How Oakland Roots Broke Attendance Record with Leap
Leap delivers results
26,575
Tickets sold to their home opener
7x
Return on ad spend increase for the home opener
3x
Return on ad spend increase for the full season
20%
Increase in email subscribers
46%
Increase in emails sent
2x
Increase in game attendance from 2024 to 2025
*Data collected from Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club in 2025
About Oakland Roots & Soul Sports Club
Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club is a force to be reckoned with in the United Soccer League (USL). Based in Oakland, CA, this sports club is made up of a men’s team and a women’s team, known as Oakland Roots and Oakland Soul respectively. Since their founding, they are one of the few teams in the USL with over ten academy contracts from local talent and have pioneered a professional development pathway in women’s soccer for the East Bay area.
What makes them so unique in their eyes? They’re a community-first club that prioritizes Oakland in every single decision. “The purpose of our club is to harness the magic of Oakland and the power of sport as a vehicle for social good,” stated Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer Edreece Arghandiwal.“Since inception, everything about our actions was intentional.”
Their decision to partner with Leap Event Technology is no exception! Since their beginnings as a grassroots team, this sporting club has been growing immensely over the past few years and needed to call in reinforcements. As they grew, they recruited Leap as their trusted team member to scale their marketing efforts. Thanks to our decades of experience in the sports industry, Leap has helped Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club elevate their marketing to sell more tickets to their games.
We met with Arghandiwal to learn more, including how we helped them break an attendance record for their home game at the Oakland Coliseum!
Recruiting Leap to the Team
As Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club grew organically, they reached a point where they needed Leap to step in to increase the growth of their fanbase with digital advertising. “Engaging with Leap for us was crucial because I needed the capacity and the help to be able to advertise digitally to people in a way that was efficient and led to a healthy return on our investment.” Since partnering with Leap to manage their email and digital advertising efforts, he noted, “So far, that success has been pretty outstanding.”
When this partnership began, Arghandiwal emphasized that Leap outshined its other vendors with the team’s attention and care to Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club brand. “What I appreciate about Leap is the kind of relentless pursuit of just trying to understand us, listen to our needs, and adapt accordingly.” After all, for a club like theirs, branding is everything! In fact, as a startup, this club’s brand initially lived in the minds of its founders, but they were more than ready to disclose their storytelling-centric brand with their partners. He added, “Leap was one of our first examples in the real world of us entrusting our brand with a group that is not internal.”
Not only that, but they’ve entrusted Leap to build and execute a marketing strategy – backed by our data and expertise – that is uniquely tailored to their specific needs as a sports club. “They take our successes, and they try to do more of what makes us special, not the same of what makes others what they are,” Arghandiwal noted. “So that’s been very, very unique to us.”
Let’s dive into how we empower two primary marketing channels – email and digital ads for Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club.
Email Marketing
Prior to Leap, Arghandiwal managed all the email marketing for the club, from writing copy himself to building imagery with his creative team. He noted “about 10 to 15% of my time on a week-to-week basis” was spent on email marketing. Since then, “having a team at Leap help us with email marketing has been a game changer.” Thanks to Leap, he emphasized, “It actually frees me up in being able to think about the big vision and where we can take marketing into the future.”
Now, Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club simply provides the vision and assets for their campaigns, then Leap “really helps catapult it from there.” Leap manages the day-to-day tasks of writing emails, launching campaigns, building automations, and more. This saves Arghandiwal and his team tons of time and increases how many campaigns they can launch each season. As he explained, “Especially with an organization that’s…still a startup, every minute that we can find is a minute gained in value.”
Digital Advertising
Additionally, Leap Event Technology manages all their digital advertising campaigns and the strategies around them. In fact, this sporting club didn’t do any paid advertising until Leap entered the picture. “The whole paid digital advertisement [world] is an entirely new domain that has never been on our plate, and now…Leap has taken that on for us.” On top of saving them time, we also empower Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club to build the best ad campaigns possible. As Arghandiwal stated, “Leap has really taken our ability to create magical game days and translate them into advertisements that drive sales to those games.” Additionally, our team ensures their ads are targeting the right demographics to drive the most ticket sales.
As they design their own assets for ads, Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club leans on us heavily for creative guidance when it comes to their digital campaigns. When Leap finds opportunities to improve language, colors, or imagery on an ad,“we trust that Leap has the data and the knowledge to be able to make those recommendations,” he pointed out. “And that has been a fantastic inner-working relationship to date.”
Oakland Roots’ Record-Breaking Home Opener with 26,000+
Going into 2025, Oakland Roots and Soul Sporting Club was riding the momentum of raising $3.9 million from over 6,000 fans who bought real equity in their club – one of the most successful community raises in American sports history. As this community-first club continued to grow, they were presented with a unique opportunity. Three major league teams had left Oakland, leaving the city’s historic Oakland Coliseum empty. This vacancy was their chance to play in this historic stadium for the first time. So, they decided to host Oakland Roots’ 2025 USL Championship season there, starting with their home opener on March 22nd.
