3 Tips to Diversify Your Youth Sports Programs
TeamSnap for Business shares 3 easy ways to diversify youth sports programs and offerings.
The world of youth sports is more competitive and complex than ever before. Youth sports businesses can cut through the noise by offering a diverse set of programming. In this blog, we’ll discuss three easy ways that youth sports administrators can diversify youth sports programs that their organization offers to communities.
Youth sports are a pivotal part of society, adding to the importance that families and parents place on the organizations they involve themselves with. That’s why administrators should offer unique, diverse, and accessible programs in order to best market their organization’s throughout a crowded landscape.
3 Easy Ways to Diversify Youth Sports Programming
Think About Offseason Trainings + Events
One of the easiest and most logical ways to diversify youth sports programming starts with the offseason. Think about the current structure of your league. Are you a baseball organization that runs from March through June? Or maybe a hockey organization that operates from October through February or March.
At a base level, different sports only operate several months of our 12-month annual calendar. That leaves about two-thirds of the year up for grabs. Sure, we’re competing with other sports that operate with different seasonality. But expanding your organization into offseason training, events, or alternate seasons is an easy way to start.
If you run your organization with a sports league management platform like TeamSnap for Business, expanding an offering is easy. You’ll be able to easily replicate processes like registration, divisions, and teams over to a new season. Get your coaches and officials on board, market the new offseason offering, and hit the ground running. The end result? Your baseball league rules the calendar for 8 months of the year instead of 3 or 4.
Expand Your Offerings Into New Ages or Divisions
Another area to quickly expand your offerings is by looking at your current season structure. What is the current age range of your programming? Is there only one level of specific competition structure? Can you organize your club or league with new divisions and teams?
All of these are important questions to consider and ladder back up to a key point: have you ever turned away new families because your programs and teams filled up? Add new age ranges, divisions, competition levels, etc. is an easy way to prevent that from happening again in the future. Think about co-ed leagues, leagues that play different nights of the week, etc.
Run Tournaments
Arguably our favorite option on the list… tournaments. While organizing a tournament may seem like a daunting task, with the right tools, it’s easier than you think. And picture this. Picture the smiles and excitement on the faces of all of your youth athletes on tournament day. If you’ve ever played a tournament throughout your own experience in sports/youth sports, then you know just what a big deal these are.
A full day of competition in one of the activities you love most. What’s better than that? TeamSnap Tournaments is an industry-leading tournament organization + execution platform for administrators. With unique benefits such as customized standings and game rules, built-in scheduling supporting pools & brackets, and easy event-day communication & website results… you can control the chaos seamlessly on tournament day.
This article is part of our bigger resource, the 2024 TeamSnap for Business League Management Playbook, where we discuss 6 plays to easily build and supercharge your youth sports programs. Download the full playbook today!
