How a Father and Angel City STH Considers Sports Fandom

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 302 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Richard Schulman, his brother-in-law! He’s a lifelong sports
fan, now a father of four and Angel City FC season ticket holder,
answering Neil’s questions about how he follows sports, became an Angel
City FC fan, raising his kids with sports, and more. His day job is the head
of the Richard Schulman Team, a Keller Williams realty.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the full
interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast platforms and at
www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 302: Richard Schulman

Richard’s Career
“I started in real estate basically right out of college. I didn't really
have a plan to do it. It's kind of a weird job, because, really, anyone
can get a real estate license, and pretty much everyone does get a real
estate license at some point. And because of the nature of how
brokerage works and how people are paid, there's not really a huge
incentive to invest a lot of time and effort into each new agent. So I
started at a different company and floated along for a while, kind of
figured out on my own, which I think is probably the screener for the
industry. Like, can you figure it out on your own?

“I've been doing this 21 years at Keller Williams, I think 18 years now in August.
KW is an entrepreneur-focused real estate brokerage, so it really taught me about
building a business. You know, there's two ways to look at real estate brokerage,
am I a real estate broker or am I a real estate broker, and I own a business that
also sells real estate brokerage services? So, now. I am a real estate broker, I sell
houses, I have clients that I actively work with. For commission, I provide real
estate brokerage services. Then, in addition, I also manage a team of real estate
agents that work with me, and sell real estate for me in a collaborative
environment. And we know from our experience that this model generates a far
superior client service than the, let's call it the traditional solo agent model. It's
not to say that solo agents are bad and that teams are better. There are great solo
agents and there are bad teams, but I know that our team in a collaborative
environment are able to provide a significantly higher service offering for you,
the consumer, than if we were solo agents on our own doing this.”

About Rich’s relationship with sports
“Well, I was always a sports fan. I used to always read the sports
section of the newspaper when it came, I know it's kind of an
antiquated notion now. I grew up a baseball fan. I now find baseball
very tedious and boring. It's very hard to watch. You know, I get
invited to Dodgers games, and I just tell my friends who have tickets,
I'm like, I really don't want to drive an hour to Dodger Stadium,
spend 2 to 4 hours watching a game, and then it's like a six hour
adventure. And you know, what, if they just have a bad game and it's
like six hours, you might see nothing interesting.

“So I grew up a Dodgers fan, I grew up a Lakers fan. Although Lakers
games were harder to go to growing up, they're just more limited.
When I was growing up, I think the Lakers have won 11
championships in my lifetime. I could be wrong there. Then we had
the Kings [NHL team]. No one really cared about the Kings. I couldn't
tell you three people on the Kings right now. We had the Raiders
growing up, so I did have season tickets to the Raiders for a year, that
was a good year. I think that the two Super Bowl teams came and
played in Los Angeles that year, the Cowboys and the Bills, I believe it
was like ‘92 or ‘93.”

“My mom watches pretty much every Dodger game. My dad is around
when the Dodger games are being watched. I found out, during
interleague [play], you know, my dad is from New York, and he has
two original Yankee Stadium chairs at the house from like 1920 or
whatever. And he has original Dodger Stadium and Pauley Pavilion
[seats], so I'm kind of a collector as well. But he, when interleague
came to town, it came out that he was actually a huge Yankees fan. But
in the absence of the Dodgers and Yankees ever having played in my
lifetime, I don't think they had played a game against them since, like,
probably the 81 World Series they played each other; so in my lifetime,
they never played each other until interleague play, so it never came
up. And then [it came out] he was actually a huge Yankees fan.