What do you get when you mix a historic venue with a purpose-oriented club that has a strong brand, passionate fanbase, and an exciting game day experience? Arghandiwal stated, “You have a recipe for something pretty special.” In a stadium with over 50,000 seats, this sports club’s initial goal was to sell 15,000 tickets to Oakland Coliseum’s lower bowl. Now more than ever, their club would need to significantly invest in advertising to fill those seats and make this unforgettable night happen.
With Leap’s marketing team by their side, that’s exactly what they did. From targeted email campaigns to bold digital ads, Leap Event Technology and Arghandiwal’s team worked together to ignite excitement in the Oakland community and sell as many tickets as possible to this game. They quickly realized that “the traction was more than we initially thought, and we very quickly surpassed 15,000 seats sold, opened up the second bowl, and sold out 26,000.” In fact, they could have sold even more tickets if they wanted to! However, the Oakland Roots team decided to halt ticket sales after reaching operational capacity to ensure they could deliver the best fan experience.
By the end, they sold exactly 26,575 tickets – a ground-breaking record for this grassroots sports team! “We proved that when you do good, build a strong brand, and put some muscle behind that with advertisement and marketing, the power is really limitless,” Arghandiwal emphasized. He followed up by saying, “Leap has been instrumental in getting that word out.”
The Magic of This Record-Breaking Game Day
The event itself was a massive success. When reflecting on this historic night, Arghandiwal stated, “It was surely magical to see people talk about the fact that that night changed their life, their kid had the best night of their entire existence, and so on.” Beyond the exhilarating match, Oakland Roots pulled out all the stops for this experience. They had local vendors, dance performances, cheerleaders, and an art gallery in the stadium. Two iconic artists from Oakland performed at halftime, and they ended the night with a huge fireworks show. He concluded by saying, “We developed such a unique and beautiful game day experience, and it was special to have 26,000 people be able to experience that.”
How Leap Continually Empowers Their Game
Since this legendary night, Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club has welcomed over 140,000 fans to the Coliseum in 2025. For all of these games and special events, Leap consistently drives results. Thanks to our marketing data, they can make more decisions that are proven to work and push the creative boundaries of their campaigns. As Arghandiwal pointed out, “A lot of times our assumptions are correct, but Leap is able to then quantify that in a way that we have never been able to before.”
This includes how their club taps into influencer marketing. Now, they can confidently launch initiatives that are proven to drive more ticket sales, like booking a certain halftime performer, launching giveaways, or hosting a predominant artist in their gallery. “Every game, we try to have those influencers, those artists, and those celebrities tied to the theme show up,” he noted. “We design those thematics, then Leap really pumps it and gets it out to those artists’ demographics and fanbases, and that really helps it grow.” Leap isn’t just energizing the club’s current fanbase; we are strategically expanding their reach to new, engaged audiences who share similar interests.
Knowing the right visuals are essential to effective marketing, Oakland Roots and Soul Sporting Club leans on Leap’s expertise when designing assets tailored to the themes of each upcoming game. They hone in on what accentuates the uniqueness of each game, whether that be a pickleball tournament, a Latin Heritage celebration, or a drone show. Then, Leap runs lots of A/B tests to optimize their messaging and drive more engagement. “The main thing I’ve learned since partaking in the relationship with Leap is the power of our graphics and imagery, and power of two specific things: wording and colors.” Together, they’ve meticulously crafted visuals for their email campaigns and digital advertisements that truly resonate with their target audience. “Those nuances [are ones] you learn over time, and data really helps support that. Leap has been instrumental in that understanding.”
“What I appreciate about Leap is the kind of relentless pursuit of just trying to understand us, listen to our needs, and adapt accordingly. …They take our successes, and they try to do more of what makes us special – not the same of what makes others what they are. So that’s been very, very unique to us.”
Edreece Arghandiwal
Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club
The Future of Oakland Roots and Leap
Oakland Roots and Soul Sporting Club’s record-breaking game day proved that a strong brand, dedicated community, and strategic marketing can lead to unprecedented success. After playing an instrumental role in achieving this milestone, Leap continues to provide data-driven value to this partnership. In 2025, this sports club achieved the first and third highest attended games across the league, ranking them with the sixth highest attendance overall in the USL.
Looking ahead, Arghandiwal believes Leap’s work will help more than double their revenue next year and increase it by five times in the next 5-7 years. He added, “The work that Leap is going to be helping us do… [will ensure] that the club can be sustainable, the club can be profitable, and we can continue to persist for over a hundred years.” Plus, as the competition for people’s attention gets more difficult, “the work that Leap does is going to be instrumental for us in getting to more people.”
Beyond this Oakland-based team, Leap is increasingly taking more teams in the USL to new heights, including the Tampa Bay Rowdies, Portland Hearts of Pine, and Phoenix Rising Football Club.
No matter what kind of organization you run, contact us today to learn about how Leap’s industry expertise can empower your marketing in the same way it’s empowering Oakland Roots and Soul Sporting Club!
