Former collegiate champion bringing timeless style to College Football Playoff with unique story

With the holiday season on the horizon, it’s time for the College Football Playoff to jump to the forefront. This year is special because the tournament is expanding to 12 teams for the first time in its history. While this expansion is meant to quiet those teams who barely missed out on the four-team playoff in a given year, you can bet there will still be some sort of controversy over who makes the final bracket.

What makes this tournament even more special is that fans can take a piece of history home in the form of a commemorative piece made by AXIA Time, representing each school in the tournament.

Founder of AXIA Time, John Kanaras, is no stranger to NCAA sports and has an interesting story having played Lacrosse at the University of Pennsylvania. This experience is what led Kanaras down this path of creating watches for college championship programs. John also wrestled in high school and thought that would be his calling at the next level.

The motivation

“Wrestling was really my favorite,” Kanaras said. “And actually, I thought I was going to wrestle in college, and I ended up playing lacrosse. I didn't think I was good enough to play lacrosse in college, but, you know, some college coaches came knocking, and I was like, Wow, alright, I can.”

“I thought maybe I could [wrestle in college],” Kanaras explained. “So, I ended up getting recruited to play lacrosse at the University of Pennsylvania, and the wrestling program at the time was really poor. This guy, Roger Reina, who is a legendary coach at Penn, had just graduated when I got there as a freshman.

“He's now the head coach, and he heard that I had been a really good high school wrestler, so he invited me to the wrestling room to roll around (spar) and see if maybe I could do both. And what I came to quickly realize is college wrestling is very different than high school wrestling. They're mean, man. They kicked the crap out of me and I got hurt. And my lacrosse coach found out that I was in the wrestling room and got hurt.”

Even after college John’s sustained interest in collegiate athletics fueled a fire within that would eventually lead him to becoming involved once again on some level. Kanaras was part of back-to-back Ivy League championship teams while playing lacrosse at Penn in the late 1980s. The individual prizes that accompanied those titles weren’t exactly up to par in the opinion of those on John’s team.

“So, the first year they gave us a ring, nobody wore the ring,” Kanaras explained. “The second year, they gave us a watch. And it's not a great watch, styling, quality and it just frustrated me. I had these amazing memories and this crappy watch; it just didn't match.”

Full circle moments

“That really was the impetus for what ultimately became AXIA Time,” Kanaras continued. “Because I kept looking and looking for 30 years for a nice watch with the Penn logo on it. And literally, for three decades, I looked and looked and couldn't find it. Then I turned 50, and I'm like, You know what? I'm just gonna do this myself. I can't find what I'm looking for. I'm gonna create it myself and then I just started doing this as a hobby. It was just a side hustle kind of hobby for four or five years.”

All these years later John decided to go into business for himself in creating these championship watches for his alma mater. Starting as a hobby, since 2018 the company has flourished into AXIA Time being involved with big-time collegiate athletics and now the College Football Playoff. Kanaras wasn’t satisfied with his championship award from college and that turned into his watches being on the grand stage in college athletics biggest title tournament.

“We're a six-year overnight success kind of thing,” said Kanaras. “People don't see the grind behind the current success that led us to this. It hasn't been easy, but it's been a lot of fun. And so, the way we think about the CFP, it's an evolution of our relationship.

“So, we started this relationship with them [CFP] about four years ago, just designing watches for fans, for the winners in ’21, ’22, ‘23 and this year, we're doing watches for the players and expanding our watches to a broader fan base. What we're looking to do is celebrate these moments in time that are really important to both the individual players, but then also the fans who cheer them on.”