More than 80% of Americans ages six and older participate in sports and recreation every year, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. It’s how we stay active, spend time together, and connect with our communities. Most of us don’t think much about what it takes to make it happen. We simply book the tennis court, go camping, play in the adult basketball league, or drop our kids off for their swim lesson.

The reality is that behind every one of those experiences is a team managing a surprisingly complicated operation. An estimated 500,000 full-time professionals and more than 3 million part-time staff and volunteers operate leagues, camps, and rec facilities across the country [source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, AmeriCorps]. They run camps and fitness classes, schedule instructors, deal with weather, communicate with parents, and handle all the moving pieces that keep our communities active.

For years, those teams have been asked to manage that complexity with technology that still leaves most of the work to them. At Rec, we’ve spent the past several years working alongside those teams to rebuild the operating system that powers our activities, empowering recreation professionals with purpose-built tools to administer child-care programs, court and park bookings, coaching programs and more. 

Today, we’re introducing Seb, our AI platform purpose-built for the sports and recreation industry.

Last year, we wrote about the opportunity for AI to take on the repetitive, time-consuming work that fills up a recreation professional’s day. Since then, we’ve constantly evaluated model improvements, tuned performance to recreation-specific context, and built a system that improves with each interaction. We continue to be firm in our belief that an industry-specific AI platform will drive more activity in every community.

‍Seb is the culmination of this phase of work, built 100% for Rec professionals. Seb is designed to be interacted with as a teammate, trained to make decisions and capable of doing the work end-to-end, giving recreation teams more time to do the work that matters. 

Every day, Rec helps facilitate hundreds of thousands of class, camp, and league registrations, facility bookings, and rec center visits across partners nationwide. By embedding Seb deeply into the Rec platform, Seb immediately becomes the most capable AI in sports and recreation.

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Seb can do more than help write an email or answer a generic question – it can help manage a Rec operation end-to-end, from running reports, managing enrollments, reaching out to customers, and adjusting field schedules. 

We’re already seeing staff members ask Seb to analyze pickleball court usage, schedule league games at the ice rink, or run their weekly marketing emails. Better yet, Seb can save a day from being derailed. We’re all too familiar with the power outage that results in a day of schedule changes, refund requests, and customer questions. When the inevitable happens, Seb is designed to step in and carry the load.

Put another way - we’ve added enormous horsepower to every Rec operation.

Many ways to work with Seb

We like to think of Seb as an awesome new member of your staff. Like any teammate, you can work with Seb in many different ways. Any staff member can simply ask Seb a question or assign a task ad hoc (“Text everyone that signed up for Hatha Yoga today.”). When staff find themselves doing the same thing every day, they can assign a daily or weekly routine to Seb, putting the repeat work on autopilot (“Check the weather at 6 am and send a rain warning to all swimmers today.”). 

In some cities, Seb has also started taking on email, phone, and chat support. Because Seb is deeply integrated with schedules, Seb can support a golf course on a busy Saturday by making and adjusting tee times and ensuring no slots go unfilled. Because Seb understands park facilities, Seb can step in on email and chat to help someone book a birthday party, ensuring they get a spot that allows a bounce house and a grill. 

Built with recreation, for recreation

The people behind sports and recreation make this industry work. Program coordinators know which classes their communities love. Front desk staff know every member and family walking through the door. Directors make judgment calls that depend on years of experience. Coaches, instructors and volunteers create the moments that bring people back over and over.

Each company and department has its own rhythms, exceptions, workflows and policies. We saw this clearly while building our Refund Agent: the hardest part wasn’t just reading a policy, but understanding how it was applied in the real world. Seb is being built with that same philosophy – great AI for this industry has to intimately understand the industry, the specifics of that community, and keep staff in control of the entire experience all the way through.

Where we go from here

Rec is a platform designed for the entire $400 billion U.S. recreation industry. As millions of residents across the country use Rec for their local activities, we see enormous potential in AI-powered products. We are building matching experiences to find a playing partner, a planning concierge to help parents find child care, automated recruiting for pools to hire lifeguards, and intelligent tools to help organizers run tournaments. We believe AI will drive better discovery of parks and programs, better facility utilization, more job opportunities in the community, and increased sponsorship dollars that fund facilities and access to learning. 

Seb is part of a much bigger vision for Rec. We’re building the most intelligent AI for sports and recreation. With our headquarters in San Francisco, we get a front-row seat at the incredible innovation we’ll see in the next decade. Whether you’re a parks and rec agency running on Rec, a resident booking on Rec, or a coach teaching on Rec, our commitment is the same: at Rec, we’ll harness these advancements to drive more activity and stronger communities for everyone.

Seb will soon be available to all Rec customers. We’ll keep adding capabilities, keep learning from our partners, and keep teaching Seb more of the repetitive tasks that make recreation run. For now, put Seb to work and tell us what it should learn next. We have a feeling it’ll be a li’l bit of a busy first season.