How Dynamo Capital helps bring Wichita’s coolest sports ideas to life
Whenever Wichita Wind Surge general manager Matt Hamilton starts kicking around an idea that sounds a little off-the-wall, a little ambitious or just plain fun, he already knows his first call to make it happen.
It is going to Justin Rocheleau and Matt Medrano at Dynamo Capital.
That has become Dynamo’s reputation in Wichita sports over the last two years: not just a company willing to partner up, but one eager to help bring the next cool experience to Wichita.
“What makes Justin and Matt so awesome is that they just want to help bring cool experiences to the people of Wichita,” Hamilton said. “Whenever I bring up a crazy, kooky idea, I know I have to give them a call. They’re always eager to jump on board.”
That was the case when the Wind Surge started exploring the idea of bringing competitive eating legend Joey Chestnut to Wichita. It was the same kind of thinking that helped produce celebrity nights around “Dodgeball” and “The Office.” And it is part of the reason a relatively new Wichita company has quickly become one of the most visible brands in the city’s sports scene.
Even fans who do not know exactly what Dynamo Capital does have probably seen its griffin logo around town by now. It was on the AfterShocks’ warmup shirts during their run to The Basketball Tournament title this past summer. It is splashed across digital boards and the jumbotron at Koch Arena and stamped on each baseline as the presenting sponsor of Wichita State men’s basketball. It sits in the seating bowl signage around the concourse at Equity Bank Park for Wind Surge games.
So who are these guys and why are they suddenly everywhere around Wichita sports?
Dynamo is a Wichita-based private real estate lender that finances investment-property deals. But since beginning operations in 2024, the company has also made sports one of its most public ways to plant roots in Wichita, reward employees, entertain clients and investors and attach its still-growing brand to the city it wants to help build.
“We’re just fans,” Medrano said. “And we like to do cool (stuff).”
That part checks out the second you step into his office. The walls are lined with sports memorabilia, from signed NFL jerseys to autographed photos to a pair of Patrick Mahomes cleats. Medrano, a Wichita Independent graduate and former college football player, has loved sports long before he ever got into the lending business.
But Dynamo’s growing presence in Wichita sports is about more than one founder’s fandom.
“We always try to put our employees first, which is easy to say in theory and make it a mantra and put it on a wall,” Medrano said. “But in practice, we try to live that out.”
That is where sports entered the picture.
The company’s first real talks about sponsorship began with the Wind Surge in 2024 when Dynamo was still a young company trying to establish its identity in Wichita.
But its first real chance came that same summer, when AfterShocks assistant coach Brett Barney called to ask if Dynamo would help sponsor the Wichita State alumni team in TBT. Medrano said Barney was the first person he ever did a mortgage with in the industry and the two had stayed in touch over the years.
It was a modest deal, but it became the blueprint.
The AfterShocks lost in their second game that summer, but Dynamo came away convinced it had found something worthwhile. The company was able to take employees and clients to the games and give them an experience that felt different from a standard night out.
When Dynamo’s Wind Surge partnership kicked in for the 2025 season, the company wanted something more distinct than a standard outfield sign. After meeting with Hamilton, it landed on seating bowl signage around the concourse at Equity Bank Park.
More importantly, it wanted more than signage.
Its first sponsor night with the Wind Surge centered on “Dodgeball.” The team gave away jerseys inspired by the 2004 comedy and brought in Missi Pyle, who played the Russian star for the Globo Gym Purple Cobras. From there came a Kate Flannery-themed promotion and bobblehead giveaway for the former star from “The Office,” followed more recently by a Joey Chestnut appearance at Equity Bank Park. The next celebrity Dynamo is helping bring to Wichita is Christopher McDonald, best known for playing Shooter McGavin in “Happy Gilmore,” for a meet-and-greet during a Wind Surge game on Aug. 29.
That has become Dynamo’s niche in Wichita sports: finding ways to make a night at the ballpark feel like more than a baseball game.
Much like Hamilton with the Wind Surge, Wichita State knew to call Dynamo when it wanted help bringing one of its boldest giveaway concepts to life. That came this past Friday at Eck Stadium, when WSU handed out 700 retro football jerseys before its baseball game against Rice. The vintage-style giveaway made a splash on social media and sent fans flooding toward the gates with a line stretching around the stadium before it opened.
“They’re just a couple of cool guys who want to make a positive impact on the Wichita community,” Hamilton said. “I think that comes across in the stuff that they’re attached to and how they help bring cool and unusual things to the city that everyone can experience.”
