What is a sport without competition? Many elementary and high school athletes work tirelessly to reach the next level, weaving a web to catch the attention of coaches, scouts, and trainers. But when they run out of silk, who are they outside of that web?
At Verse Athletics, colloquially known as Verse, the only person you compete against is “who you were yesterday,” according to founders Emilio Arruda and Yinka Ogunnote. “We want to teach [our athletes] skills that are transferable anywhere, [like] leadership skills. How do you stay accountable? What does that mean in your day-to-day? Helping them with their mental health, dealing with high pressure, low pressure, dealing with stresses of life. [A player] can get injured and lose it all, so we want them to be prepared for all facets of life,” says Ogunnote.
Est. in 2024
Founded in December of 2024, Verse now has over 20 alumni who have committed to sports programs at participating schools in Ontario University Athletics (OUA), including the University of Windsor, the University of Ottawa, Wilfrid Laurier University and many more. If you followed UW football last year, you’ve already seen Verse alumnus and receiver Ben Yong take the field. Verse hosts several training camps and tournaments.
An economics student from Guelph by way of Lagos entering his fourth year, Ogunnote founded Verse Athletics with Arruda, a psychology student from Brantford.
“We had initially partnered with another company that focused on hockey, Advantage Prep Athletics, and we were going to be a subsidiary for them that would have focused on football,” Ogunnote says. “But [Arruda and I] decided to part ways with them, and then start our own thing with our own vision, and Verse was born.”
Both life-long football fans and current athletes for UW, Arruda and Ogunnote met during their first year and quickly became close friends. Through years of practices, training camps and attempts to pursue their passion at the university level, they realized how muddled the recruitment process had become for young athletes.
“It was difficult to find training camps, get exposure, et cetera, growing up. You’d have to drive hours, send emails to every coach you could find, [and] hope to get a reply,” Arruda says. “We wanted to bring something different for the next generation [of athletes], something more streamlined.”
But before Verse became a rapidly growing, respected name in the KW region, it consisted of Arruda and Ogunnote hosting free training sessions during the harsh winter for local youth, with no more than 10 or 20 children in attendance at a time.
Once they’d begun to establish a foothold, they contacted their respective high school coaches to spread the word. Verse rapidly picked up steam soon after, drawing the attention of Warriors rugby flanker Spencer Makela in October 2025. With Makela’s expertise in technology and coding, the duo-turned-trio now had the resources to execute their vision.
Less than 2 years later, the company now hosts training camps with hundreds of athletes, and has close to 3000 followers on social media.
Twenty months gone by
Now with a brand and a core group of founders, Verse has accomplished a lot before its second birthday. Originally for high school football players looking to make the push to post-secondary athletics, the company added a rugby program in July of 2026 and programs for elementary school athletes as well. They now hold camps with over 100 people from around Ontario in attendance, where aspiring players can receive high level training and exposure.
“Entering 2027, we plan on hosting our own seven-versus-seven tournaments and sending teams to tournaments across Canada,” Arruda says. “Our long term goal isn’t to be the biggest name or most profitable company, but to change the culture surrounding Canadian sports. We want it to be talked about more seriously, give everyone a chance to play and bypass barriers that might hold them back. We want sports to be more than entertainment, but an avenue for long-term connections and life lessons.”
Student-athlete-entrepreneurs
Managing a startup business while attending practices and going to classes is a lot for anybody. Time constraints and personal relationships can interfere with the needs of a business. With plans for expansion on the horizon, such as the first Verse rugby camp held in July 2026, how does Verse tackle these problems?
“Compartmentalization,” Arruda says. “We all know our roles and trust the others to do theirs,” Ogunnote adds. Arruda handles the company’s media relations and marketing, Ogunnote focuses on operations and event planning, and Makela handles IT.
“Because I joined so late, it was challenging to understand what my role would be,” Makela says. “When a business is first starting, there’s a lot of chaos and it took me a few months to settle in. But knowing I can give 100 per cent to my part while [Arruda and Ogunnote] give 100 per cent to theirs has made it easy.”
“There’s sacrifices as well,” adds Spencer Cockerill, an inaugural coach for Verse and high school teammate of Arruda’s. “Sometimes you have to decide between two commitments, or go to work then head straight to a training session. But we love what we do, and that makes it easy.”
You vs You
A company is built for money, but a brand is built for an idea. Playing a sport competitively takes enormous amounts of time and puts strain on the body. An exceptionally long athletic career might last 20 years. Regardless of skill, background, work ethic, or luck, one day, everyone has to hang their cleats up for good. At the end of their career, an athlete won’t be able to rely on athleticism or highlight tapes, but rather the skills and lessons they learned during that time.
“That’s what we care about,” Ogunnote says. “The one thing we all agree on is that anybody that gives us a chance should get something out of it, beyond sports. We want to share more than football techniques.”
Through every business dealing, personal relationship, and training session, Verse strives to be as ethical as possible. “Nothing is easy, but everything should be fair,” says Makela.
Whether that’s following up with athletes who ask for extra help, making accommodations to lighten the load on parents or guardians attempting to enroll their children, or going out of their way to cheer up a player having an off day, every aspect of the business matters to Verse.
“I’m not always a super talkative guy, but thinking of the coaches I had that volunteered and went out of their way to train us, I knew I had to give that same energy to the kids I coach,” says Cockerill. “I always try to talk to every player, learn their names immediately, open up group conversations to the shyer kids. That’s what sticks with me the most, knowing I made a difference no matter how small.”
That same supportive spirit comes into play when training athletes at Verse. “Sometimes players don’t understand a drill or mess up,” says coach Yassier Adams, a fourth-year kinesiology student at UW and defensive back for the Warriors. “When I grew up, coaches would scream, embarrass you, but I think the difference in us being younger is we understand what these players are going through. We take our time with everyone.”
Verse’s slogan and brand, “You vs You,” was built from this idea. There’s competition in everything, but it’s important to recognize that not everyone starts from the same place. “Comparison is the thief of joy,” Adams says. Makela adds that “if a pilot is learning to fly, they’ll make mistakes. But even if they’re facing turbulence, they don’t look at another plane and let theirs crash. They see what adjustments they have to make to theirs and fix it.”
And in that same vein, the team at Verse emphasizes that being better than who you were yesterday is all that matters. “If I become one percent better than I was yesterday, just one percent, that means everything to me,” Cockerill says. Arruda agrees: “It’s about looking in the mirror and asking yourself, ‘how can I be the best version of myself today?”
“I try to teach myself and our athletes that you can learn from others’ mistakes, and if you learn from your own, it’s a lesson,” Ogunnote said. “It’ll always be ‘You versus You.’”
