Hosting an event or contest is a great way to get students and players to sign up with you in your training business.

It’s also a great way to develop a following in your community.

I developed this when I had the idea to do something for the school that let me rent their gym for my basketball training.  

I decided to put together a free throw contest for all of their players (and any other student who wanted to participate).

Coming up with ideas for an event or contest

It’s easy to come up with an idea for an event if you do training in a sport that can be adapted to have competitions, like basketball (shooting contests, all-around skills competitions, etc.) or football (like the Punt, Pass & Kick competitions). 

If you coach another sport, like baseball or softball, soccer, tennis, volleyball, etc., it might be harder to come up with something.  

You’ll have to get together with other coaches for ideas or search online to see if there is a way to have a skills competition for your specific sport.

If you coach and train in basketball, you can use the Free Throw Contest Score Card I developed so you don’t have to come up with something new.  It’s something really simple I created and it works great. 

For other sports, just use this as an example to give you ideas for hosting an event or coming up with a competition and how to structure it with rules and age groups for all the players.

(A template of the Free Throw Contest Rules and Score Card is in the downloadable pdf at the end of this post).

You can announce this on your Facebook page and on Instagram as well as your other social media.  You can make a short video or simply a brief post telling all about it.  

Just make sure you give them all the info so they’ll know what’s going to be involved.

Getting others to help you when hosting an event

The coaches at the school had no problem helping me out, and you’ll need some of them and maybe other people to be “refs” to keep score and make sure things go smoothly.   

And they can help you count and rank all the score cards at the end before you announce the winners.

If there aren’t any other coaches who can help, there are usually always a few parents who are eager to assist you.  All you have to do is ask.

Awards materials (trophies and medals) for your event or contest

You can get trophies, but I like to use medals from the Crown Trophy Company (CrownTrophy.com). 

It usually costs me around $100 for all the medals when hosting an event or contest like this, but it’s a great investment. 

If you get just 1 student from this, you’ll recover all of that, plus some.  And to tell you the truth, even if I didn’t get any students from this, I’d still do it anyway.  

I like to take care of the school who allows me to rent their gym, so I want to do what I can for them.  Something like this also helps you become known in your area.  It’s publicity.

Getting athletes to sign up for your contest (and ask about your training business)

Let me say again that hosting an event or contest is a great way to get more clients.  

One thing to do is pass out your information (flyers, business cards) for your training business to parents who bring their kids to the contest.  

Some might even sign up on the spot, but at the very least give them some information so that they’ll have it to look at later.

As far as advertising the contest itself, in addition to using all of your social media, try to get permission to pass out your contest flyers at places like local tournaments, camps, or high school games.   

You can even run an ad in the newspaper if it has an “Announcements” section. (NOTE: My local paper has a “What’s Happening” area in the sports section where they print events for free.  Check to see if your local paper does this so you can announce your contest for no cost).

But no matter how you advertise your event, try to link it to your sports training business.  So anyone who might not make it to the contest will still see that you are a skills trainer.