Club Capital’s Tax Services help clubs navigate complex compliance regulations, prepare and file tax returns, and avoid costly penalties. With experience and knowledge in non-profit and for-profit taxes, our team can ensure your organization remains compliant while maximizing your tax benefits.
CFO Services:
Should you hire another coach? Should you start a winter program or a summer clinic? Will my club have enough cash to run until fall registration? As club directors/board members, these are the questions you ask yourself every day, and our CFO services will help you determine how these decisions will impact your club’s future success.
Monthly Accounting:
Take away the guesswork and empower your club with monthly financial reports and quarterly meetings designed with your dedicated account manager to help your club achieve its goals.
Interested in learning more? Check out the Club Capital website HERE
In today’s digital age, social media has become an integral part of our lives, connecting people from all walks of life, including youth athletes. However, with the rise of social media, there has also been an alarming increase in scams targeting these young talents. As a parent, coach, or organizer involved in the sports community, it’s essential to educate ourselves and our young athletes about the dangers of social media scams and how to stay safe online.
Understanding the Threat: What Are Social Media Scams?
Social media scams encompass a wide range of fraudulent activities that exploit individuals’ trust and naivety. Scammers often create fake profiles, pages, or events that appear legitimate, targeting youth athletes with promises of scholarships, sponsorships, or opportunities to enhance their athletic careers. These scams can lead to financial losses, identity theft, and emotional distress.
Red Flags to Look Out For
Too Good to Be True Offers: Scammers often dangle offers that seem too good to pass up, such as full scholarships to prestigious universities or lucrative sponsorship deals. Encourage your young athletes to verify the authenticity of such offers through official channels.
Urgent Requests for Personal Information: Scammers may ask for sensitive information like social security numbers, bank account details, or passwords. Remind your athletes never to share such information online.
Poor Grammar and Spelling: Many scams originate from non-native English speakers, resulting in poorly written messages. If a message seems suspicious due to its language quality, it’s wise to be cautious.
Request for Payment: Legitimate opportunities rarely require upfront payment. If a supposed opportunity demands money in exchange for promises, it’s likely a scam.
High-Pressure Tactics: Scammers might create a sense of urgency to coerce young athletes into making hasty decisions. Advise them to take their time and consult with trusted adults before committing to anything.
Tips for Prevention
Educate Your Athletes: Organize workshops or discussions on social media safety to ensure that young athletes understand the risks and can identify potential scams.
Verify Profiles: Teach your athletes to verify profiles and organizations before engaging. Genuine entities will have a strong online presence and a history of interactions.
Use Privacy Settings: Encourage your athletes to set their social media profiles to private and control who can access their information.
Two-Step Verification: Enable two-step verification on their social media accounts to add an extra layer of security.
Trust Instincts: Emphasize the importance of trusting their instincts. If something feels off, they should distance themselves from the situation.
Reporting Scams
If your young athlete encounters a potential scam, make sure they know how to report it to the respective social media platform. Prompt reporting can prevent others from falling victim to the same trap.
In conclusion, as a part of the virtual sports management community, it’s our responsibility to arm our young athletes with knowledge about social media scams. By educating them about the red flags, prevention methods, and reporting procedures, we can help ensure their online safety while they pursue their dreams. Together, let’s create a digital environment where young athletes can thrive without the fear of falling prey to scams.
Always be sure to reach out to your social media support lines to report and aid in removing social media scams:
Did you know that youth sports teams can obtain sponsorships just like professional teams? Check out some tips on how to start the process for your club below inspired by LeagueApps!
1. Define Your Team’s Goals and Needs
What is it you’re trying to achieve by securing a sports team sponsorship? What areas do you need support in? Consider equipment, uniforms, travel expenses, and coaching fees as a place to start.
2. Create a Sports Team Sponsorship Proposal
Potential sponsors are more likely to engage with your idea if you outline why it will be beneficial for them. Include where there name would be featured, information about your team, your team’s achievements, the demographics of your target audience (who comes to watch games), and how the sponsor’s brand will gain visibility through your team’s games and activities.
3. Identify Potential Sponsors
Create a list of local businesses or organizations that align with your team’s values, mission, or target audience. Consider local sports stores, restaurants, healthcare providers, or companies with community involvement programs. You can also approach larger corporations with a local presence. Collaborating with parents of your players can be a great way to tap into the businesses that parents go to or are even connected to—they can help facilitate introductions and provide referrals.
4. Make Contact
Reach out to your potential sponsors with a well-crafted email (this can be templatized to make the process easier) or by visiting them in person. Don’t forget to introduce yourself and your team, express your interest in establishing a sponsorship relationship, and be clear about the benefits and what their support will do for your team.
If you don’t hear back immediately, don’t get discouraged. Politely follow-up via email or make a phone call. Persistence and professionalism without seeming impatient can make a difference.
5. Offer Different Sponsorship Levels
Create a range of sponsorship options to cater to different budgets and needs. For instance, you can have different tiers of sponsorship with varying benefits, such as logo placement on uniforms, banners, or promotional material.
6. Provide Exposure for Sponsors
Show your potential sponsors how you plan to give them visibility and acknowledgement—like logos on team uniforms, on your website, your social media, and in other ways at events. You can even promote their brand during games by selling their product or hanging a banner.
7. Build Relationships
Remember: sponsorship is not just about financial support, it’s about building long-term relationships. Treat your sponsors like partners and provide them with regular updates on your team’s progress and community involvement. Don’t forget to express gratitude and recognize their contributions when your team experiences successes.
