Customer story
Keeping Atlanta in the stands all summer
The AEBL brings pro basketball to Atlanta every summer, and the games are free. Now fans can follow the whole league or just the teams they root for, saved to their own calendar, so a busy week never costs them a game.
Bigger than basketball
Jahi Rawlings started the Atlanta Entertainment Basketball League in 2012 with one idea: bring the Rucker to Atlanta. New York had its famous summer pro-am. Atlanta had the players, the music and the crowds, and no league to bring them together.
More than a decade on, the AEBL runs men’s and women’s pro-am leagues and youth programs, and its summer games have drawn players like Kyrie Irving, Jaylen Brown and Anthony Edwards. Sponsors cover the gate, so anyone in the city can walk in.
“We’re bigger than basketball.”
For Jahi, the games are the front door. The league runs youth camps, back-to-school drives and scholarships, and summer is when the city shows up for all of it.
The problem with a free ticket
A summer league runs about eight weeks, and fans don’t stop caring halfway through. Life just happens. A work trip, a kid’s birthday, a week where nobody opened Instagram. By the time they check again, the game they meant to catch has already been played.
A paid ticket is its own reminder. It sits in your email with a date on it. A free game has nothing like that, so nothing holds the date for you. For a league built on the crowd, every fan who loses track is an empty seat.
From one post a week to the whole season
Today the schedule lives where most leagues put it: a graphic on social media and a page on the league’s website. The graphics are great. But a post reaches whoever happens to see it that week, and the next week the league has to find every fan all over again.
SoKal turns that around. A fan subscribes once, and every game after that comes to them: on their calendar ahead of time, with a reminder the day before and the morning of. The league adds a game once, and it reaches everyone following that team.
Follow the league, or follow your team
Every business on SoKal gets a brand page. The AEBL’s holds the season: every game, every team, and the league’s own events. A fan opens it from a link or a QR code and picks what to follow.
- The whole league. Every game, all season.
- Their teams. One team or a few, home and away, and nothing else.
- The events around the games. The All-Star game, youth camps and giveaways, as the league announces them.
It all saves to the calendar they already use. Apple and Google Calendar need no app and no account.
What fans get when they follow
Every tip-off, ahead of time
The schedule for the weeks ahead, right next to everything else in their week. When the league adds games, they show up on their own.
Only the games they care about
Follow one team and get its games, home and away. Their calendar doesn’t fill up with matchups they’d never go to.
Changes, first
If a game moves, a tip-off shifts, or a night gets called off, the game on their calendar changes with it. Nobody drives to an empty gym.
What Google, Apple, and Outlook can’t do
All three will subscribe to a calendar link, and a league could hand one out. When the feed refreshes is up to the phone though. Sometimes it’s within the hour, sometimes most of the day, and it always lands silently. A fan can miss that tip-off moved up an hour.
Saving to SoKal keeps three things a subscription gives up.
Changes land right away. Move a game and every saved copy moves with it. Call one off and every fan holding it hears. Nobody has to refresh anything.
Reminders arrive as notifications. The day before and the morning of, so no game sneaks up on anyone.
New games show up the moment they’re added. As the league fills in the schedule through the summer, each game lands on a fan’s calendar when it’s posted, not the next time their phone checks a feed.
Where it goes from here
Jahi started the AEBL to give Atlanta a league of its own. Following it keeps that connection going between games. Fans who can’t make every night still see each one coming, and the nights they can make are already planned.
The league sees how many people follow and how many visit its page, so it knows how far the schedule is reaching across the city.
Run a league or a team?
Free to set up, reviewed the same day. Add your teams and your games, and let fans pick what to follow.