When you hear school baseball team it’s easy to overlook how the team runs successfully. What if we told you that the baseball booster club is an integral part of that success? It’s understandable to think that just having a school baseball team may be enough to attract players to the team and students to the stands. But who recruits players? Who organizes the fundraisers, and helps to get the team the new equipment? Who ensures that the team even exists as budgets are cut? Players don’t just flock to your school baseball team and tickets aren’t magically sold. It takes leg-work, advertising, meetings, phone calls, events, recruiting, and so much more to run a successful school baseball team… Enter your school baseball booster club.
What A Baseball Booster Club Does
Most people are familiar with a middle school or high school baseball team. In many cases your school may compete at a city or state level among other schools every season. While baseball booster clubs aren’t as well known, they are essential in ensuring their school baseball team is as competitive as it can be. A baseball booster club is typically an all-volunteer group that organizes fundraisers, special events to coincide with games, stadium upkeep, food distribution at games, uniforms, and so much more. Baseball booster clubs exist to elevate the experience and improve day to day operations of all school baseball team members – from players, to coaches, to their family members. A baseball booster club is essentially a team supporting the team itself!
Why are Booster Clubs Great for Schools and Baseball Teams?
Aside from the financial benefit of having a baseball booster club supporting your team, booster clubs are critical in providing both visibility and moral support to athletic programs while preserving the opportunity for kids to participate. With any school, there are always fiscal restraints that often hinder departments or otherwise indirectly put a cap on how much attention can be given to extracurricular activities. Your baseball team booster clubs are there to step in and fill in the gaps, providing needed volunteer support and establish a line of communication between the team, the parents, the players and the school. Having a booster club for your school baseball team can can be thought of more as a management system to help the team grow and develop.
Baseball Booster Clubs Can Impact Recruiting
You may not realize it, but booster clubs play an integral role in recruiting both baseball players and coaches. Recruiting for the team takes time, a bit of promotion, some paperwork, organization, and of course – manpower. Considering that this needs to happen on an annual basis with players and every so often with coaching, this becomes almost an entire booster club department in itself. The advantage of the baseball booster club handling recruiting delegates most of the process to allow coaches and players to play while maintaing a focus on quality recruits. This does not mean that your baseball team coaches, and athletic directors are not involved, but with a baseball booster club, the heavy lifting of recruiting is all taken care of. That being said, picking players that always hit home runs and throw no-no’s is no guarantee!
Build Morale For Your Baseball Team
We talk a lot about how much a booster club can do for a team on the financial and management side, but it also extends further by positively impacting team morale. Your school baseball team isn’t required to have special events, brand new equipment, or things like special ceremonies but these things absolutely help raise team spirit. Given the hectic practice, game and school schedules, there’s only so much that a team itself can organize. Again – in steps the baseball booster club. By shifting many of these morale focused events to the perview of your school baseball booster club ensures they occur in ways that are in the team’s, school’s and athelete’s best interests. The morale results are helping transform your school baseball team from just a sport for the school into a sport that the entire community rallies behind.
Booster Clubs Increase School and Community Support
Whether you volunteer for your booster club to help provide the team with awesome experiences, or joined the baseball booster club to help raise money and organize fundraisers, booster clubs engender a community environment of support. Your efforts to improve the team, will undoubtedly increase your community’s awareness of the team. As the team continues to improve with better equipment, newer facilities and better training – your community’s involvement and support will grow as well. The impact your work with the baseball booster club can not only bring the community together, it can positively change the entire course of student athletes involved.
Financial Gains Bring Better Baseball Equipment and Facilities
All schools and athletic programs have a budget in place for the year and in many cases those budgets fall short of what is really needed. Booster clubs by their very nature are able to raise funds of their own to fill in those fiscal budget gaps. How do they accomplish this? Through a plethora of channels including fundraising, retail and ticket sales and donations.
The primary source of booster club revenue: Fundraisers, bring in money for things that may not be in the budget but still need replacing or upgrading. Hypothetically if your school’s baseball team is in dire need of new baseball bats but there is no budget for it, a booster club fundraiser can help. In another case, the school budget may not be able to afford the entire purchase of new team uniforms – again your booster club can step in and help bridge the gap through fundraising.
These fundraising needs of course aren’t just thrown together impulsively, but are pre-planned based on the school budget. This helps formulate your booster club’s yearly mission goals, operational budget, and strategy to achieve or surpass the goals. Working together with the school and coaches, the booster club is able to fill in as a critical financial partner to any baseball program no matter the size.
Booster Clubs Increase Interest In Your Baseball Team
Beyond financial, moral and management support, your baseball booster club also serves an additional important role. It needs to be great for bringing awareness to and advocating for the baseball team. This role is accomplished in a few key ways.
Online Promotions
In a day and age where the school newspaper may not have the same impact it used to, booster clubs need to effectively utilize the ever growing entity known as social media. Through platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as well as the school website, booster clubs can access students and the community in entirely new ways. Your baseball booster club’s online presence, from website to social media to even advertising has never been more important to help increase your team’s awareness within the community.
Merchandising
Another way the booster club build student and community interest is by creating school sport branded merchandise. Students as well as community members love to rock their school mascot or team. Not only does this add a revenue stream for the booster club, each of those branded items is advertising your team out in the community.
Local Promotions
Like online promotions, local promotions play a huge role in student and community engagement with your school baseball team. From simply passing out flyers and taping up posters, to interviews in local newspapers, to media appearances on local radio and TV programs – there are any number of local opportunities to increase awareness. Plus the more places and more creative your local promotions for your team are, the more impact you will have on your community involvement.
Support Your Team by Supporting Their Booster Club
As you can tell, your baseball booster club helps to strengthen your team in any number of ways. While mainly behind the scenes, in many cases the booster club is the machine that keeps the baseball engine running and thriving. While the glory is to win games and bring home the trophies, that only happens due to planning, awareness, financial support and the positive moral support a booster club provides. The next time you cheer on your school baseball team you may want to consider ways you can also support their booster club.
