When Gus Fitzgerald was about to become a father, he decided it was time to leave Colorado to return to his hometown of Harrisonburg, where he'd be closer to family.
He also left behind one of the riskier aspects of his life in the Rocky Mountains: working as a police officer and enjoying potentially dangerous outdoor sports. When he got back to Virginia, he was looking for a new career as well as a place to offload some of his mountain climbing and biking gear, and found the Shenandoah Valley lacking in second-hand sporting goods shops.
Thus, Redemption Athletics, located in Dukes Plaza on South Main Street in Harrisonburg, was born. But Fitzgerald's goal wasn't just to fill a gap in the local market; he wanted to make sure fewer kids were priced out of playing their favorite sports or trying a new one.
“We started cooking up the idea of Redemption Athletics and launched immediately and got the space last August,” Fitzgerald said. “We wanted to do something besides just selling used sporting goods. We launched with the mission of all kids play built right into it, and we were able to sponsor our first kid less than a month after we opened.”
As it nears its first anniversary, Redemption Athletics buys and sells used sporting goods and fitness equipment. The store has also worked with local teams and aims to sponsor a youth athlete each month with store credit to purchase needed gear.
While brand-new equipment such as bats, gloves, football pads, or golf clubs can quickly run up a bill of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, Fitzgerald said a family can usually leave his store with everything a youth athlete needs to start a season for $150 or less.
The response from the community has been strong, but declaring a purpose beyond profit has also been a driving force for Fitzgerald, his family, and his employees, even as they know the start of any new business comes with challenges.
“The whole idea was to give us some sort of drive besides just slinging used sporting goods,” Fitzgerald said. “To have a mission behind it, I felt, would give us more ambition to get through the difficult beginnings of the business. That has been super rewarding. Getting to sponsor the kids has been the highlight of our month every month. We ran with that and decided the whole mission was going to be affordability in sports for kids, period.”
Fitzgerald said that, in his experience, kids are nearly as aware of the rising costs of youth sports as their parents are, which can lead to more specialization in one sport at a young age or even a hesitancy to ask to play.
“My favorite sponsorship was a kid who was going to back out of playing baseball because he was afraid of how much money his parents were going to have to spend,” Fitzgerald said. “The parents were talking to me about how much that hurt. It was like OK, this is exactly why we are doing this, and it's why the slogan of the company is ‘Gear Doesn't Make the Athlete.’”
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