original programming is no one knows how it's going to end. And in this case, we'd love to see that scenario roll out year over year. It's not going to, I know Adam Silver would love the NBA All-Star game to come down to the final possession and it has. And when it doesn't, everyone talks about what needs to be fixed about the NBA All-Star game. So there's a lot that's outside of our control. What's in our control to your question is putting on a hell of a broadcast.
So we work with our production partners in Ross and ESPN to make sure that we are getting the best technology and the best software. So the technology on field from camera operators to angle software to virtual graphics and using AR to unpack a complex moment with statistics so that the enthusiast that's watching at home is really entertained and loving it and that the net new fan is understanding what they're watching, really entertained and loving it. That's within our control. And then on the teams now that are in markets, what we work on pretty heavily out of our growth vertical is our player experience and then our fan experience. And our fan experience will look different this year because when you go to a Philadelphia Water Dog's home game or a Maryland Whipsnakes home game or a Boston Canons home game or Utah Archers home game, it's going to feel like their stadium. Where in the past it was a PLL stadium where our eight teams were playing. Now you're going to feel the home stand
Josh King:
After the break. Paul Rabil and I are going to continue to talk about the Premier Lacrosse League and dive into his new book, The Way of the Champion out now from Penguin Random House. That's all coming up right after this.
Audio:
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Josh King:
Welcome back. If you're enjoying our conversation, want to hear more from guests like Paul Rabil. Please remember to subscribe to Inside the ICE House podcast wherever you listen to your pods and give us a five-star rating if you would, and review on Apple Podcasts. Before the break, Paul and I were discussing the inclusion of lacrosse in the 2028 Olympics, the success of the Premier Lacrosse League so far in its first five seasons and what the future may hold for it.
It's been nearly three years now, Paul, since your retirement and the Premier Lacrosse League is on the cusp of its sixth season. Amid the highs and lows of your athletic career and your subsequent business ventures, you've chosen to write The Way of the Champion pain, persistence, and the path forward. You were always a journal or an introspective guy. The first time I talked to you, I could tell that you were, and I'm looking at your noted up book of your own set of galleys that you never stop writing and trying to think about storytelling. Why was now the time to put this all into the form of a book?
Paul Rabil:
It's funny, I didn't know it was the time. I got an email from Ryan Holiday who's been my consultant on this project, and he's an investor in the PLL and I think one of the most talented writers in the world. I got an email from him saying, "Hey, have you considered writing a book yet?" And this was heading into my final season in 2021, and I told him, "Why would anyone want to read a book that I write? I'm having a hard enough time at the PLL side getting people to watch a game or a sport that they haven't seen before. Is this going to be distracting?" And he said, "That imposter syndrome is the reason why I want to do this with you." Because in his experience, writers who feel like no one wants to read what they put on paper are often wrong. And writers who think everyone wants to read what they put on paper are often wrong.
So that was our jumping off point, and I think back in my career and the characteristic that I'm most proud of is curiosity. There's a reason why I launched a podcast interviewing the best athletes, entrepreneurs, entertainers at what they do, but more so digging into their challenges and their tools of life and tactics. I used to think about different ways to practice. So there's a constant thirst and what that's led to is surround sound entertainment in my head around lessons from the greatest in sports, operating to athletes, performing to entertainers. And I have all this stuff that I wanted to share with the next version of me, the kid out there who is looking for a guide to navigate the upcoming challenges and successes that await them to learn from the legacy of those that preceded them. And there's a chapter in here where I reference Nick Saban and he talks about the five options or five choices we have in life. It is to either be bad, average, good, excellent, or elite. And this book, I hope, will service as a guide to those who want to be elite.
Josh King:
The books divided into three sections, amateur, professional, and beyond the game, offering numerous lessons from the three monkeys to seize the short window to over-reward the assist. How is this structure going to enhance the reader's experience and benefit their understanding of your insights?
Paul Rabil:
Yeah. What's great because that was the challenge and why it took two years to write this is we knew what we wanted to write but didn't know how it would live on the pages structurally. So as you mentioned, amateur professional beyond the game match that with what we know in sports and in life, there is no blueprint. Katie Ledecky says, "The secret is there is no secret." And I'll give you an example, take the two best footballers in the world. Pele and Tom Brady different sports, but football. Pele won three world Cups. Tom Brady won seven Super Bowls. Their pregame rituals couldn't be more opposite. Pele used visualization. He put a cold towel over his eyes, he tried to bring his emotion and energy level to neutral, and he started thinking about scoring goals, touching the ball, feeling the ball against his foot.