“We had, through his work, partial season tickets for a time, so we
used to go to Dodger games growing up and I would keep score. I'd
bring a scoring book and I'd keep score. And then I became a
collector. You can see I've got some cool pieces. You probably can't
see there, that's the original [LA Forum] floor section there. And I've
got, [from] Haas Pavilion, the giant R from the floor. I've got a 1920
something bench from Memorial Stadium at Cal…

“One of my dad's friends gave me a pack of cards, probably in like the
late 80s, I was probably 7 or 8 and I still have my closet. Your sister
doesn't understand, I've got maybe 30, 40,000 baseball cards. I
mean, most of them are, like, completely worthless, but I collected
with an eye for investment, so I have a box of rookie cards. I have like
all these Shaq rookies and Larry Johnson rookies and people who are
big stars, but the only card I have that's worth [anything] — I took like
my best 30 cards and sent them to an auction house to evaluate, not
that I was gonna sell them, but I was just curious.

“The Shaq rookie cards are primarily worthless because there's so
many of them. In ‘92, when he was a rookie, he had this Upper Deck
card, I probably have five of them. They might have made like 10
million copies of this card. I think you had to mail away to get it, but
like, everyone got one. The Magic Johnson rookie is worth like a few
thousand dollars, and literally everything else combined is not worth
$6. There's really no market for like — you know, I had a collection of
baseball teams that no longer exist. I have a pile of like Washington
Senators and, and Boston Braves and stuff like that. Worthless. But I
find it neat, you know, an interesting piece of history.”

How his sports fandom evolved as he graduated college and started
his career and grew a family
“Well, now I'm constrained on time. Like, I took my seven year-old to
a Savannah Bananas game. I'm sure you're familiar with them; and
the same with soccer, it's like you get there and you sit down and
exactly two hours later you're walking to the car. I can take my kids to
an Angel City game, which is the women's pro team in LA, it's like on
a schedule. It's like 7:00 game; I like to go early with the kids, we can
walk around; but I can leave my house at 6:00, I can sit down at 6:30,
the game starts at 7:00, the game is over by 8:45, I'm home by 9:30.
It's a pretty tight time. And the kids like it. It's very efficient, right?

“I hate to be, like, mechanical about it, but compare it to a Dodger
game. No one in the family cares about baseball, my kids don't even
understand baseball. We saw the Savannah Bananas game [and] I'm
having to explain to them how this is like fake baseball, but it's how
baseball works generally. So sports now has to fit into a box. Like, I
can watch playoffs. But you know, I used to watch college football
Saturday all day, and I could just watch a random three-hour football
game. Like, you can't do that anymore.”

On what drives decisions to engage with sports today for him
“Well, I honestly stopped. I mean, I went to Cal, which is a mid level
sports school. You know, when I was there my first year, on a rescheduled
game that really shouldn't have happened, we beat Rutgers to finish 1-11
and Rutgers finished 0-10, and two years later we were both in the top
five in the country. So that was part of the interest in college sports; it's
not Alabama, but we had good teams every now and then. We were 1-11
my first year and the year after I graduated we came one play from being
in the national championship game, and three years later we had another
team that almost got to that point, and then we had other good teams. We
had at one point the top five number of players in the NFL, I think we had
like 50 NFL players.

“But now, you know, with NIL — like, we had a really good
quarterback last year [Fernando Mendoza] and he just went to
Indiana. So it's like, what's the point of being a sports fan? A school
like Cal's going to just generate a good player; you know, Aaron
Rodgers was a junior college transfer of no regard. In today's
environment, he would have come to Cal, had a great junior year,
transferred somewhere else for his senior year. So college sports is
stupid. I imagine college sports will have a problem at some point,
because at some point you're going to have like 15 schools that are
really good at football and no one else will care.”

How Richard consumed sports content and growing up and how he does
today, if at all
“So I grew up sort of before the internet blog era. I used to read The
Sports Guy [Bill Simmons[ early on, I enjoyed reading The Sports Guy. I
don't remember which format I was reading on…I would watch
SportsCenter every night and I would know, like, every [baseball player].
You know, like when I was like, 10-11-12, I'd watch Sportscenter. Now I
see people get signed; like, especially in the NBA, I see people like, Oh,
like Neil Horowitz, four years, $100 million. I've never heard of this
person, he's got a $100 million contract. I think it's crazy, but I couldn't
tell you, like, probably half of [MLB] if they're not on the Dodgers, I
probably don't know most of the all stars in any sport.”

