Company: Ultimate Fantasy Sports
Launch date: 1986

Ultimate Fantasy Sports is a testament to fantasy players who value the experience over just the financial reward.

Sure, it’s always nice to win money for doing something — particularly a hobby in which you enjoy participating no matter the stakes — and cash prizes go out to top-performing UFS players. The $550 awaiting each baseball league champion, however, is clearly not what keeps 90 percent of the players coming back.

“It’s never been totally about the prizes,” founder John Zaleski told FSB.com. “It’s more about the community. These guys just have a passion for playing in lifetime leagues.”

Zaleski — who started UFS back in 1986, when the primary source of player stats still came in 50-cent packages, some even with a rock-hard stick of gum — says he has always used the term “lifetime” rather than the more common “dynasty” for his leagues. He sees the difference as a symbol of his commitment to the consumer and each entrant’s commitment to his league.

Ultimate Fantasy Sports began enrolling teams in 1988, hosting leagues in baseball, football, basketball and hockey, and added the “lifetime” component in 1990. Owners of “lifetime” teams carry rosters over within the same leagues from year to year, engaging in rookie/prospect drafts each off-season.

“The lifetime leagues now, they’re awesome — just an awesome group of guys,” Zaleski said. “They love the lifetime teams. They love taking over bad teams, and they’ll work on them, build them up.”

“Bad” teams aren’t those judged to be lacking in any way. Those are just the roughly 10 percent of rosters that wind up without managers after each season. Zaleski puts all of those teams back on the open market via an auction system. Interested parties can pick up a team for less than the regular $200 annual entry fee, and Zaleski guarantees his customers that no new leagues will be formed until all open teams find new owners.

Such a promise is just a small example of the kind of focus on customers that has kept UFS rolling for more than 20 years.

“You just take care of people,” Zaleski said. “At the same time, I don’t put up with some of the BS that some of the guys bring in, and guys really respect that. Guys can try to take advantage of other people, and I just didn’t let it happen. Because of that, the service had a great backbone and it kind of thrived off of that. I didn’t realize it until about 10 years after it happened, because you’re just so busy trying to get through the day-to-day.”

Taking care of people has left Zaleski with a strong group of loyal players. UFS currently counts 50 baseball leagues, 45 for football and five in hockey. Basketball has been out of the mix for a few years now, after interest waned following the 1998-99 NBA lockout.

“The interest just died,” Zaleski said. “I did everything possible to keep it going, but we just couldn’t. There were just too many open teams.”

In the beginning — that ultra-labor-intensive, pre-Internet fantasy age — running all of the UFS leagues took a series of phone calls to an answering service that allowed owners to submit lineups and transactions and listen to reports on team results and player moves.

Zaleski said the introduction of the Web gave him his life back, but he still reviews every trade in every league, rejecting those that he deems unfair. That happens much less often at this stage, though, as the explosion of information availability has completely changed the landscape.

“The knowledge base is 1,000 times better than it was when we started in 1988,” Zaleski said.

Although several factors have kept UFS from growing its user base beyond current levels, today’s fantasy climate has Zaleski exploring potential expansion.

“There are a lot of companies that aren’t doing a lifetime business, and they’re afraid of it because of the turnover. But they’ve never talked to me,” he said, referring back to his astonishingly strong annual renewal rate of about 90 percent. “You’re always having to beat the drum to get new people. I don’t have to beat that drum because of the way I’ve got it set up.”

Whether the right growth scenario presents itself, however, won’t impact Zaleski’s satisfaction with the business he launched more than 20 years ago — back when the Seahawks resided in the AFC, the Brewers in the American League and hockey teams in cold northern cities.

Ask him what his initial goals were for the company that has served as the primary source of income for his family since the early 1990s, and his answer is simple and unequivocal.

“The greatest thing I can say is that I’ve accomplished everything I set out to do.”

Name: Brandon Funston
Nickname: The Gamer — the moniker used for several years at ESPN (online and magazine)
Job title(s): I manage the editorial group of Yahoo! Sports Fantasy
Full-time in fantasy? Full-time in fantasy for 13 years
Age: 39
Education: Attended Western Washington University
Family status: Married (Diana - wife) with 2 children - girl (Genesi — 6 years old) and boy (Jonas — 3 years old)
Favorite fantasy sport to play: Football
Favorite sport to watch: Football
Favorite sport to play: Basketball
Favorite team (any sport): Seattle Mariners
All-time favorite athlete: Gus Williams, Seattle Supersonics
Years playing fantasy: 26 years

I got my start in the fantasy industry when: I was 13 years old when my friend’s priest hired us to co-manage his fantasy baseball team for the sum of $100 apiece. He would come out on the balcony of his church living quarters and float dollar bills down to us so we could run off and buy research materials.

Since then, my fantasy résumé includes: I started my profession on a more permanent basis in 1996 as one of the first few hired on at ESPN Fantasy Games. I worked for ESPN for 9 years, spending several years managing the fantasy sports content group and the final two years playing a more prominent role as an on-air/online analyst. I also contributed a few years as a regular fantasy columnist for ESPN the Magazine.

I made the move to Yahoo! in 2004, again taking on the role of managing the fantasy content group. This is the (ever-expanding) role in which I reside presently.

