Youth sports leagues are an important element of childhood, as well as the fabric of your local community. Unfortunately, these organizations are expensive to operate, requiring parents and players to spend time raising money each season. To defray league operating costs, these groups need new sources of revenue and brand new donors. Luckily, you can work on these tasks with a flag football tournament.
Draw more young adults into your next fundraiser with a competitive flag football tournament.
Sports Fundraiser
When organizing a fundraiser with youth sports leagues, clubs and fraternities on campus, or an entire neighborhood, one of the biggest challenges will be finding participants. A team sport is a good choice because the team captain will recruit his own players.
Flag Football
Although a regulated football tournament would be difficult to manage, holding a tournament in support of your cause won’t be hard to accomplish. Some advantages of flag football over regulated football, include:
- No pads or helmets needed
- Less chance of injuries
- Smaller teams/easier to find teams
- Traditional football fields are not required
- Your own volunteers could act as officials
College Students
In some communities, it might be easy to round up enough adults to form 10 or more flag football teams for a single tournament, but that’s probably not a common occurrence. Organizing a fundraiser of this sort really requires a large pool of young adults. Colleges and universities are great places to find teams for your sports fundraiser.
Campus Competitions
It’s common on American college campuses for fraternities, sororities and other housing/social units to compete against one another in a range of activities from best homecoming float to intramural sports to the “university sing.” Most of these groups have a budget for these types of activity, so there won’t be much arm twisting required.
Organizing Your Tournament
Although securing participating teams is important, make sure you don’t forget these other elements of a flag football tournament:
- Venue – See if a particular school will allow you to hold the tournament on campus. Colleges usually have plenty of open lawns or fields, which are suitable for flag football.No matter where you hold the tournament, speak to the owners about adding a rider to their liability insurance for the day of the event.
- Volunteers – Besides your standard group of parents and coaches, why not ask some of the university athletic staff if they’d be willing to help? You might even be able to get some of the school’s football players out to officiate.
- Post-event – When the tournament is over, everyone will gather to watch the winners get an award. Afterwards, you can recognize the best volunteers and sponsors with a special donor recognition gift like an engraved brick paver from Bricks R Us.
If you have any questions about organizing a fundraiser or fundraising consultation, contact us today!
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