“For something big like [the Luka Doncic trade], like that'll show up on
the regular news or my social feed will pop because I have friends who
care more than me about it. But for me, I think the challenge for sports
going forward is, like, I remember I used to get a certain amount of TV
time per night; this is probably like 91-92, so I saved it up to watch. I
watched like every Laker game that season. Like, Vlade [Divac], Elden
[Campbell], Anthony Peeler, I remember Pig [Anthony] Miller, the 12th
man. I think Nick Van Exel was on that team, I want to say Eddie
Jones, but I feel like he was a little bit later. But I would save up all my
TV time to watch a Laker game, you know? Or maybe I'd just save up
enough for the half of the game or something. But now it's crazy that
people would even think about spending that much time watching.

“You know, when the playoffs come around, I'll get interested. I
watched most of the Dodgers playoff games last year. Except, of
course, the game they won the World Series, I was at soccer with the
kids and they went down 5-0. I'm like, Well, I guess we're not
watching that game. We'll just watch tomorrow's game. And then on
the drive home, they tied the game. But I watched the whole game one
with the kids with the Freddie Freeman Grand Slam, so they all saw
that.”

How having kids changed his relationship to live sports
“Time just increasingly becomes a limiting factor for these things. So sports
became like a thing that we do together. Like, I coach their soccer teams. And
it started off very casual with [his oldest daughter] Becca…You know, just me
and Eric, Becca's best friend's dad, started coaching teams, and we got lucky
to get two really elite players on our team who are still playing. Like, those
two girls are still playing super top level youth soccer. It was a good thing to
do, to engage with the children and spend time with the children positively.
You know, my dad coached my teams growing up. I think your dad coached
your teams. I don't want to judge anyone else's parenting journey, but to me,
it's like, people go, ‘Thank you for coaching, I can never do it.’ To me, it's like
I could never sit on the sideline and watch someone else do it.

“Like, now Becca and [middle child] Hannah are in club soccer. I
don't coach them, but still it's hard to sit there and not be like, You're
really not using my daughter correctly. She has skills, like these are
her skills. I don't know how you don't know this. You're the
professional. I try to behave myself. Then it became as they started
getting better and better and playing longer then we started getting
more engaged. It became not just Fall, it was all star, then basically
year round. And then a lot of the friends come from soccer, which is a
really nice experience. So it became more and more and more.”

On which sports to have their daughters play
“Becca tried basketball one year. You know the interesting difference
[between] basketball and soccer? Basketball is like a highly technical sport.
Like, you could be really big and athletic and do well at youth basketball, but
unless you're the tallest kid on the court and fairly coordinated, basketball
requires just years and years and hundreds of hours of practice. You could
take a child that can run at a mid level and can follow directions at a mid
level, and at youth soccer, you can make them into a meaningful player on a
field. They're not going to be the best player, but they could develop into
that. We've played with lots of girls that…like, Hannah scored a goal four
seconds into her first game I think. She just had it. But she played with a lot
of girls who were not good, and then over time developed into good.

“But in soccer you can have no clue about soccer, and you can play a
part in the game. Playing basketball without having any dribbling and
shooting [skills] is really hard, especially when you're smaller; like, a
nine year old girl and you're playing on a ten foot rim with a women's
professional ball. The vast majority of the girls cannot even throw the
ball coherently towards the rim. So it's kind of dumb. But everyone
can kind of kick a soccer ball, like it pops off your foot, right?

“So, we did basketball one year, and then we got really into soccer. I
don't know how people do it with multiple sports. I mean, I know it's
probably better for the kids overall. It's probably better for their
sports. But at some point you have to say you gotta play soccer year
round if you want to advance in soccer. Like, it'd be neat if you also
had time to be like a swimmer and a volleyball player, but with four
kids, it's just not going to happen.”

Getting the girls into club and year-round soccer
“It's not really challenging because, you know, they are invited to play
on an all star team and they get excited for that, and they generally
tend to become friends with the other all stars. So it's like you want to
do more soccer with your friends? Of course.”

