Rollerblade, Spikeball, Kan Jam: What happens when a brand’s name is synonymous with a sport

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Rollerblade, the in-line skating brand, found itself in a tricky trademark situation. The brand had become synonymous with the sport, but Rollerblade wanted to protect its trademark from competitors, Mary Horwath, who was its VP of marketing at the time, told Marketing Brew.

“We needed to give the market a replacement name,” she said. So Horwath and her team coined the term ‘in-line skating.’”

It’s “less sexy,” but “more descriptive,” Horwath said, allowing other companies to manufacture and market similar products as the sport grew in popularity, while preventing them from calling those products “Rollerblades.”

For sports brands with popular trademarks, it’s on them to not only come up with a replacement name, but also to show how that name is used in internal and external materials, including ads. If a brand doesn’t have the right protection, competitors could possibly sue on the grounds that the trademarked name is generic enough for anyone to use—and the original brand could lose the rights to the term.

“We coined the phrase in-line skating, and then wanted to be sure that we never used it incorrectly,” Horwath said. “We were certainly policing our own usage.”

Decades later, a few other sports have faced a similar predicament: What do you do when a trademarked brand name becomes interchangeable with a sport?

“I thought about what makes our sport unique,” Spikeball CEO explained

You might know about Spikeball, a sport in which players bounce a small ball on a trampoline-like net on the ground.

You may not know it’s actually called “roundnet,” according to Chris Ruder, CEO of the company Spikeball, which makes equipment for roundnet. Ruder started playing Spikeball when he was about 14 years old, he told Marketing Brew.

In 2007, he started his company and named it after the original product, Spikeball. And he made sure to trademark it. Five years after that, Spikeball hit $1 million in annual revenue with zero full-time employees, and Ruder quit his day job in online advertising, he said. In 2015, the company was featured on an episode of Shark Tank. Today, it has 517,000 followers on Instagram, reflecting the growing popularity of the game.

Ruder was partially inspired by Horwath to coin the name roundnet after she recommended he pursue a “generic name” to trademark, he said.

“So I thought about what makes our sport unique,” he said. “Our sport has a round net. It is a generic term, kind of like baseball, basketball, football. Nobody can trademark that.”

The move opened space for other companies to start manufacturing roundnet sets without any “not-so-friendly legal letters.” For instance, Franklin sells the game under the name “Spyderball.”

Ruder’s ultimate goal, he said, is to create an industry around the sport, even if it means inviting competition.

“Speaking as the CEO of Spikeball, I don’t want anybody else making a product anywhere near us, and I want to have the whole playground to myself,” he said. “But I think that’s a bit short-sighted. Having those other people, those competitors, is going to push us a little bit more.”

Now, there are college tournaments, national tournaments, and, potentially, the first Roundnet world championships in a couple of months, Ruder said.

How Kan Jam followed in Spikeball’s footsteps

Retire your use of Kan Jam in reference to the sport, in which players toss and deflect flying discs at cans to score points, says Eric Klavoon, owner and president of the Professional Discflect Association (PDFA). The Kan Jam brand now makes equipment for the game “discflect,” he explained, though Kan Jam does not yet appear to integrate the term on its website.

When deciding on a new name for the sport, Klavoon found himself researching similar scenarios and came across Spikeball. He said he was directly influenced by Ruder, just as Ruder was influenced by Horwath.

Like Ruder, Klavoon homed in on the most unique aspect of the sport: Deflecting the disc, as opposed to just throwing and catching it, a skill required for other disc sports like ultimate frisbee. In May of 2021, the PDFA unveiled the term in a blog post.

To help with the task of coming up with a word that accurately depicts the sport, Klavoon said he put together a board of directors consisting of eight other players, including marketing director Derek Scull. Everyone brainstormed names, he said, and the board eventually settled on discflect, a play on the words “disc” and “deflect.”

“We’re still in touch with Kan Jam,” Klavoon said. “There’s still a relationship there, but we’re doing our own thing and they’re going to do their thing, because their main focus is to sell games, and ours is to grow the sport.”

Ultimately, the challenge for marketers at sporting-goods companies is to develop an athletic community while also protecting their brands, Horwath said.

Sports brands, due to the nature of their industry, have the potential to quickly build very loyal followings. The hard part is making sure at least some of that loyalty is associated with the brand itself—not just with the sport.