Tom Brady uses anger. It helps him as what he says, heighten his senses so that he can become more aggressive, more intense, more focused. So those are two entirely different pregame strategies that worked fantastically for two of the greatest footballers ever. So knowing that lessons are different and it's up to the reader to take what resonates with them. What I could do was break it down into more of a linear trajectory. So there's amateurism, which is derived from the Latin word amateur, which means a lover of an enthusiast, and that's so beautiful about playing the game at the wreck or town level that we were just talking about.
You have to incorporate hard work, coachability, you have to be a student. There was a chapter I write about watching film transition to professional. One of my favorite authors, Steven Pressfield wrote Turning Pro, and he says, there's two stages in our life before pro and after pro.
It is our ability to profess our calling sacrifice, discipline perspective, even the work ethic, being coachable and being a student that continues on the work ethic might shift a little bit though where as an amateur, you're going to be the hardest worker in the room, you're going to grind yourself into the ground because you need to make the next stages as a pro. You want to extend your career so you become a little bit more thoughtful around impact training. That's an example of differences between the two stages. And the last is what do we do when we retire from sports and how are we channeling all of those learned characteristics into impact in community and investment? And I think the quote from Muhammad Ali always resonates with me that if a man who's 50 years old who've used the world the same way as he does when he was 20, has squandered 30 years of his life, and that book is all about what we do next, how we let go, how we resource our thoughts and tensions and energy and how we want to be remembered.
Josh King:
Talking about amateurs and professionals there filled throughout the book, you feature anecdotes from people like Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Vince, Vaughn. We've mentioned earlier, George Lucas, so many others. As you research the stories on their achieving success, do you find recurring themes or similarities among their experiences like George Lucas and Michael Phelps couldn't be more different, but what were the common threads that you found between the two of them?
Paul Rabil:
Yeah. Well, the common threads are sort of noted in this subtitle, pain, persistence, and the path forward. The path forward is your belief. A lot of the shared similarities are the guarantees I believe that we have in life is that we are required to endure pain and we're required to have patience. It's not just a world of the strong will survive or the fast will accrue. It is about endurance. Can you become stronger and faster over a long period of time? Can you demonstrate a level of resilience and problem solving, and are you able to zoom out and see the bigger picture? I think those are shared characteristics of every successful athlete, entertainer, and entrepreneur. Tactics along the way too are building the honesty and fortitude to ask for help, which by the way, for the best athletes in the world, that's a difficult thing to do because what's on the other side of asking for help is you don't know the answer which you fear the coach will say, you haven't studied the playbook or you're not sure that you can effectively be successful in the next play.
But proven, the ability to ask for help will yield quicker results and better results. There's a chapter in there that pairs Howard Schultz and Magic Johnson. Howard Schultz names that as the number one attribute of CEOs, the ability to ask for help. And Magic Johnson for the middle part of his career, he asked his publicist for the Lakers if he could get the contact information for everyone who sat courtside, and they granted him that he called them and asked if they could take him out for lunch. And of course, everyone said, yeah, I'll grab lunch with magic. And that was his way of being curious and thinking about the other side of his playing career, which he made $40 million in wages for the Lakers and now he's a perennial entrepreneur and owner with a net worth in the hundreds of millions. He's done way more off of his basketball career than he did during it.
Come to show that one of those meetings he had was with Howard Schultz and Magic Johnson. Little known fact was the only owner of a Starbucks restaurant. They were all corporately owned. He owned 125 of them and made quite a profit from building a relationship with Howard Schultz, asking for help and becoming a partner.
Josh King:
One of the other important characters in your book are the lessons you learned from your coach at Hopkins. Dave Pietramala, arguably maybe the greatest defenseman in lac's history. A member of the US Lacrosse Hall of Fame coach is the only person of one player of the year, coach of the year, and D1 National Championship as both player and coach. How have his teachings shaped who you are?
Paul Rabil:
Well, I remember sitting here with you five years ago and you played back this clip from my freshman year where we were playing Virginia in the semifinals and it was overtime and I was caught on defense. We got a stop from a great save from Jesse Schwartzman and I transitioned the ball and gave the assist to our defensive midfield captain, Benson Irwin. That sent us in the championship. We ended up beating Duke and we had our undefeated season.