About the accessibility of club soccer
“Well, I mean, look, club soccer is not terribly expensive, but it's
probably $5,000 a year. So it's an investment. You can always do
AYSO extra programs, they're not free, but they're probably a lot less
than that. If you're really good enough and can't afford it, there's
always a scholarship. We knew someone who got a scholarship to play
club soccer, because he played a position that they needed. I know the
clubs have scholarship programs, I don't know the behind the scenes
on that. But the clubs are a business and their goal is to produce
winning soccer teams and develop talent. So if they can produce a
winner and they need to, you know, cut a break to someone, sure.

“But soccer's really, like, you can go in the yard and play soccer,
basketball, you can play one on one; soccer, you can play one on one.
You can't really play baseball one on one, right? You can't play
football, really one on one, you can play catch. But soccer is a game
you can really play easily anywhere.”

The technology making it easier for parents to follow youth soccer
“Most of the games at club level are recorded on AI, really fancy cameras
and, yeah, you know, I can get just highlights of my kid. It's pretty good, it's
not great. Like, on Hannah's team, there's a girl that looks like her and the
camera will confuse the two of them. They have similar numbers and they
sort of look the same, so it's kind of like AI in its infancy. The camera's high
also up and far away, so sometimes you're looking at like a little blur on the
screen, you can't really tell. It's supposed to chop up all the best highlights,
but sometimes you're like, Hey, I know she had a really good play around
here and they didn't pick it up, so I've got to like manually sort through to
see it. And then you realize, I can't do that. You can watch the whole game.
But yeah, you gotta watch the whole game most likely.

“They don't really keep stats at this age level. I guess you could sort
through…Usually someone's keeping score like, We won 3-1 and here
are the girls who scored goals…And it's sort of unfair because you
have permanent defensive players, so like they're unlikely to get goals.
You know, in soccer, your best players are typically your defenders, so
your best players are going to have zero statistical impact on the
game.”

On he and his family becoming Angel City FC fans
“We had gone to some LAFC games, me and the girls. We had friends that had
tickets, so we would occasionally go with them on their tickets or buy tickets
near them, and they liked it. I mean, it was neat for them. It was really
interesting when Angel City came around, the same friend and another friend
got season tickets and we thought, Oh, we're not going to go to all the games,
and then we went and the girls had a much better reaction to girls playing
soccer than boys playing soccer, which to me, maybe it sounds obvious; I was
surprised just because, like, I didn't really ever think about it. We had pretty
good seats. It's a small stadium, it's a nice, intimate venue, but you're still like
100 feet away from a player. And if they do a throw in right underneath your
seats; like, I can throw a baseball probably to the players that are closest to us.

“But [my daughters] really responded. So then we ended up getting
[season tickets]. We've had season tickets now for three of the four
years that Angel City has been around… I mean, they don't follow it
like I used to follow sports, but they know the best players, like the
main starting players. Angel City seems to have a constantly changing
roster of players, so it's been a little challenging to attach. But like, you
know, let's say Alyssa Thompson is their best or most notable player,
like when we met her at the stadium after the game, they go down and
try to get autographs, they're really excited. Hannah recognized her
and her sister at the mall, and we tracked down Alyssa Thompson at
the mall. I didn't get a picture with her. Hannah was in her AYSO
jersey at the time, so that was a very fortunate circumstance.

“But they probably couldn't tell you 11 players on the team and we
don't really follow — like, Angel City has not been successful at
winning soccer games. So we haven't really been following their
games that we don't go to.”

