Two former basketball players went on the path of entrepreneurship and founded a private basketball club that managed to take the senior team to the national league. Rada Costea and Sorin Dragomirescu tell Sports Entrepreneurs how they got started, how you can make money from private basketball and how much it costs to maintain a national league team.

Shot from a match with the Laguna Sharks in the National LeaguePhoto: Laguna Sharks Club

Radu Costea and Sorin Dragomirescu are two of a team of 35 basketball coaches scattered around Bucharest.

The Laguna Sharks club they founded is the only private basketball club that plays in the national league, and the teams are heavily supported by public funds.

17 years ago, when founding the club, Radu and Sorin, former basketball players, made a different bet: they checked their own savings, rented a hall in the center and started training children. They miscalculated from the start, but they didn’t give up; they closed in the Center and moved to the neighborhood. In the following years, they spread to other neighborhoods and covered five of the six sectors of the capital.

Today, the Laguna Sharks already have a productive team in the National Men’s Basketball League, a track record that collects championships and runner-up titles among juniors and, perhaps most importantly, children’s initiation clubs in all age categories, from children’s basketball to mini basketball. basketball, for juniors U18.

This autumn, on Hotnews.ro and StartupCafe.ro, we continue to look for video stories with entrepreneurs who have invested money in sports or sports-related activities.

In the fourth installment of the video mini-series “Entrepreneurs in Sports”, we discussed with coach-entrepreneurs Sorin and Rada how to make money from basketball, how much it costs to have a team in the major league, and how to reconcile high-performing sports with good results in teaching and academic education.

See below the fourth series of the video miniseries “Entrepreneurs in Sports” and learn how a private basketball club manages to financially support a team in the national league and even relegate teams from traditional clubs.