I talk about that moment funny listening back to you and I's conversation in my book, and it's through the lens of being smarter, outworking and being more prepared than your Peyton Manning was known for his understudying of the linebacker position. Ray Lewis was known for his understudying of the quarterback position. They knew that they were watching each other, and if Peyton could be the smartest linebacker on the field, he's going to be a better quarterback, and vice versa with Ray. Dave Pietramala had a mandate when you walked on campus, no matter how talented of a midfielder or attackman you were offensively, you were going to learn his defense first, and you in fact had to learn his defense first before you could even step on the offensive end. And that was really frustrating for me as a freshman because I came in as a highly touted recruit.
However, there was some doubt because this is the number one team in the country, so was I going to be able to play and I didn't get a chance to play offense in the fall. Over time, I figured out his defense and then he let me play offense. And the first time I started was our second game of the regular season against Syracuse, and I was started because we were down seven to one that halftime, and he brought me in and said, Hey, let's try to mix things up. Cut to that clip that you shared. Of course, the biggest game of my career, semifinal. I was stuck on defense and had Coach Pietramala not built the principles of becoming a defender first, knowing that there was likely going to be a moment where his offensive players get stuck on defense, they better know his system, and he was right.
Josh King:
Another thing that we talked about in that conversation in addition to those games with Hopkins, was this relationship interesting relationship that you struck up with Coach Bill Belichick and he wrote the forward to way of the champion, and he's never your direct coach, but he has deep connections to lacrosse because he was a goalie for Wesleyan and also a dad of his three boys who now coach the Patriots were also lacrosse players. How would you compare the mentoring and teaching style of Belichick with Pietramala, both defensive specialists, but in the locker room? I mean, at least what I've seen of Dynasty now showing on Apple+. Belichick is a very different guy behind closed doors as he is on the podium and the press conference.
Paul Rabil:
Yeah, he's done a masterclass with his press conferences in my view. It is an attempt to conceal as much as it is to protect his players from the podium because Bill takes a lot of heat for handling press conferences the way that he does. But he prefers to take his heat, the heat than the quarterbacks or the linebackers or the tight ends or wide receivers. So it is real shepherding, and I think he's a tactician when it comes to that. He's very similar to Petra and why they were such close friends. In their curiosity and their preparation, they are two of the most prepared people I have ever been around. And they have that mindset of trying to forecast 20, 30, 40 scenarios like we talked about with the PLL potential outcomes so that they're prepared. And Coach Belichick, for me is the greatest coach in any sport of all time because of his humility, his diligence, his work ethic, his brilliance. The humility piece though is pretty unbelievable, the fact that Belichick became friends with Petro because Belichick wanted to learn from Petro, not the other way around shows that humility.
Josh King:
He shares some interesting things in the one of them is the fact that you and he had dinner at one Patriot place and he tossed out the idea of, "Well, maybe Paul Rabil would be an effective D back for the Patriots." Deon Sanders and Bo Jackson both had two sport careers. Jim Brown, legend of lacrosse, and also one of the biggest legends of the NFL. How might life have been different if that conversation went that way and you said, "Let me suit up for the paths."
Paul Rabil:
We'll never know. In a way, as you mentioned, he wrote the forward graciously for the book, and then my introduction is a response to his forward, and we both recall that moment and that decision that we arrived at, which was for me to go all in on professional lacrosse. My wage was $12,000 at that time. The max was 14,000 and the rookie men was 6,000. That's not per game, that's for the whole season. And a minimum wage in the NFL call, it was 400K at that time. And we knew there was a path for me to make a run in the NFL.
Chris Hogan actually was that version two years later, four time lacrosse player at Penn State, went on to play and win three Super Bowls with the Patriots as the receiver. We're seeing Pat Spencer, who was probably Lacrosse, his greatest player over the last 10 years at the collegiate level, forgo the number one pick in the PLL to go out for the NBA, and he's now just gotten onto the Golden State Warriors roster. Two sport athletes are just so inspiring to me and also hopefully index the importance for parents listening and young kids that playing multiple sports makes you a better athlete. And so it's wise for you if you want to be in the PLL or the NFL or the NBA or Major League baseball one day, that you actually pick up a range of skills by playing three, four, five sports at a young age. Then you become, as you get older, a better athlete with a clearer vision around which of those sports you want to go long in.
