LOVB Is Set to Bring Professional Volleyball to the Sports Industry with the Help of a Partner

Jan 24, 2025

In November, when League One Volleyball (LOVB) announced $100 million in committed new funding, which is expected to fuel its mission to transform volleyball from the grassroots to the professional level, at least two sports industry executives were not surprised.

Shalom Suniula and Ryan Douglas, who lead the sports division for USI Insurance Services, knew all along that LOVB was about to fundamentally alter the sports landscape with the launch of its inaugural professional season in 2025.

Consequently, USI jumped in bed early with LOVB, became its de facto partner for all things related to risk management—a heavy lift given that LOVB’s footprint extends from kids to the pros. The myriad of challenges that LOVB faces made USI a good fit, according to Corinne Lortie, Senior Counsel, Legal & Business Affairs. Once Lortie began working more closely with USI she realized there were many more unanticipated benefits associated with the partnership.

To learn more about this unique partnership, we sought Lortie for the following interview.

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Question: Why has LOVB been successful in attracting investment?

Answer: The recent boom in women’s sports has been immensely helpful for us on the investment side, along with the hype around our Pro league. As you can imagine, everyone wants to get in, but we have intentionally elected to accept support from people best aligned with our mission.

Another reason we’ve been attractive is the unique ecosystem structure of LOVB. We have seen many pro leagues fail in the past, but from the outset we wanted to take a different approach to it. I have prior experience with national governing bodies and not-for-profit sports leagues. So, I was very excited when I was initially looking into joining LOVB and learned about its focus on grassroots development and supporting the sport for girls from the ground up. It’s really genius because not only are we building this really strong foundation, but we are building our own extensive fan base across the country at the same time.  This ecosystem allows us to integrate the various aspects of LOVB, and so youth athletes are able to experience the Pro athletes– they are able to see success in women’s sport and the path to get there.

As an example, the aim is to have all our Pro teams anchored in one of our major youth clubs in their home city and so quite literally, our youth athletes are practicing and training in the facility alongside the Pro Athletes.  This ecosystem also focuses on the full lifecycle, if you will, of these youth athletes that may join one of our youth clubs. They may join as young as 4-years-old and following what we aim to be a highly developmental and supportive club career, support the athlete through the college recruiting process. Upon completing college, we hope they’re able to come back to us as a member of one of our Pro teams, or where that may not be an option, have them join us in other capacities, or be involved in the volleyball/sports world through development of their careers. With that aim, we are offering internships and working with partners in formulating internship and career development paths for our current and former athletes whether at the Pro or youth club level. Ultimately, we hope that they become lifelong fans of women’s volleyball, and LOVB, and generally remain members of the community in whatever capacity makes the most sense for them.

Q: How did the relationship with USI come about?

One of my capacities with LOVB is to oversee risk management and insurance for organization in all aspects. Our relationship with USI originated via reference and has blossomed from there. USI is now essentially my go-to for all things insurance and risk management related. LOVB has grown exponentially in its five years, and USI has now become a pivotal partner in this growth.  USI has been one of our biggest cheerleaders and their excitement about LOVB and its mission is palpable – it’s really great to work with partners that are truly on board with your organization. We have great things happening at LOVB, and they understand our model and believe in what we are building.

Q: What was the challenge before USI came along?

The challenge was that we were a start-up moving incredibly quickly and growing just as quickly, so a lot of our coverage was very piecemeal. We had different brokers doing different things, and policies all over the place. Because USI has an arm specializing on the sports side of things, we were able to get a team that better understood where and what types of coverages we needed and the challenges we face, which could otherwise prove difficult without that experience and knowledge.

There’s a lot of nuances to the sports industry, and all the more so with LOVB where we exist in both the professional and youth sports worlds. With USI we have been able to centralize our insurance portfolio, ensure robust coverage and essentially clean things up. With that we were able to take advantage of our scale and secure better policies with insurers, especially those in niche markets. It was a difficult process, but USI has been incredibly helpful in putting us in what is now an excellent position where we are able to expand and be proactive rather than reactive.

With USI as well, they understood that from the outset, one of our major focus areas and differentiators, was athlete safety which included again, not just being reactive, but rather focusing as well on prevention. In this, LOVB has developed at both the youth and pro levels a program called Safe@LOVB, which outlines guiding principles, means of reporting and clear courses of action in the event of a concern being raised. USI was massively impressed by what we’ve put together while concurrently and continuously seeking to improve on the program.   

Q: Can you speak a little more about this?

USI has been very supportive in our focus on athlete safety, and especially the preventative aspect, getting out in front of these issues before they become issues, whether in terms of physical injury or any form of misconduct.

Some examples of the steps we take include having every single person affiliated with LOVB, whether you’re me sitting in an office or you’re on court teaching the kids, you have to be a member of USAV in your region, which automatically means you’ve gone through a rigorous background check, and you’ve completed a SafeSport training course, among other things. This is mandatory on a yearly renewal basis.

USI also has a resource, a substantial risk management portal that we’ve been utilizing and includes a library of various training programs and guidelines outlining best practices, etc. The resources touch on safety as well as health and wellbeing.  

Q: What about the implementation?

USI have been a really important partner for us. Insurance is not simple – I have worked now extensively in insurance for a couple years and yet still feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface. It is important to have a partner like USI assist you in navigating the realm of insurance.  As I mentioned, they’ve really gotten to know our business and can assist us in planning ahead and permit us to rest easy to an extent knowing that should something happen, we will be covered and have someone there to help us get through.

They have also worked closely with us in terms of medical benefits across the organization, and through what is another one of our differentiators, that is that our Pro Athletes are employees of LOVB, and with that are eligible for world class medical benefits. USI assisted us in making that happen, which was more complex given the fact that some of our athletes and coaches are from outside the U.S. Together we worked to make the process as seamless as possible for them, ensuring there were resources to help understand the system, which may be entirely novel to them, and even to provide those resources in their native language. 

Our implementation is not yet done – with the first Pro League match only a few weeks away, we have had to continue to expand our portfolio and will continue to do so as LOVB expands and evolves. What is important is having a partner there working with you through those changes and to do so in a thoughtful and intelligent way. We always have an eye on how we can prepare for future years and put in place now things that will help us be in an even better position down the road so in year 2, 3 and so on of the Pro League and as the youth club business evolves.

As you can imagine, starting a new professional league, with its first serve as mentioned, only a couple weeks away, it has been crazy. But everyone here at LOVB is incredible, passionate, and committed and I think we’ve done, with the assistance of USI, some incredible things in a short amount of time and that all of this hard work is going to pay off in a big way.

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