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New York has a brand new fight org for the thousands of fighters in the area to keep their eyes on, Lightning Fight League came into existance on the whim of owner Chris Dewing on March 24th 2013 and immediately began to sweep up some of the newest fighter talent on the East Coast.
But is this article merely an advertisement for the company? Absolutely not, whilst it would be nice to get a bit of publicity from writing this the real reasoning behind it is for me to document the highs and lows of what I've gone through in the last 5 days. I'll try to make it as interesting as possible, I promise.
The problem that I'm sure any new fight org faces at the beginning is trying to find fighters. I used to run a fight org called Stampede Fighting Championship in Montreal but I remember it being a lot easier to get people signed up back then than it was this time. As of March 29th at 1:30am I have sent out 70 contract offers and have 22 fighters in the company, enough to run a first show at least but I still have 35 contract offers outstanding. When targeting 0-0 fighters you always run the risk of getting managers who make fighters and then never come back but the frustrations come with the people who decline contracts. There are certain reasons I can accept, the main one being money as with limited finances I can only offer 400/400/400 contracts and some people aren’t going to find that acceptable. The reason I can’t stand is that the fighter is “still in training”. I completely understand that people want to train their fighters up before they debut but there is quite a big tick box saying “Needs Contract” that you untick when that’s the case. The fact that some managers get quite snarky when they reply makes it even more infuriating.
So with my 22 fighters under contract (and surprisingly they were all spread out over my five divisions) I got around to booking my first event under the LFL banner. I was pleased to see that the basic layout of booking a show hadn’t changed at all (if it has then it was probably easier) and I put my highest ranked fighter in the Main Event. This was an immediate mistake I actually had more popular fighters on the card but I stupidly looked at rankings and not popularity. A rookie error that hopefully I won’t be making again any time soon!
I never really got to grips with the advertising and production values in the 100+ shows I ran with the SFC so it came as no surprise that anything I had learned three years ago wasn’t fresh in my mind when I came to it here. Booking the smallest venue and setting my ticket prices low were obvious choices for me but after using the If I lose money on this show I won’t be surprised but that’s all part of the game. I know a lot of the most successful org managers go into great detail and research to make sure they’re squeezing the most money out of every event but I’m not going to do that, I fear that would just burn me out way too early.
Of course at this moment in time the only fights that are confirmed involve the fighters that I manage and there’s absolutely no guarantee that any of the other managers will come back to accept their fights but my fingers will remain tightly crossed until I get a full card confirmed. In the mean time I will sit back and look at my horribly amateurish poster that I made. Thankfully I found someone with actual graphical talent to make my logo and banner for which I am incredibly grateful.
If anyone has any fighters in the New York area looking for a contract (those with hype/popularity of over 100 are warmly welcomed) then feel free to let me know, if this is published then I’ll write an update soon provided I’m not curled up in the corner crying over the crippling failure I’ve accomplished! Thanks for reading!
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