Josh King:
And you've lamented the fact that with sports specialization, you're denying three other sports the year another participant because they spend all their year focusing on lacrosse training.
Paul Rabil:
Yeah, I mean, we grew up playing four sports a year. You play a sport every season, and so four sports were counting me once and now if I'm the next generation kid who's only playing one sport four seasons around then only one sport's getting my credit. So I haven't seen any studies that cross-reference overlap yet in way of participation. There are third party studies that we can and have invested in the past that show, "Hey, lacrosse players have interest in hockey and soccer and basketball and football but haven't seen the overlap yet." And I think that's a real challenge for the posterity of our next generation as they embark on their sports careers.
Josh King:
You wrote, I'm going to quote you here. "I was a college graduate from an elite university. I was considered the best player in the country and my reward, my dream coming true meant moving back home to live with my parents," on your rookie contract with MLL for $6,000. Fortunately, you know your star power led to endorsements, one of which came from Under Armor, NYC ticker symbol UAA, Sporting Goods, ticker symbol DKS. I want to take a listen to that first commercial promoting Under Armour cold gear that played during the NFL's Thanksgiving Day games.
Audio:
Paul Rabil report to cold abuse simulator.
Where do you go to bury limitations, to redefine preparation, to remain the world's greatest lacrosse player? The Under Armour cold gear headquarters only at Sporting Goods.
Josh King:
That some had a hair you had back then, Paul.
Audio:
And no beard.
Josh King:
After the ad, Bloomberg billed you as lacrosse's first million dollar man. And as you put it, playing professional lacrosse had paid off. How did that spot and the money that came with it help influence what you and Mike would eventually do with PLL?
Paul Rabil:
Yeah. It ties so well to your former question, which was that decision, that crossroads that I was at with Bill. And he was the one who encouraged me to stick with lacrosse. And his note was very, very few people in history get an opportunity to pursue being the greatest at what they do. That's what he's doing in football. And he was like, "That's what you're doing in lacrosse." We don't know what the future is. And frankly, the materialism of what you get as an NFL or NBA or Major League baseball player shouldn't dictate this crossroad decision now. So we went all in on lacrosse. I didn't know that I was going to launch the PLL 10 years later, wouldn't have wanted to because that would've indicated that my 10 years of playing in the MLL weren't going well. And Mike and I have always said it would've been smarter for us to own a team in a league that was working. All of those didn't net out at the time, which is why we launched the PLL.
I think related to the impact of the Under Armour ad, the story that Bloomberg put together, all of that is part of narration for the brand of lacrosse, for the inspiration of the next generation. There's a chapter in the book called You Need a Good Story, and I referenced the Bloomberg article. I also reference a photographer for Life Magazine, Flip Schulke, and Flip Went and shot Muhammad Ali underwater, and it was this famous Life magazine photo shoot, and he did it because Muhammad Ali told him that he trains underwater. He found out 10 years later that Muhammad Ali doesn't train underwater. But that story and that photo sold millions of issues.
Bill Bowerman, who is Phil Knight's co-founder at Nike, I think changed the business by his belief on what an athlete or who an athlete was and by doing something else. So he would constantly push Phil Knight to believe that if you have a body, you're an athlete. So instead of just servicing high school, college and, pro athletes with their footwear, let's go after everyone. How did he get there? Well, he wrote a book called Jogging and the subtitles were about benefiting your health and medical situation and wellbeing. That became a bestseller. More people started this new thing called jogging.
I think the Bloomberg article did a couple of things for lacrosse. One is that it showed for the first time that you could be a professional athlete and make it, and the other thing that it did is it introduced that aspirational belief for the next generation. They're not only going to succeed if they make it, but they're going to be further along because the sport will advance. It was like Nolan Ryan was the first million dollar baseball player, and what that did to baseball participation in America was amazing. And our hope is that with really intelligent and impactful stories that we can impact the next generation of participants in lacrosse.