Chestnut’s appearance was a perfect example. Medrano called it a bucket-list night for himself because it allowed him to square off against the greatest competitive eater ever in a chili bun eating contest. But Dynamo also built a company-wide conference around the event, flying in its remote workers to Wichita so the full staff could spend time together, handle work and then take in the game and promotion as a group.
Dynamo employs roughly 50 people, about half in Wichita and half working remotely. Sports has become one of the easiest ways to break up the routine and reward them.
“We could probably be doing more profitable things,” Medrano said. “I mean, you don’t get into mortgage to do cool things, right? It’s difficult to break the monotony of mortgage sometimes, so these promo nights are really easy ways for us to build around an experience for our team.”
Medrano said Dynamo’s push into Wichita sports is not really driven by direct business. Every now and then, a client will mention seeing the company’s logo at a game or sporting event around town, and he said there is value in that kind of visibility.
But he insisted the bigger goal has been to create memorable experiences for employees and help bring fun events to Wichita.
“It’s hard to pinpoint the impact that it has from a business perspective,” Medrano said. “You can’t really tag a loan to it. It’s good to be top of mind, but honestly, it’s really about putting our employees first. We’re just trying to curate awesome experiences for our team.”
That became especially clear this past summer, when Dynamo renewed its sponsorship with the AfterShocks and watched the company’s logo ride along on warmup shirts during one of the most electric stretches in recent Wichita sports memory.
The Wichita State alumni team won six straight games at Koch Arena, claimed the $1 million TBT prize and captured the championship in front of 9,029 fans in a scene that felt like a throwback to the best basketball nights in the Roundhouse. Because of Dynamo’s sponsorship, the company’s employees and guests were not just in the building. They had VIP seats, behind-the-scenes treatment and postgame locker room access.
“Generally speaking, our investors can buy anything they want and have any experience they want,” Medrano said. “But we were able to give them something that they couldn’t access any other way than through us. Everybody absolutely loved it.”
The AfterShocks run ended up doing something else, too. It accelerated Dynamo’s rise as a major player in Wichita sports.
About a week after the tournament ended, Playfly Sports, which partners with Wichita State athletics through Shocker Sports Properties, called about a larger idea. Not long after that, Dynamo struck a six-year deal to become the presenting sponsor of Wichita State men’s basketball.
The agreement is now the largest sports partnership Dynamo has made and the clearest sign yet of how quickly the company’s footprint has grown since starting operations in 2024.
Its visibility at Wichita State stretches well beyond a mention in a press release. The company’s griffin is all over Koch Arena, from the baselines to the ribbon boards to the video displays around the arena during home games.
For Wichita State, it is the type of hometown corporate backing that matters in an era when college athletics is more expensive, more competitive and more dependent on local business support than ever. For Dynamo, it is a chance to tie its name to the city’s biggest sports brand without turning the relationship into a cold transaction.
“We want to make those relationships meaningful,” Medrano said. “We don’t want it to feel transactional, where we’re just cutting a check and they’re just sticking our logo on a promo jersey.”
That mindset has shaped the company’s broader view of Wichita, too.
Dynamo’s business could operate almost anywhere, but Medrano, a Wichita native, and Rocheleau, a Kapaun Mt. Carmel graduate, wanted the company planted here.
The sports sponsorships are part of that. So is the way they talk about the company’s actual work.
“The projects and properties that we fund do genuinely revitalize communities,” Medrano said. “Our borrowers are taking homes that are in disrepair and breathing new life into them and breathing new life into communities.”
Rocheleau sees the sports side as another extension of the same local identity.
“We’ve always been rooted in our community,” Rocheleau said. “We’re a lender who understands our markets, who understands who we’re lending to and we want to know the people that are behind the projects and the builds. So this has been a way for us to pour back into our community and continue to show that we are an anchor in this community.”
In the span of about two years, Dynamo has gone from a new lender trying to put its name on something for the first time to a company Wichita fans now see at the city’s biggest sports stages. The path ran from a modest AfterShocks sponsorship in the summer of 2024 to a more creative Wind Surge partnership, then back through the AfterShocks’ title run and into a six-year deal with Wichita State men’s basketball in 2025.
The company’s name is everywhere now.
But the more revealing part may be why.
For Dynamo, sports became a way to build a brand, yes, but also a way to reward employees, impress clients, deepen ties to the community and help inject something memorable into Wichita’s sports calendar. In a city where sports still serve as one of the clearest public gathering places, Dynamo found a way to make itself part of that energy.
And when Hamilton has the next kooky idea, he already knows the call he is going to make.
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