Turning an Idea Into a HOME RUN

What began as an observation while Brad Rea was working for a waste management company has morphed into a successful business. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, where he starred on the Panthers baseball team, and following a five-year professional baseball career, Rea founded Champtires, a company that sells high-quality pre-owned tires and is a sponsor of Pitt Athletics.

Rea has built a thriving business from the ground up while leaning on valuable lessons he learned as an athlete. "Playing sports is all about competing, and you're really doing the same thing in business," says Rea, the company's president and CEO. "I think the best business owners are competitive. They want to be better than the competition." He adds, "Playing baseball, you have to learn how to get along with teammates and how to work together. You're making a lot of jokes between teammates. It's similar to working with people in any business."

A native of Pittsburgh's northern suburbs, Rea graduated from North Allegheny Senior High School, where he played on a baseball team that was nationally ranked at one point. From there, he made his way to Pitt, where he rewrote the program's offensive record book from 1999 through his final season in 2002. More than 20 years after his final at bat, Rea—who describes himself as a confident, aggressive hitter who relished the one-on-one competition of facing a pitcher—is ranked first in program history in career home runs, RBIs and total bases. Additionally, he's tied for sixth in career games and seventh in games started. As a senior, he hit 18 home runs and 66 RBIs, ranking him fifth and third, respectively, in program history for a single season. At the end of that season, he earned All-American honors, becoming just the fourth Panthers baseball player ever to do so.

He parlayed those college accolades into a five-year minor league career, much of which was spent in the Pittsburgh Pirates farm system. It was a cherished opportunity for Rea to continue to play the game he loved, but as he neared the end of that run, he knew that the rest of his life awaited him off the field.

"Minor league baseball is very different from playing in college," Rea says. "You need to be very committed. You have to really, really love baseball, because you don't really see your friends anymore. You don't see family. You're in small towns. You're on long bus trips. It's really not as glamorous as people think. I got to a point where I think I wanted to explore other opportunities in life."

Rea had no idea how good of an opportunity was right around the corner.

An economics major at Pitt, Rea had known for some time that he wanted to get into a field where he could use his degree. He began working at a waste management firm where, one day, his life changed. Part of the firm's work involved collecting tires that needed to be disposed of, often from clients whose customers hadn't liked the tires for one reason or another and returned them. The company wasn't reselling them, so they would simply get thrown away.

Rea noticed a problem, though: Many of the tires were still in excellent shape or were, Rea says, "pretty much brand new." From there, he came up with an idea. He began buying those tires and subsequently selling them online.

"It just worked out well on eBay, so I kept buying more and more tires," Rea says. "It grew into a business."

In 2009, that side venture became something more tangible. Rea launched Champtires, providing customers with a safe, affordable and eco-friendly option for tires. Over the past 14 years, the business has grown considerably and is now one of the largest used tire companies in the United States. The company currently has more than 40,000 tires in stock, each of which undergoes a rigorous inspection process. Champtires currently has two Pittsburgh-area locations—one in West Mifflin and another on Washington Boulevard - where services like installations also are offered—as well as a warehouse facility in North Carolina.

Rea already has invested in technologies that would have been hard for him to imagine when he first began selling tires online, like a machine that inventories tires and measures their tread depth. As eager as he is to expand, he wants Champtires to do so at a manageable pace. In the years to come, for example, he hopes to open a distribution center on the West Coast.

"There's clearly a demand for our product," Rea says. "Any time you can save people money and give them a quality product, you have a chance to have a really good business."

The strides made by his company also have allowed Rea to reconnect with his alma mater in a meaningful way. Given his accomplishments there as a baseball player, Rea already cares deeply for Pitt. In recent years, though, his connection to Pitt has gotten even stronger, particularly as he has established a relationship with baseball coach Mike Bell, whom he describes as a "great guy and great coach."

Rea and his wife, Shilo, also a Pitt alum, have been donating to Pitt for years, but in 2023, their donations took on a more committed form when Champtires became a sponsor of Pitt Athletics.

"The older I get, the more involved I want to get with Pitt," Rea says. "I really want to be involved with the baseball program."

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