Three questions

1. What was the demand for and treatment of fantasy content like back when you first joined ESPN? How quickly did you see things start to grow?

I think insatiable has always been the best way to describe the thirst for fantasy content, then and now. There used to be very few places you could look for an “expert” take online, but the industry has grown, as has the means by which opinion can be flaunted by anyone and everyone.

From a professional presentation point of view, I know that fantasy content, at least at places like ESPN and Yahoo!, has evolved to the point where it’s nearing the same level of internal editorial scrutiny as that of its traditional sports media components. As far as growth, it seemed steady for several years after I began in the industry, but it seems to have skyrocketed, in terms of industry breadth, in the past few years.

2. What brought you over to Yahoo! Sports, and how did your role differ from what you did at ESPN?

Frankly, I had a very good thing going at ESPN, but I spent the final couple years of my tenure there in Bristol, Conn. And the reputation of life in that Northeastern town is deserved. Admittedly, I’m a West Coast kind of guy — born and raised in the moderate, albeit rainy, northwest corner of the country. While in Connecticut, we lived in a classically beautiful New England town of West Hartford, but that didn’t overcome my desire to be back on the West Coast — closer to the family, friends and way of life I was accustomed to. It was tough to leave the ego-boost that comes from getting to rub elbows with sports celebrities on a daily basis in the halls of the Bristol campus, but after two years, my vanity had run its course. And Yahoo!, another monolith in the fantasy industry, offered me a great opportunity to get back to “my” side of the country without having to take a professional step down to get there. I made the move with no regrets, and it’s the same six years later.

3. How do you balance the various sports that you cover, and how does user feedback break down among them?

I have a love for the big three: football, baseball and basketball. But because of just the massive audience that football brings to the table, it garners the majority of my focus. So, while I have a passion for fantasy hoops, I have to slight it in terms of my personal content contributions to the site because its season comes midway through the football season, a time at which I have literally no extra time to give. Baseball gets a little more love from me because it begins as basketball ends and football is still in hibernation. But, with all things — be it managing writers, contributing my own content, or managing the relationship of our content partners — it’s just a matter of prioritizing. That said, I work from home, and the gravitational pull of an office only steps away from my bed can have me at my computer at all hours of the day.

As far as the breakdown of feedback goes, I think it’s proportionate to the audience of that sport. In any fantasy sport, I think there is a somewhat similarly sized (percentage-wise) subset of that participation group that is passionate to the point of actively engaging in message boards and other modes of feedback.

Just like last year, RotoWire took six of the trophies given out by the FSWA on the first day of the FSTA’s winter conference.

As RotoWire president Peter Schoenke walked up to accept the awards for his company and staffers, emcee Matthew Berry met him with comments such as “I wouldn’t go too far” and “you might want to just start walking up now, Peter.”

That second one came as the nominees for Best Online Football Article were displayed: a category composed solely of RotoWire submissions.

Derek VanRiper’s victory over two colleagues in that category marked the second straight year that RotoWire has taken that award. Chris Liss’ entry took the online article prize in 2009.

RotoWire also repeated as top baseball magazine, claiming that trophy for the third year in a row. The company also saw Mark Taylor repeat as the top racing writer but saw the top writer honors in golf, baseball and college sports go to other sites (after claiming those three in 2009.

Other victories came for best basketball writer (Andre Snellings, another previous champion, though not in 2009), best baseball Web article and best baseball series (both David Regan).

Here’s the full list of finalists (with winners in bold) for those six categories …

Best Online Football Article
Dalton Del Don, RotoWire
Jeff Stotts, RotoWire
Derek VanRiper, RotoWire

Best Fantasy Baseball Publication
Fanball
Fantasy Baseball Index
RotoWire

Best Online Baseball Article
John Rakowski, Sports Grumblings
David Regan, RotoWire
Scott White, CBS Sports

Best Baseball Series
Jason Grey, ESPN
David Regan, RotoWire
Mark Strausberg, RotoExperts

Basketball Writer of the Year
Cory Elfrink, Fanball
Tom Lorenzo, RotoExperts
Andre Snellings, RotoWire

Racing Writer of the Year
Scott Engel, RotoExperts
Brian Polking, Fanball
Mark Taylor, RotoWire

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– Turner Sports has launched a website for basketball analyst Mike Fratello. Amid the other analysis and bits, the former coach of the NBA’s Grizzlies, Hawks and Cavaliers offers a weekly fantasy pick (apparently each Monday). The three players he has focused on so far include Celtics guard Tony Allen, Pacers center Roy Hibbert and Sixers guard Louis Williams.

– Those who won their leagues this year would probably dispute Nando Di Fino’s most recent Wall Street Journal column that deems fantasy football mostly luck-driven. Those who lost, however, might be more inclined to agree. Anyone who provides fantasy advice, on the other hand, should skip right to the part where an author says we “usually know nothing.”

– We’ve learned over the past few years that sports statistics officially reside in the public domain. Deep Focus Inc., however, now wants to trademark a popular method of baseball statistical analysis: sabermetrics. The Society of American Baseball Research, or SABR, is fighting that effort.

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