On exposure to any sports teams besides Angel City
“I think [youngest daughter] Leah went with her friend to half of a
Laker game, and the friend who took them said that was the right
amount of time to take seven-year-olds to a Laker game, was half.
They've never been to a Dodger game. Leah went to Savannah
Bananas, Leah went to Lakers, I don't think the others have been
anything else professional…”

On taking kids to games
“Probably around 6 or 7 [is the right age to start taking kids to
games]. I mean, Leah will watch a whole game, but last game we went
to, they wanted to go buy candy, and I'm like, there's 20 minutes left
in the game, you're not going to go buy candy. You know, wander the
stadium and go buy candy and miss the whole game. So you know,
something like that…

“[Angel City] has a lot of stuff going on before the game, which is nice.
The food options have dwindled as attendance has trailed off. They
always have a local musical thing happening. They have some celebrity
fans they highlight, which is neat. But they should focus on putting out a
winning product on the field and that will kind of solve [things]. Like,
they just had a friendly match and gave everyone free tickets, which was
neat. But like 5000 people came, so half the restaurants were closed,
which was fine because the food used to be great and they closed all the
restaurants.
“But the nice thing is, in a women's soccer game, as a man, there's no line
in the bathroom. Go to the bathroom at halftime, there's no one in there.”

On consuming any ACFC content outside the IRL live games
“It's still hard to find highlights of professional women's soccer
online. Like, they had a bicycle kick goal last year, it was hard to find
video of it. I don't know why, but it's still a problem.”

On rationale for becoming Angel City season ticket holders
“There's only like 10 or 12 home games, so it makes sense, once you
start going to them. You can have your tickets that you want to
have...We like to have the same, next to friends. The seats are good,
it's reliable, I don't have to worry about going online. You know,
Ticketmaster is still a poor experience to buy tickets. So it's just nice
to see, Okay. I have my tickets, I don't have to think about it.”

“Angel City is good about doing on-field experiences, so the kids have
had a few of them, which is nice. They held the flag for the anthem,
and Hannah got to walk the players out. [Angel City] is good at that.
That's been a positive experience…If you buy enough tickets, then
Angel City will package the tickets with an experience. So if the school
goes, the soccer club goes, they'll buy 40 tickets, and then you'll get to
do an experience.”

“[His daughters] get excited even when they meet [any] player. You
know, they got an autograph last week at the game, and we don't
know who the person is. I have a picture of her, I have to figure out
who it was. But she was excited, it was a former player who signed her
jersey. So sometimes, if they go down to the field, they'll get a
signature from some of the other team, like the backup goalie from
their team, but they're still excited.”

On coaching his girls in soccer
“You try to just learn and then when you reach a problem, you try to solve the
problem. I can't think of a good example right now, but, you know, a lot of
soccer at the youth level is just solving problems. Okay, we played a good
game, and our corner kicks sucked. Realizing opportunities; like, for example,
last year with Hannah's team, we knew to win the league we would have to
beat a team that had a super elite player, and so all we did all year was prepare
to defend a super elite player as a team, which is basically like some sort of
man to man or even two men on one defensive scenario, which is not like
professional soccer, but in youth core soccer, you don't have nine professional
players (they play 9v9). So it's like, okay, yeah, we have to beat one of the two
best players in the league to win the league. So all we did was work on that.

“We also thought corner kicks — this is a professional thing, too,
corner kicks, at this age level, are a massive advantage to the team
taking the corner kick. You can teach your team to play defense at
such a high level that you will give up very few goals. But if you look at
the goals scored, a lot of them come from corner kicks both ways. So
we also practice corner kicks to an excessive degree, and the game
winning goal in the championship game came from a corner kick, and
it was actually a direct corner kick into the net, which is good for 11-
year-olds. But if you practice hundreds of corner kicks throughout the
season and this defensive alignment, you can win a game.

“A lot of people will say you're teaching them how to sort of game the
system, not learning technical skills. But the great irony of youth
soccer is that the number of girls who will play top level collegiate
soccer is very small. Like, if one of your parents didn't play
professional sports, you're probably not going to play collegiate
soccer…Hannah will occasionally say that [she wants to be a soccer
player], I don't know if she actually serious about it, but then you'll
say, like, Hey, here's this David Beckham documentary, the one that
was on Netflix. He talks about how he practiced for four hours a day
in the yard by himself just doing juggling drills. And you're like, do
you want to practice juggling? ‘No.’

