Promoting and Communicating Your Team Via a Team Website

When I started coaching I was told that a coach wears many different hats– teacher, counselor, administrator, role model, etc.  For today’s coaches, the world is demanding one more hat to wear–website manager/administrator.  People get their “news” in the palm of their hand (their smart phone or tablet).  Even television “news” is beginning to see the impact of social media.  In the “old days” the media would come to you and your school seeking information– to interview coaches, take pictures, get rosters, etc. Today, the local paper no longer comes to you.   The print media is a dying business and to stay afloat it’s fast becoming more electronic.  Because of this, coaches have to put on their own promoter hats and generate team news and information.  Put figuratively, a webpage is like your “front porch.” If kept attractive and clean– regularly updated and loaded with interesting news and information your athletes, parents, fans, and community will visit it often.  They’ll want to “sit on it” with their friends and have conversations with you and your coaches.

Almost two years ago, we contracted with a national website management company – National Amateur Sports – to create an athletic website for our large school district, and for each of our schools and each of their sports teams.  Why did we do this and what were the selling points in getting buy-in from our schools? I’m about to explain because my goal in this article is to convince you of the value of doing whatever it takes to establish and maintain a team webpage for your program and athletes.

For a good many years, our coaches and athletic directors had been constantly complaining about the lack of media coverage.  About twenty years ago, our local newspaper The Greenville News, was our state’s largest newspaper.  The coverage our high school sports teams received was phenomenal.  They reported on virtually all of our sports teams as well as football and basketball throughout the entire state.  They sponsored events such as district-wide track meets and coordinated and gave coverage to all-district teams in most sports.  Slowly, all of this disappeared.  The newspaper’s circulation dropped significantly, its staff shrunk in size, and our sports team’s media coverage became a trickle.  Most days, there is now not even a single item on high school sports in our local paper’s sports section. Although most coaches hardly noticed this subtle paradigm shift, shift it did and so must we! I’m guessing the above story is a familiar one in your own community because of the tidal wave of 24/7 news coverage via social media through smartphones, tablets, and smart TV’s.  These devices, in concert with the Internet are driving change. It’s happening in every community across the country and around the world.  Today, I get my newspaper delivered electronically and read it on my I-pad.  Everywhere you see people gathering, they are glued to their smartphones reading or sending tweets or texts, and getting news and sports updates, instagram’s, and instant messages from major news and sports media outlets. We can now follow games with live streaming and get live scoring via website links. It’s a whole new world and it is how people expect news and information to be shared with them.

So what should you do if you want to promote your team and athletes?  You can’t wait for the local media to come to you. Instead you must “send” or “post” information  to them or provide them with “smart” access to your team through your website.   Ask yourself these key questions:

• How do people find out about your team and your program?
• How are people likely to find your team, how it operates and its accomplishments?
• How can people learn about your team?
• How can you best establish credibility with your athletes, parents, and fans?
• How can you best promote your team and your athletes?
• How can you get the media to follow your team proactively?

Bottom line is, if you don’t have a team website, you are missing out on a huge amount of potential, positive exposure for your team and athletes.  Your website can and will be a significant communications tool that will make your job easier, and at the same time present your program in a first class, professional manner.  As you will find out later in this article, if you don’t have a website you are also missing out on a huge fundraising opportunity .

The first step is to create a website for your team.  You may be thinking where do I begin? Who are the website management companies that market specifically to schools?  For your location it should be easy to find out by simply searching the Internet.  There aren’t that many website providers that specifically work with school athletic teams.  Below are links to some of the larger companies that target website services specifically for high school sports:

• http://leagueathletics.com/
• http://www.eteamz.com/
• http://www.bigteams.com/
• https://www.hometeamsonline.com/sportswebsites/
• https://www.planeths.com/

Although we contacted some of the above companies for our school district, we decided to go with National Amateur Sports because it offered us all the services the above companies offered in a much stronger financial package.  In our search we looked at our needs and determined what services we felt were essential for our programs.  Below are some of the issues and services we considered in our search for website assistance:

• Cost effectiveness Many website providers generate their profit from sponsorships and advertisements.  Others may charge a fee.  You do need to consider financial effectiveness (upfront costs as well as maintenance costs compared with potential revenue productivity).  Does the website provider offer the opportunity of generating your own sponsorships and advertisements for profit?
• Ease of use for managers, users and visitors— This is a critical concern that must be addressed in the selection process.   The site should be user friendly for website managers and administrators as well as customers.  A key factor to consider is capability for multiple site managers with different levels of accessibility – department level to team level.  You will want a page format that not only looks good but also is easy to use.  Look at sample pages the provider shows you or visit other school’s websites served by the provider and check for ease of use and accessibility.
• Training and service — Does the provider offer free upfront training for your coaches and website managers?  What about ongoing service?  You will need a provider that has a 24/7 service for any issues and questions that arise for your website administrators and managers in your school system.  Because there is a high turnover rate for coaches and volunteers within high school athletic programs you will be changing team page managers on a regular basis.  Does the website provider offer online training for those new coaches and volunteers who become team webpage managers?
• Athletic specialty capabilities —  Does the site provide the capability of automatic updating of league standings, team-player-program statistics, scoring (what about live scoring), live video streaming, and the uploading of pictures and video clips.
• Content volume – The site must have the ability to house huge volumes of digital data in the form of statistics, media (pictures and video), rosters, schedules, etc.  All of this should be in place without having to pay additional fees for extending storage capability.
• Online payment capability and registration — You will want your site to have the ability for parents and athletes to register (creating a roster and communications database) and the ability to pay online for fees, donations, tickets, and fundraising.
• Communication capability — With registration ability there is a great opportunity for you to build a database for communicating with your athletes, coaches, parents, and fans via email, social media, and other electronic communication tools.
• Booster club and fundraising capability — Mentioned above under online payment capability, you will want a website that allows for your booster club to have its own page and to be able to generate funds through membership registration, spirit wear-store purchasing, and fundraising events such as barbecues, silent auctions, golf tournaments, etc. You will find that booster club pages work real well because parents will actively work the website.  Why? Because the higher the level of activity on a booster club page, the higher the income generated!

After you have selected your provider and the website together with team pages goes live online,  then it is up to the athletic director and coaches to drive the content on their sites.  This is not easy as coaches are very busy.  As an athletic director in a large school district, my biggest headache is getting our coaches to engage with and use their team webpage’s.  I suggest that you make sure to at least do the basics on your website – enter your schedules, post contest results, and report some minimal statistics.

Our provider, NAS Athletics, gave us a guide for the basics that showed each webpage manager Three keys to a great team page. This document gave simple directions for doing three key tasks in keeping their page updated.  Everything else you might want on your webpage can be categorized as enhancements.  Again, our provider gave us a simple guide for Enlivening your team’s website. These two guides gave us all we needed to make our website active and effective for our team community. Webpage effectiveness is measured by how many visits it gets on a regular basis. Having a team webpage sounds like a lot of work and it can be.  However, today’s coaches needs to take advantage of this electronic communication mode to communicate with their athletes, parents, and fan base. Not doing so is failing to be a competitor in the world of coaching.  Making this happen may require using an assistant coach, a volunteer parent or fellow teacher, or even a student techno-geek to be your team’s webpage manager.  Remember however, that when selecting your webpage manager, make certain you keep your school’s athletic director and principal informed every step of the way.