Refr Sports

Refr Sports is a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based sports-technology company building referee management software. The platform provides scheduling, payment, invoicing, background check and communication tools used by sports officials, assignors and organizations, and it also supports team websites. It has been described as a gig-economy marketplace serving the sports referee industry.

As of July 2026, more than 20,000 officials used the platform across 40 states and 15 sports, supporting hundreds of thousands of games annually. The company stated it was growing between 350% and 400% year over year and planned to expand capacity to millions of games each year and to reach 100,000 officials by the end of 2027.

Founding story

Co-founder Huck Sorock was a hockey player who worked as a referee in high school and observed inefficiencies in how hockey leagues assigned officials to games, including paper-based organizing and no online way to swap games. That experience led to the idea for Refr Sports, which he built with co-founder Wyatt Gustafson.

Business model

Refr sells software to sports assignors, leagues and organizations that schedule and pay officials, positioning itself as a marketplace and management layer for the referee industry. The platform bundles scheduling, payments, invoicing, background checks, communication tools and team websites, with organizations as the paying customers and officials as the end users who receive assignments and payouts.

Traction

As of July 2026, more than 20,000 officials used Refr across 40 states and 15 sports, covering hundreds of thousands of games annually, with stated year-over-year growth of 350% to 400%.

Latest developments

In July 2026, Refr closed a $2 million seed round led by Traction Capital, with participation from angel investors and follow-on investment from Groove Capital and Kickstart. The company outlined plans to scale to millions of games annually and 100,000 officials by the end of 2027.