Josh King:
As we begin to wrap up, Paul, I just want to pause a little bit on the idea of friends, partners, and brothers, because that clip that we played of Fate of a Sport was that moment that you and Mike were in the room and the news came out about the merger with MLL. There's another scene in the documentary where MLL is trying to buy you and you guys are both looking at each other and pondering what it actually mean for your pocketbooks. So I think you're both going to get $6 million if you took that deal and then you say it, "We're not going to do it." But considering your close relationship with Mike, what apprehensions did you have prior to starting the PLL with a sibling? I mean, there's often cautionary tales about mixing family with business, given the potential impact on personal relationships. How did you navigate those challenges to get to that moment when you and Mike are saying, "Man, we are in this together?"
Paul Rabil:
Well, to double click on that, I remember Hearst Ventures asked when they were looking at investing into the PLL in our early round, asked if they could get a reference with our parents because they knew that mixing family and business historically is a challenge. And I try to look at it-
Josh King:
And the Hearst should know.
Paul Rabil:
I try to look at it from two perspectives. One is the shareholders and then the other is our perspective. From a shareholder perspective, a founder's job is to service them, and that needs to be the priority, and you worry that if you have co-founders that their priority is each other, and the truth is both can be true. The other thing is we probably have all felt this at different times, but there is a oddity in our closest relationships, whether it's family like my brother and I, or your significant other or your parents or your closest friends is as humans, we have this weird psychological tendency to treat the people who we love the most, the worst, and people who were meeting for the first time, we have no clue about them the best.
And so you have to constantly be mindful. I picked this up at least for myself with Mike, is that because he's my brother and all of the young stuff and our attachment styles can supersede logic and the present state of emotion, I have to treat him as if he is my co-founder first versus my brother, and that requires honesty and vulnerability. The one thing that I'll say which is why I believe mixing family and business is a good thing, especially for entrepreneurs, is that it's really, really fucking hard building a company. And when you're doing it with someone who you love, there is a level of trust and loyalty that is so interwoven in the partnership that it gives you a physiological edge. And the late nights that turned into early, early mornings around the clock, knowing that you were doing it with your brother, I think made it all possible.
Josh King:
We are headed into your sixth season shortly after that concludes we're going to be at the 2024 Olympics in Paris, France. Should be a super show as the athletes make their way down the sen. And then we're going to begin this phenomenon in the United States that we probably haven't seen since 1980 after Lake Placid looking forward to '84 to Los Angeles, or I guess, '92, looking forward to 96 in Atlanta of, shit, the Olympic Games are coming to the United States to Los Angeles in 2028. As we wrap, what will that run up be like for the game of lacrosse, the PLL, and where do you expect to see the game and your league on the other side late 2028, 2029?
Paul Rabil:
I think that it's the biggest moment in our sports history, and I'll explain why once we get through the Paris games, all eyes for the national governing bodies are going to be on LA '28 the next summer in Olympics. Olympics in the past have gotten 3 billion viewers globally. Put that in perspective. That's 30 Super Bowls worth of viewership that will be now pointed toward lacrosse among other disciplines. So the awareness level will spike to unheard levels and then incumbent on us at the PLL, the Elevate 28 partners. How do we make sure that we have the guardrails up? We're prepared to take on that awareness, we're able to convert it to attention, and a long-term fan, that's stuff that we're building toward.
But as soon as Paris is done, one of the big unlocks in addition to awareness and viewership that a sport gets from being in the Olympics is they get pro rata resourcing. So lacrosse won't be played in Paris, but because it's played in LA, as soon as Paris is done, those Olympic training centers open up and offer resources to lacrosse coaches and players. That's from Mike Placid to San Diego to Vail Colorado. Among other places. Lacrosse has never had that resource, and I believe that when that happens all around the world, these 91 countries at play, we're going to get to that place that you and I started this podcast, which is going to see more interest for lacrosse, more participation in lacrosse, more conversion to PLL fandom.
Josh King:
Well, we will have you back in five years as we look at the... Maybe we'll record at la. That would be awesome.
Paul Rabil:
That would be awesome.
Josh King:
Paul Rabil, great to have you back Inside The ICE House.
Paul Rabil:
Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Paul Rabil, co-founder and president of the Premier Lacrosse League, and author of The Way of the Champion, the Pain Persistence and The Path Forward out now from Penguin Random House. If you like what you heard, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, make sure to leave a review. Email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Lance Glynn with production assistance, editing and engineering from the great Ken Abel, Pete Ash is the director of programming and production at ICE. And I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.
Audio:
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