8. Explore Crowdfunding or Fundraising Events
Consider organizing fundraising events or setting up crowdfunding campaigns to supplement your sponsorship efforts. By using LeagueApps E-commerce features, you can easily connect donations right within your registration flow. You can also share the links to your listings with their family, friends, and community to encourage donations for their favorite young athlete’s team.
Securing sponsorships takes time and effort. Tailor your approach to each potential sponsor when possible and don’t forget to make them feel valued in the partnership!
Building a registration form can be difficult, especially if you’re doing so by yourself. Check out our 7-Day checklist inspired by TeamSnap!
1. Find a Good Platform
Finding a good platform to set up your registration is the most important step in staying organized. A good platform will allow you to collect as many data points as you need, collect a payment, and track all the happenings of who is registering and when. Getting a good system in place will save you a lot of time and effort in the end!
2. Find out what needs to be recorded
Data is the quintessential piece to your registration setup. Without the appropriate information, you’ll get disorganized and things will start to fall apart. It’s important to take some time to think about what you may need to do with the data in the future and set out some of the major data points you need to be recorded.
3-4. Begin building your form
Once you have found a good foundation and set some time aside to take notes on your registration fields, it’s time to get to work building it out. Take some extra time to really make sure that you hit every point when building this out. Incomplete or difficult registration will only make the lives harder for yourself, coaches, volunteers, players, and parents. Building something simple and easy for parents to complete is the ideal goal when formatting. There is no need for anything too flashy on the registration side of things.
5. Run Through Tests
Now that your registration form is complete, have yourself and a few others run some tests. You may find you missed a data point or find you want to add or remove certain items. You also want to make sure someone other than yourself can run through these tests to get a good outside perspective on the ease of the process.
6. Begin Marketing
After the registration building process is complete, you aren’t done yet. Marketing your program is just as important as the initial setup. Marketing your program can be done either through social media, email marketing, flyers, or whatever your preferred method may be. The more your program is marketed, the more traction it’s going to get.
7. Launch, Promote, and Track
You’ve built out your registration, marketed it, and now it’s time to launch. Once your registration is active, it’s not time to slow down. You’ll want to keep active on things, especially in the first few days to make sure everything is running smoothly. Keeping a watchful eye on things as time passes will help you prepare for the actual program you run. This will also give you a good idea of things you may want to change in the future the next time you set up your registration!
It’s also necessary for all players and parents to know what is expected of each of them. Players and parents should each sign and read the team’s code of conduct.
In the U.S., about 37 percent of kids between the ages of 6 and 12 play an organized team sport on a regular basis.
What does that tell us? There are many reasons why kids might be opting out of organized sports such as finances, skills and location. But that also means it’s more important than ever for sports organizations to ensure kids have a good experience when they do participate.
To do this, youth sports clubs need to be organized and well-managed. When evaluating your organization, take a look at the following best practices for running a youth sports club.
Establish leadership and governance
Youth sports clubs need organization, and this starts with establishing governance. Most clubs have a board of directors, usually comprised of parents and community members. Make sure your board is clearly identified and the roles of each person are made clear.
According to GoalNation.com, board members are needed from a leadership standpoint, but it’s also important they know when to let the director and coaches handle issues. Micromanaging staff members can hurt productivity and morale.
Also make sure the club’s mission, values and code of conduct are published and distributed. These will help define who the club is, what it stands for and what behaviors it will or will not tolerate.
Set expectations
Every person on the club’s staff and roster should know what is expected of them.
Before the season begins, make sure all staff members and coaches are aware of the club’s expectations. From a behavioral standpoint, this could include following the team’s code of conduct and embracing its mission and values. Coaches could also be expected to attend clinics and seminars to ensure they are enhancing their coaching skills.
It’s also necessary for all players and parents to know what is expected of each of them. Players and parents should each sign and read the team’s code of conduct. This will make each individual aware of what is expected of them throughout the season, and what rules they’re expected to follow. This also gives teams written documentation to fall back on if action needs to be taken during the season.
Establish lines of communication
Teams should make sure there are open lines of communication between the club and its members. Establishing communication creates transparency throughout the squad as players and their families know the team wants to hear their opinions. It also gives directors, coaches and staff members an organized way to talk to the athletes and their parents.
To ensure each person has a chance to be heard – and to prevent staff members from being bombarded with phone calls and emails – teams should set boundaries on communication. This includes how communication should take place and when. Determine if a specific team phone number or email address should be the go-to for communications from parents or players, or if coaches and directors can be contacted via a personal phone or email address.
SportsRecruits.com also recommends determining when communication can take place. Are parents and players limited to making contact during business hours, or are phone calls and emails during the evenings and weekends allowed?
Be transparent
Sports clubs need to be as transparent as possible with athletes and their parents. With so much emphasis being placed on fairness and openness in youth sports, teams need to give players and their parents as much visibility into their club and its processes as possible. This can include giving clear instructions as to how rosters will be determined and how tryouts will be run. It can also include communicating information as needed throughout the season as issues occur, including roster or schedule updates.
One way to add more transparency into your club is by using sports evaluation software. Apps like TeamGenius allow clubs to evaluate players during tryouts without listing player names. Instead, players are listed by only their tryout number. This can prevent evaluators from knowing the identity of the player they are scoring. This solution also allows coaches to send results to players after tryouts so each player knows how they scored and what criteria the staff will be using when creating the roster.
Hire the right coaches
Running a good youth sports club can come down to the people. How a player interacts with their coach could make or break an athlete’s experience with the sport and your club. Putting quality coaches in place and ensuring they have the support they need can create a successful environment for coaches and players. Coaches can be supported by receiving training, being allowed to attend clinics and seminars, and other events where they can enhance their skills. They should also know they have the support of the director and the board of directors and that the entire club wants him or her to succeed.
