 A full disclaimer, if you purchase through the webinar, that helps support our channel here. And I only partner with people that are legit, right? I have a lot of fuel that reach out to me all of the time that has to be on our YouTube channel. And when I talked with Christie, I knew from the very beginning, she knows her stuff, she is the real deal. She's already helped a lot of other trainers in basketball start and grow their own three on three leagues. So sit back, watch this video. And again, if you wanna learn more, go click on the description under the video to take a deeper dive. That's it and enjoy the video. Hey, are you running smaller versions of sports? Meaning, are you doing something where you have fewer kids playing, like for example, a three on three basketball league? Cause if you're doing something like that, I can tell you how to grow it. I'm Christie Hilly and I've been running three on three basketball leagues for over 25 years. I've run nearly 350 three on three basketball leagues and we offer over 30 three on three basketball leagues a year in Minnesota. And we have about 14,000 kids participate every year. If you're doing something like this, I have four simple tips for you for growing your own three on three basketball league. So first and foremost, we wanna focus on fun. Okay, we don't wanna focus on prizes. We don't wanna focus on winning and on standings and records. Okay, now I know it's really typical in our culture that we define fun with winning. I mean, winning is fun, right? But what do we do? We say to kids after they play a game, we say, did you win? Okay, and if we do this, that means mathematically speaking, 50% of our teams or our kids are not having fun because 50% of them have to lose, right? So what we wanna try to do is not direct our focus on the win and loss record, okay? The kids in our leagues, they know the outcome of the game. They know the score, but we don't post standings. And even during our games, we don't have the score visible while they're playing. Our refs will yell out the score for the teams if it's close, but we tell our refs, don't say the score if it's 34 to four, okay? There's no reason to even highlight that. Just let the kids play and have fun and not worry about winning. The second thing that you can do to help grow your three and three league is not allow coaches, okay? And hear me out on this. I know you're probably a coach and so this is kind of maybe something that raises your eyebrows a little bit, okay? But I'm not saying that we don't need coaching, okay? I know we need coaching, but I wholeheartedly believe that kids need this opportunity to play their sport without always being coached, okay? I think back to when I was a kid, I had plenty of opportunities to play my sports, basketball and volleyball, where I could just go and play them and I wasn't being coached and always being told what I needed to fix or what I wasn't doing well or getting yelled at even, okay? So when we ask our athletes, our participants, why do you love playing in our three and three basketball league? They give us usually one of two reasons, okay? And the two top reasons are, number one, no coaches. The kids love to play without having coaches and their second reason that they love playing in our leagues is that they get to play with their friends because what happens a lot of times with sports is kids try out to make teams and they're gonna make the A team or the B team or the C team or however it's done and they're not necessarily on a team with their friends. And this happened to my son, his whole basketball career. His two very best friends, he never got to be on the same team with them for five on five. The only way he got to play basketball with his friends, with his best buddies was if he played three on three basketball. And he loved our three on three basketball leagues. He would just geek out about them. He was always mad when they were over and I remember saying to him, Alex, why do you love three on three basketball so much? I mean, you are super obsessed with this. Why do you love it so much? Mama gets to play with my friends and also no coaches, he said. And which I thought was funny at the time because his dad was always his basketball coach, okay? So maybe that had something to do with it. Okay, third thing that you can do to grow your three on three league is train your staff. So you wanna make sure that your events are safe and fun. And you might have this great vision of how your three on three league is gonna go, but you can't do it all alone, all by yourself. You need your staff to buy into your vision too. And what you really don't wanna do is just hand your staff a whistle and send them off to go ref their game, okay? If you do that, you're gonna get a variety of experiences happening in all your different courts or your fields or whatever you're doing because the refs are gonna do things differently. So you want to make sure that you're training your staff and that they understand your philosophy and your vision of what your three on three league is gonna be like, okay? And you can do this a couple of ways. You can have an event where you train your staff and we do this, we bring in a lot of our staff members and we let them practice refing a three on three basketball game. Another thing that you can do, it's a little bit of work but once it's done, it's so cool, is create a digital and online training. So all you have to do is provide a link to your staff and then they can go to your online training and hear the same message. It's gonna just make things a lot more consistent for you at your leagues as a very minimum before games start and go over your rules, okay? So specifically we meet with our staff and say, okay, what's different about our three on three league versus refing five on five? And we go over some of those things that are different. And again, we just keep highlighting our philosophy and what our brand's gonna be all about. We actually have on our clipboards for our refs a list of specific phrases that they can use with the kids that are engaging and that are fun and can help our staff interact with the kids and not focus just on winning all the time. So it's some things that they can say with the kids. And when you have really good staff members that are doing a great job of making your event fun for the kids, reward them. Maybe raise their pay or give them a bonus. And then along these lines, you want to continue to train your staff and your parents with how to talk to the kids about their game. So instead of saying to the kids, did you win? Try to train your parents and your staff to say things like, did you have fun? Did you get to try anything new in your game? Did you get a good workout? Tell me about a great play that happened in your game, okay? Fourth tip for growing your league is be very organized and always have a mindset of scaling. That first league that you run, if you've already run a league, you know what I'm talking about, but the first three-on-three league that you run, it's hard, it's a lot of work. Everything you're doing is new to you. So as you're going through it, you wanna be remembering and figuring out the best way to do things so that you're always working towards a more efficient way of completing tasks, okay? So if you have a mindset of scaling, that means that you're thinking about how you're gonna take your one league and run many leagues year after year after year. And so you're gonna do yourself a huge favor if you're conscientious about building a system and getting a system in place that you can repeat, that you keep tweaking and improving, and it's just gonna help you be more organized and more efficient, okay? And so you can end up doing more work in a shorter amount of time. So here's an example. In our three-on-three basketball leagues, we give every kid a T-shirt that plays in our league. And we don't just order a bunch of red shirts or something in bulk and then hand them out. We don't do that. We order each kid a specific shirt. We know what color that child's going to get because we have each team get different colors and what size. So we don't have extra shirts. We just buy one shirt per kid, which is less expensive if you do it that way. And then we really had to create a system to do this, though, because that's tricky to order each individual shirt for each player. So we didn't want our distribution of these shirts to be slow at our leagues. We had to come up with what's our process gonna be here. So what we decided to do instead of handing out one shirt at a time to each player at our league, that could be like 500 shirts we're handing out, we packaged them by team. So we get all the shirts for one team together and then we put a sticker on them that has the team name and then all the players' names on that sticker plus their shirt size. And now we're handing out a whole team's worth of shirts versus a bunch of individual shirts. So we're just streamlining our processes. We're making things more efficient and things just keep evolving. So have that mindset as you're going through things about I wanna scale this. How do I get more efficient at what I'm doing? Okay, how do I make this task more efficient? Okay, I have so much more I would love to teach you about what we're doing with Three on Three Basketball Leagues and it will work for other sports too. So I would like to invite you to save your seat at a free training that I'm doing. So if you go down to the description below, there's gonna be a link where you can sign up for my webinar where I'm gonna teach you the seven specific steps that you're gonna wanna follow so that you can launch and run and profit from your own Three on Three League. Okay, I hope to see you there.