Action Sports gets a bad rap. Talk to any actuary and odds are they’ll tell you that participants are risk takers that are prone to catastrophic injuries and therefore a liability to insure. But the reality is that most participants are young, healthy, and heal rapidly. While they may be prone to the occasional broken bone they are definitely chronically under-insured and more interested in riding than finding a job with good health insurance coverage.
Enter Xtreme Sports Insurance (XSI), a Salt Lake City based company that is offering action sports focused supplemental insurance plans for just seventeen dollars a month and focusing on athletes, industry companies, resorts and retailers. The plan reimburses injured riders for their out of pocket medical expenses, and while it has only been around for a few months, the company already has nearly 4,000 clients and has inked deals with Campus Rail Jam and the Park City Snowboard Team to provide insurance for participants, students, and coaches.
“This accident insurance is a long awaited service for professional athletes who depend on good health to do their job, says professional snowboarder Pat Milbery, who recently signed on with XSI.” After years and years of patience, XSI has connected riders with the one need that hasn’t been met. I hate living in fear, and when I ride without insurance, there is a constant fear eating at me.”
We caught up with XSI President Robert Scott to find out how riders and the companies that support them can cover their asses and assets when the worst happens.
What’s your background and how did you get the idea for XSI?
I’ve been in the insurance business for about 14 years. I’ve always been into extreme sports and I broke my hand boxing this last year. I have 600 dollar a month health insurance that only pays 80 percent and so I started researching supplemental health insurance to cover me while I’m doing my sports and there really wasn’t anything good out there.
We do a lot of business with Conseco and told them we’d like to use their programs for this market. They were leery at first, but we showed them the numbers and they’re all for it. Basically we have a program backed by Conseco that will cover anybody doing any active sport whether it’s snowboarding, moto, BMX, or skate, we can cover them all for a very, very low premium.
It’s $17 a month?
Yes.
How are you able to provide such good benefits at such low cost?
We partnered with the right people that don’t exclude things like this. We just take a product that’s available in the normal, everyday market and gear it towards the action-sports world. People are surprised at how many active participants that there are and there aren’t as many injuries as people think. Insurance companies have kind of been scared, but they haven’t really done the research. For example the Campus Rail Jam has been running for four year and has almost 1,000 competitors a year and they have not had one injury. Whenever an injury does happen it’s always highlighted, but in a lot of these sports, there are millions of people that do them every year and don’t have injuries. But when they do, we want to make sure that they have the appropriate amount of coverage.
What kind of response have you been getting since your May launch?
We started sending feelers out in March. We went from just a few people here and there to almost 4,000 clients. Every industry that we start opening the doors to, for example the snow industry, we just started working on that about three weeks ago and we’re getting a lot of positive feedback, people wanting to jump on board. Pat Milberry is on our team, and he was one thousand percent behind it. We’re not a huge company so we can’t offer big sponsorships, but we’ve had no problem getting them to endorse it – they love the idea.
We’re the official insurance of the Campus Rail Jam Tour. We’re providing the insurance for all the athletes that compete in the tour. When they sign up, they’ll be able to get the insurance. We’re really trying to be a part of the community – getting involved with the activities and doing sponsorships. Doing it the right way, rather than be a bunch of insurance sales guys getting into action sports. It doesn’t work that way – we’re trying to work from the ground up.
What other marketing initiatives are you working on?
We’re doing the traditional sponsorships, working with resorts, press releases, ads, but mostly just your grassroots guerrilla marketing campaign. We’ve been focusing on MMA and then brought on people from the action sports world. We’re starting to attend trade shows like ASR and SIA.
Are you working with companies to add this as a benefit package?
Our goal is to take care of the athletes and the people that are actively engaged in action sports, with that we’ve had a lot of people emailing and calling us about providing inexpensive benefits for liabilities and events. We provide that, we provide the liability for companies.
For employees?
Yes, we can do group benefits for employees. Really where we specialize is in the sports world. We’re not going after construction companies.
Have you gotten response from companies?
For events, we’re doing a lot of MMA events. We’re doing six group benefit programs. This is a good alternative for companies that are looking to cut back on traditional benefits. We’re going in with this program at $17 a month that provides pretty outstanding benefits.
For plan details visit www.xsinow.com
