20,000 leagues under the fees.

• Author: Roush, Chris
• Position: SPORTS SECTION

Adult recreational sports leagues are booming in North Carolina. Wilmington's recreation division added 23 teams for fall softball this year, bringing its total to 95. Elsewhere, rec leagues have been set up for flag football, basketball, volleyball and even kickball. The Raleigh Parks and Recreation Department offered adult dodgeball this year and signed up 30 teams. Apparently there's nothing like the thrill of hurling a rubber ball at the office jerk or striking out a player on a team whose company competes against yours.

Tampa, Fla.-based i9 Sports Corp. wants to turn that boom in participation into a booming business. The company has signed a franchisee to run private, for-profit adult sports leagues in Charlotte and surrounding counties and is looking for franchisees in Greensboro and the Triangle. The Charlotte franchisees, brothers Scott and Craig Parkin, were planning a flag-football tournament in November and a three-on-three basketball tournament in December to promote i9 while they organize a softball league. They have a definite market in mind. "It's not just people who play sports. It's people with disposable income," Scott Parkin says.

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That could place the company and its franchisees in direct competition with county and city governments. CEO Frank Fiume and Parkin say they will offer the weekend warrior a different experience by giving teams cash prizes, parties and other amenities and by setting up Web sites with updated stats and schedules. Though they might compete with government-run programs, they say that, ultimately, they'll help them by renting their fields and courts.

"A lot of what we're offering will take up some of the slack," Parkin, 34, says. Recreation departments "don't have the funds to do certain things. We're hoping that by building a relationship, they'll refer people to our Web site. We're looking to reach people that they're not. We're finding that a lot of weekends, these parks are being underutilized."

The Parkin brothers grew up on Long Island playing sports. Scott Parkin played baseball in high school and then softball in leagues run by ABA Sports, another Fiume company. When Parkin lost his job in New York as a regional manager at iMotors.com, an online carbuying service that went out of business in 2001, he began to look for another career. His brother, Craig, 32, who played baseball at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., had moved to the Queen City a year earlier to work...