What to do instead of fitness

Igor Sayfullin, the founder of the project “Sports Section”, told “Championship” about how to stop doubting your abilities, get into the company of like-minded people and master a new sport in a month.

Igor Sayfullin

– How did the idea of the project “Sports Section” come about?

– At the beginning there was a question: how to occupy yourself, your friends and colleagues in your free time. That is, the idea did not pretend to any scale. It was such an internal story. My friends and I have our own agency, video production, where our friend Elena Vlasova works as a producer. Actually, we were sitting with her one day and thought that it would be great to refresh our working process, to invent some new forms of interaction with our colleagues and our partners, to cheer ourselves up. Lena herself is a certified teacher, a yogi, and not long before this conversation, she had shown some poses and asanas to everyone on the set during breaks between shoots on one of our projects, and everyone loved it. Six months later we remembered it again and thought that it would be great if Lena continued to teach us yoga. We started to remember who else from our friends and colleagues are into what, and thought who could teach us something.

– And what happened next?

– We came up with the story and started making it. It didn’t work out quite right. We didn’t have that many athletes around us, and they didn’t have much time to adjust to our schedule. So we just started looking for cool coaches and different venues and non-stop training there.

– What was your very first practice?

– The very first training was yoga on the roof of the Narkomfin house. It was summer, the weather was very cool, the beginning of July. We all gathered early in the morning and had such a start-up session. And then everything spun with some incredible speed. We made a Facebook group as a platform, added 40-50 of our closest people and gave them the opportunity to invite their friends. It wasn’t long before the group became closed and you could only get in by written recommendation.

Trying is cool, you just need to give people the opportunity to try something with a deep dive.

And so it began to spiral: photos, videos, cool people who started to unite. As a result, by the end of the year we were already friends with Puma, we started making cool parties for participants, looking for new venues. In general, the initiative for ourselves spilled out into the outside world and started to move and drive ourselves.

– When the first training appeared on the site and what was it?

– What appeared on the site and became available in a wide segment is a slightly different product and a different format. The format, where every time a participant was waiting for a new training session on a new sport, remained in our closed community. But what went outward and what became available for purchase were the sports section courses. It’s fun to try everything, but in order to buy something, you need to clearly understand what it will give you, to see the systematic nature and your specific goal. We still think it’s cool to try things, we just need to give people the opportunity to try something with a deep dive.

– What is the main message of your project?

– Our mission: to provide an easy threshold of entry for anyone into any weird sport. To eliminate fear, social barriers as much as possible. To make it comfortable and easy for a person and all he has to do is to try it. So that he was surrounded by cool people, pleasant company, so that he did not have to worry about equipment, site and so on. It was important to us that a person would get a ready-made story at the press of a button. Otherwise, if he is not confident enough, how can he start trying something?

– What is the duration of the course?

– Almost all of the section’s courses run for a month. Almost all of them consist of eight classes, in exceptional cases there are a little more. For example, we have a course “boxing + ballet”, which consists of 12 classes (8 for boxing and 4 for ballet). And rock climbing consisted until recently of 10 classes.

– How many people are usually in a group?

– There are 8-10 people in a group. As we think, this is the most comfortable number of people in the group in order to give everyone proper attention. In such a group it is convenient for everyone to get acquainted and remember everyone. If it is a single sport, there is usually one coach, if it is a doubles sport, there are two.

– What courses that were presented on the website are now unavailable for purchase?

– We temporarily froze the course on artistic gymnastics, on cheerleading. And we had a trial course, which I don’t think will come back, because it was a kind of experiment – “saiking + yoga”. The idea was to combine an active cycling sport with stretching and relaxation. The powerful focus of the course was on recovery from active training.

– What is the most requested course in the history of The Sports Section?

– Fencing. This was the first course on which we tested the hypothesis. Because from the very beginning we were not sure that this story would be in demand. That’s why we built the site on our knees, by the way, this “knee version” is still successfully functioning(smiles).

– Why fencing?

– Fencing was the easiest to build at that moment. Because we already had all the resources on our hands: a great coach – Anya Anstal, with whom we had already done a lot of training in our closed group, a venue and the ability to get all the necessary fencing equipment very quickly. The first course was bought very quickly, literally in a couple of days on reposts in social networks.

– What do you need to have with you when you go to the class?

– You don’t need anything. Like I said. It is very important to us that a person who has bought a course from us does not need to do anything else at all. Just show up with a basic uniform and that’s it. All the equipment can be obtained on the spot.

– Does the section have a motto?

– I guess so. “Try not to try.”

You can already become a part of the section.