“They have this Netflix TV show about a high school soccer player.
One of the rhetorical elements of the show is that the girl runs three
miles every morning while narrating her thoughts to the show. I said,
Oh, let's go run and get faster. ‘I don't want to.’ Okay. So it's like, that's
fine. I think people need to be realistic, that this is okay. Like, they're
not going to play collegiate soccer. They probably won’t even play high
school soccer. It's fine. Keep them playing as long as you can. And so
when you coach it's like, Okay, I can make you into a player who has
more value. If you can kick a direct corner kick into the goal, that will
keep you on the roster an extra season. If you learn how to defend a
super elite player, you might stay on a roster one more year or get
enough playing time that you squeeze onto the next team.”

On sportsmanship in youth sports and Rich’s observations
“I've seen a lot of the idea in soccer that boys are allowed to be very
competitive and to have winning be important, and I've seen that girls
are treated differently. Your top girl players want to win at soccer. I
can't comment on boys, but the girls who are good want to win and
they are sad when they lose and they're sad if they are contributing to
a loss, they're happy when they contribute to a win. So winning is
important.

“I learned something good, you never learn anything good from a win;
you learn from losses. So, it's important to, you know, you have to
lose at some point. You're not going to always win. But I always start
with the idea, because I think some people go to youth soccer and say,
Hey, listen, I want you to have a good time and I want you to try your
best and blah, blah, blah. It's like, actually, it should be We're here to
win a soccer game and you're going to have fun if you win, you're
gonna have fun if you contribute to the win. And my position as a
coach is like, Let's say, Neil, you're terrible at soccer, right? Let me
find a way that you can contribute to this team winning a game. Let
me find a way that you can be a part of a win.

“Versus like, look, I've had good children on my team because of my
kids as soccer players, and we've had good records. Like we're going
to be a good team, right? Like, Leah's team will be a good team next
year. We may or may not win the league…Knowing nothing else, I'd
be shocked if we won fewer than eight games out of ten, based on my
experience. So we're good, right? Let me find a way for everyone else
to contribute to that environment. Maybe two girls have 80% of the
goals, that's fine, how can everyone else be a solid defender or a solid
goalie or produce some value for the team?

“But ultimately, the idea that people don't want to win is silly…
Hannah had a tournament where, I wasn't there, but they didn't score
a goal. They got blown out like crazy. This happens. You start playing
higher levels of soccer, you just play teams that are just not the same
as you, and she wrote an essay for school about how that was her
favorite trip ever, because of how much fun she had with her friends.
Now she's had a lot of wins also. In the hundreds of games she's
played, she has a staggeringly good winning percentage. So for her it's
like it doesn't really matter. You know if they win out next year and
lost all 30 games and they play okay that'd be a different story.”

On if fandom of Angel City will persist with Rich beyond his kids’
childhoods
“I don't know if anyone will listen to this, but [Angel City] has got to
figure out how to keep the same 11 girls on the roster and put a team
on that can play competent soccer…My prediction… I mean, soccer
has had a massive upswing in popularity in the US, and I think if you
project into the future with, you know, football and concussions and
college sports, and all this NIL and transfer protocol and the fact that
baseball is just horribly boring, if you look into the future, it's like,
geez, like, Hey, I can give you a sporting experience, Neil. It's a two
hour start to finish experience. There's constant activity. They fight.

“A goal can be scored by either team within ten seconds at any time,
and almost every game will be coming down to the last [minutes]; like
there are very few blowouts in soccer. Like, you know, I don't know
the stats, you can probably figure out the stats. Like, even though
Angel City does not have a good record, if you added like six goals to
their season this year, they're probably a top three team in the league.
So every game is competitive. Or you can go to a baseball game and
your team could go down five-nothing in the first inning, and you
have a 1% chance of winning that game, but you got to wait four hours
to find out.”

The most memorable game Rich remembers watching or attending as
a kid
“I went to the Dennis Martinez perfect game and the Fernando
[Valenzuela] no hitter.”

