Shirt Reporting Configuration and Best Practices
By LeagueApps
March 6, 2013
3 min
LeagueApps partners frequently express the important role of t-shirts within their sports organization. Many partners almost feel like they moonlight as t-shirt vendors since they spend so much time and energy on shirt ordering, distribution and customer service.
Shirts serve multiple purposes. Many sports programs will provide shirts to their teams and/or participants as uniforms for their sports activities. The shirts are often included as part of the registration fee. An added benefit for both the leagues and it’s members is that individuals will rock the shirt beyond the playing field. It’s great marketing (a human billboard!) as the participants are proud to show off their athletic and/or social super-stardom to their friends!
LeagueApps enjoys collecting our partner shirts and we plan to hang them up on the walls in our office. We’ll be sure to share photos once we actually hang them up.
Unfortunately, dealing with shirts can be exasperating for a league organizer. Shirt quantities, colors and sizes all have to be collected and managed properly. Shirt ordering is often time-sensitive. Shirts need to be printed and delivered by the start of the sports programs. If a players doesn’t get their correct shirt, watch out!
LeagueApps can help with the t-shirt process. Here are some of the best practices.
Collect T-Shirt Sizes (With Customized Form Fields)
Customized form fields can be utilized during the registration process to obtain the t-shirt size for each participant. The most practical way to do this is create a mandatory drop down form field with all of the different shirt sizes. As each of your members register for a new program they will enter their shirt size.
We recommend to add this form field to each program registration. You may also consider adding a form field to the member profile information when new accounts are created (although player shirt size may change over time). This way you will also have an additional listing of a players t-shirt size as a backup.
Generate a Shirt Report (Individual Program)
As the registration period ends it’s time to tally up all of the team and player information in order to create a t-shirt order. Within each program you can extract a spreadsheet (.csv) report of all of the player data. This will include additional form field information such as t-shirt size. You might even want to delete some of the fields that are unnecessary to create a shirt report. Often, it makes sense to sort by team and then by size and manually tally the totals for each program. Below is an example of how a spreadsheet might look.
Generate A Shirt Report (All Programs)
Shirt reporting and ordering gets way more complicated when multiple leagues or programs all need to be processed and ordered at the same time.
The new registration report within LeagueApps should be helpful. Instead of having to pull a report of each individual program you can now pull a report of multiple programs. Programs can be sorted by status, name, sport or type. For example, a report can be pulled of all upcoming basketball leagues. Reports can even be saved for future use.
Similar to the individual program report, a spreadsheet (.csv) can be generated that includes player name, program, team as well as form field information that would include t-shirt size. Actual t-shirt sizes by team still need to be calculated from within the spreadsheet so be sure to find an excel guru if you need help!
What’s Next
We know there are ways that LeagueApps can improve how it can help leagues with their t-shirt reporting to make it even quicker and easier. A few enhancements on the list include:
- Incorporate team colors into the reports
- Automatically tally t-shirts by size, team and program within LeagueApps and .csv files
- Enable the ability to send a report directly to your shirt vendor
- Collect additional fees for special shirts or sizes
Let us know how your organization uses LeagueApps to help with shirt reporting. Or hit us up if you think we can help configure LeagueApps to make this process more efficient.