On August 28, 2010, Maxwell Ritz returned to Radnor High School with a rather elaborate answer to the question of what to do after graduation. There were professional lacrosse players, youth clinics, a vendor village and a performance by Wale. Several thousand people came. Ritz and his brother Xander played on the side that won the afternoon’s game, 10-9. A school reunion rarely requires quite so much equipment.
Ritz had helped found LXM Pro, a touring marriage of lacrosse and music. The Radnor stop brought that experiment to the brothers’ old school. For young fans, the attraction included an hour learning from professionals they could then watch compete. Two hundred boys took part in the clinics. A ticket bought access to the people behind the performance, as well as the performance itself.
That distinction makes a useful starting point for understanding Ritz, now cofounder and co-CEO of The Loyalist in New York. Across sport, apparel and consumer commerce, his work has involved the distance between having an audience and giving that audience something worth returning for. A crowd can be assembled for an afternoon. Building a business around its enthusiasm demands a longer acquaintance.
The younger Ritz takes the shot
Ritz graduated from Radnor in 2004. At school he played soccer as well as lacrosse; his senior lacrosse season produced 44 goals and 45 assists. The near balance is an appealing detail for an attackman: making the opening mattered alongside finishing it. He went to the University of Maryland, where Xander was already playing.
In the spring of 2005, Max scored the overtime winner against Virginia in the ACC semifinals. He followed with two goals against Duke as Maryland won the championship, earning a place on the ACC All-Tournament Team. A freshman suddenly had something more persuasive than potential to put beside his name. The ball had gone in when the game required it.
By his senior season, Maryland described him as its leading returning scorer and an ambidextrous attackman who could adjust to the players around him. He received preseason honorable mention All-America recognition in 2007 and 2008. The description of a player willing to create opportunities for others offers one way to read the later career, though a lacrosse scouting report is hardly a business-school recommendation letter.
The sporting years also establish that the community Ritz later worked to reach was one he had participated in. He knew the college game from inside the attack unit. He subsequently played for the Denver Outlaws in Major League Lacrosse. Before he had to sell anyone an afternoon watching professionals, he had been one of the professionals doing the playing.
Overtime winner: Maxwell Ritz
Freshman season. Second career start.
When the teams disappeared
LXM Pro emerged after the loss of Major League Lacrosse teams in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ritz and his partners were working around camps and clinics in markets where young players had fewer opportunities to watch high-level lacrosse locally. The people were there. Part of the sporting infrastructure had gone away.
The founders included Max and Xander Ritz, Scott and Craig Hochstadt, and Kyle Harrison. Their first event, in Orange County in November 2009, drew a reported 6,500 people. An Austin stop in April 2010 drew more than 4,000. The two early stops put the idea in front of crowds in different states. Bringing the tour to another city meant finding another audience and putting together another day, with the same sport at its centre.
The format treated a game as the centre of a larger day out. Music could introduce the sport to people who had arrived for a different reason. Clinics gave young players something to do. Autographs made the professionals approachable. There was a practical logic to combining these activities: a newcomer had several ways into the event before needing to understand every whistle.
The founding discussions also made room for a tension familiar to anyone expanding a niche interest. An event needs new people without making its existing people feel like scenery. The lacrosse remained serious while the surrounding occasion became more welcoming. A concert poster could travel beyond the places where a lacrosse fixture normally appeared. The organizers were widening the invitation.
The afternoon behind the poster
The homecoming at Radnor made that invitation tangible. The pro game stayed close, with Jimmy Borell scoring the winner in the final minute. Fans could spend part of the day learning a move and another part watching experienced players attempt it at speed. The relationship between instruction and spectacle was built into the schedule.
Ritz spoke about the effort of bringing the event home. Familiarity with the location helped, but it did not remove the work of setting everything up. That is a small, useful correction to the romance of the returning local athlete. A hometown audience still needs an organized afternoon. Knowing where everything is does not mean everything arranges itself.
A festival is an unforgiving form of business education. Its promises have a date attached. If the attraction includes music, instruction and a game, each part has to appear in the right place at the right time. The audience experiences the whole day, rather than the separate responsibilities of its organizers. A person who buys one ticket has little reason to care how many moving parts sit behind it.
Viewed this way, the event years help explain the interest of Ritz’s later operating work. The same ordinary difficulty appears in both settings: people remember whether the experience delivered what the invitation promised.