The social media platform or platforms that Rich is most active on
“Well, I'm not super active anymore, but I'm on Facebook a little bit.”

How does Rich discover sports news, and with whom does he talk
about it, if at all?
“[The big stuff] will show up in my social feed. I'm on an ACFC chat
with my seatmates, so they'll pop in the chat when there's a trade or
something, but it's pretty quiet otherwise.”

The most memorable sports trip Rich has taken
“I got lucky. I went to the Super Bowl in Houston, the 28-3 [game]. I
went with my dad, I told him at halftime, I said, This is a really close
game, actually. I didn't like predict that the Patriots were going to
win, but the Falcons were about to score and the Patriots got a pick
six, and then the same thing, they got another pick. And I'm like
You're two plays away from the Patriots leading this game, it was a
really close game. So that was a fun one.

“I also went to Minneapolis for the Virginia vs. Texas Tech men's
basketball [championship game]. That also went to overtime, which I
think at the time were the only two times those games had gone to
overtime, and Texas Tech screwed that up because they were up three
[late] in regulation, and they let Virginia make a three to tie it. Like,
the dumbest [play]. It's like one of those things, you're like, I don't
know how you're not ready for this, guys. But you know, Texas Tech
could have been a basketball national champion there.”

Whether Rich watches live sports or other sports content
“I’ve never seen a 30 for 30, which may surprise you. I’ll watch some
sports documentaries once in a while…I really don't watch live sports
unless it's playoffs and playoffs. Like, LA teams in the playoffs, I
mean, I might watch the NFL, I might watch all the semi finals and
Super Bowl. But, other than that, I just can't invest like four hours
into watching a sporting event. It doesn't have any impact on me.”

Does Rich donate to Cal and does he follow Cal Athletics at all?
“At some point I was donating to Cal, but at this point, there's no
point in donating, you know, there's no point in contributing…When I
was [a student on campus] I would go to all the games, basketball and
football, but now what's the point? I graduated in ‘03 and from ‘04 to
‘09 or ‘10, we were a really good team. And, you know, in 2007, we
were ranked second and we could have gone to number one. We blew
it…But, you know, I would go watch football with my young alumni
friends, because you're in your 20s and you have time and your team
is good, but like, then you're in your 30s and you have kids and your
team's bad, what's the point?”

About taking his youngest daughter, Leah, to a Savannah Bananas
game
“I mean, she really enjoyed it. I don't think she'll think about it ever
again unless I ask her about it. But, you know, it was a fun experience.
I think it's going to change how sports are consumed because it's just
a superior product... It's just back to all the other things I said, it's just
nonstop action. It's two hours, they basically start out and tell you,
like, here are the rules. You're going to be in your car two hours from
now. They put a timer on the board, the game ends in two hours.
That's how they start off.

“You've got to compete in a world where people want to watch two
hours of really just energizing content. And if it's, you know, on their
phone, or live or whatever, you can't then put out a product that's four
hours and boring, or three hours and boring and then compete
against the product that's two hours and exciting.”

The best meal to get in LA and where
to get it, and the best food Rich has
ever had at a sports event
“Well, LAFC used to have a restaurant
attached, it was like a high-end, fast
casual restaurant, if that makes sense.
It was really good. Best food in LA? I
don't know, I think food as a hobby is
overrated. Maybe Benihana. It's pretty
fun. P.F. Chang's, but they're all closed
now.”

What was Rich’s most personally viral Facebook post ever?
“I have no idea. I mean, probably something real estate related, but I
just couldn't think of what it is…I never thought about it like that…A
couple hundred comments is not uncommon, but I've had a bunch of
those.”

The most memorable property Rich has ever sold
“We just sold an $11.5 million property. So that probably will be the
top one for a while.”

Where to find Rich and his business
Visit richardschulman.com

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Rich for being so generous with his time to share his
knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

How a Father and Angel City STH Considers Sports Fandom

More Related Content

Similar to How a Father and Angel City STH Considers Sports Fandom (12)

More from Neil Horowitz (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

How a Father and Angel City STH Considers Sports Fandom