EDWARDSVILLE - Play It Again Sports, a new and used sporting goods store, officially opened to the public in Edwardsville with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on March 29. Owner Dan Brynildsen said that “it’s been a long road to get here,” but he’s excited to bring a store like this to the community.
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Play It Again Sports has been buying quality used sporting goods from the public for the past six weeks, and they’re now ready to open and start selling those goods - and more - to the community.
“We buy and sell quality used and new sporting goods,” Brynildsen said. “A lot of sporting goods out there have a lot of life left in them. We specialize in bringing those things in and marketing them to be able to sell them to the next person who can continue to get life out of them at a great value.
“On top of that, we carry the new products as well, so we are a full-blown sporting goods store … if we don’t have it, I can order it and I can have it in tomorrow. We’ve got partnerships with all the big manufacturers - I can get whatever you need.”
Brynildsen is an Edwardsville resident and said all four of his children attend Edwardsville schools. He saw an opportunity with Play It Again Sports to bring something to Edwardsville he thought was missing, despite Edwardsville’s wide range of athletics.
“There was really no place to get good quality sporting goods in the area,” he said. “We’ve been saying that for years, we’ve been driving to Fairview Heights and we’ve been driving 30+ minutes to get any sort of real sporting goods. We saw the opportunity was there … we jumped on it, and kind of the rest is history.”
Going forward, Brynildsen said Play It Again Sports plans to enter into partnerships and sponsorships within the Edwardsville community and may focus on other sports, given that Edwardsville residents play such a wide variety of them.
“Edwardsville’s got every sport,” he said. “We’re playing all the sports here - lacrosse, field hockey, ice hockey, baseball, you name it. Tennis, pickleball, wrestling, aquatics, we’ve got it all here. So we’re excited just to be able to jump into that head-first.”
A video from the ribbon-cutting is available at the top of this story or on Riverbender.com/video.
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