Clothes with a constituency
Alongside LXM, Ritz helped run Adrenaline Apparel. In a December 2010 interview, he described a business rooted in lacrosse but attracting interest beyond the sport. He emphasized fit, materials and the experience of wearing a garment. The ambition was a devoted following, rather than a contest with enormous apparel companies on their own terms.
His wardrobe sounded less like a fashion executive’s manifesto than a sensible packing list: Nikes or Converse, Levi’s, and Adrenaline clothes or buttondowns. He liked keeping things. Vintage T-shirts lost in a childhood move still bothered him. Clothing, in that telling, carried memory as well as a label.
There is a helpful distinction here for a consumer business. A garment can identify the group someone belongs to, yet it still has to survive being worn. Community gives the product meaning; construction gives the buyer a reason to keep using it. Admiration may get an item into a shopping basket. An uncomfortable item has an excellent chance of remaining in a drawer.
Ritz’s apparel thinking brought those two concerns together. Product quality and audience identity belonged in the same conversation. It is a less glamorous view of branding than treating every purchase as a declaration of destiny. Sometimes the customer would simply like the sweatshirt to feel right. That modest expectation can be expensive to disappoint.
“I think apparel is all about the fit and feel.”Max Ritz, December 2010
A brief detour through The Hills
Ritz’s California years also produced an appearance on MTV’s The Hills. IMDb credits him in two episodes in 2010. A contemporary interview described filming in real restaurants during ordinary evenings, a setting that required some adjustment. Television had entered the sporting circle, and the sporting circle had acquired cameras.
He said he had never aspired to work in entertainment and did not follow non-sports television. Asked about the experience, he sounded relaxed rather than dazzled. He also pointed out that filming content did not tell him what MTV would ultimately choose to include. Participating in a scene and deciding how the audience sees it are different jobs.
The cameo belongs in the story because it places him near the overlap LXM was exploring: sport, popular culture and people who could bring attention from one world into another. It need not become a theory of celebrity. A few television appearances occupy much less space in this career than the sustained business of organizing products and experiences.
From the sideline to the operating company
Ritz later worked on the investment team at Innovation Endeavors and at SoFi. He was a partner at Dorm Room Fund in 2015-2016 and earned an MBA at Columbia Business School. His listed start as co-CEO and cofounder of The Loyalist is June 2016. The sequence adds investment and finance to the earlier experience of events and apparel.
The Loyalist now presents itself as an operating company serving emerging consumer brands and intellectual property. Its website places strategies, systems and stories beside one another. That combination suits the territory Ritz has occupied: the appeal of a brand on one side, the work required to sustain it on the other.
A public licensing list from 2019 names Max Ritz as the contact for TL x HF LLC, associated with The Loyalist and Hillflint. The listed categories include outerwear, fashion apparel and fleece. It is a concrete reminder that consumer-brand operations eventually arrive at actual things people can put on. The vocabulary may broaden; the garment still needs making.
In an April 2023 hiring post, Ritz sought two business analysts with retail or ecommerce experience and a strong grasp of SQL or Python and related data structures. The specificity matters. In a business serving consumer brands, understanding the customer-facing world and understanding its data were being asked of the same candidates. The work behind a brand can require fluency in both.
What comes after attention
On his public Intro profile, Ritz also identifies himself as managing partner of Chanticleer Partners. He describes work financing and servicing the supply-chain, ecommerce and finance needs of consumer brands. He states an ambition to raise a growth-equity fund to invest in and acquire brands. The ambition puts ownership alongside the work of helping brands operate.
His self-description keeps the geographical shorthand simple: a Philadelphia native, a New York resident, a Columbia MBA and a Terp. The educational credentials sit beside the team identity. The progression into consumer investing has not required editing the athlete out of the biography.
It is tempting to make every career turn look inevitable once the destination is visible. Ritz’s is more interesting when the separate tasks keep their texture: scoring in overtime, putting on an event, thinking about clothing, studying finance, and asking analysts to understand retail data. Each offers a different view of what happens after someone first pays attention.
At Radnor, the invitation had been to spend an afternoon with a sport and its players. At The Loyalist, the work is organized around emerging consumer brands. The scale and the vocabulary have changed, but the practical question remains recognisable. Once people have arrived, what have you made for them? And when they come back, will it still be worth their time?