 Do you wanna start a three on three basketball league business and avoid some of the biggest mistakes that people make, then you're in the right place. Hi, I'm Christy Hilly with three on three hoops hub. I have run over 400 three on three basketball leagues since 1997 with my company Midwest three on three. In the past few years, I've been helping hundreds of other people get their own three on three basketball leagues off the ground and have them be profitable by sharing our model on how we're doing things here in Minnesota. I've worked with hundreds of people the past few years and I've seen some mistakes that people make and I wanna share with you the three biggest mistakes that people are making so that you can avoid them. The first mistake has to do with promotion. One of the things people do is they don't give themselves enough time to promote their league. You're gonna wanna have at least three months to promote your league. So that means once you've gotten your website ready, your registrations ready, you've secured your facility and you can start promoting your league, you wanna have a solid three months of time that you can be telling people about your league before it actually starts. And all too often I talk to people whose league is maybe in four weeks or six weeks from now and they're just starting their promotion efforts and I know already that it's not gonna go very well for them because I had three very busy children and my calendar was already filled up with their activities for the next month. Four weeks from now, six weeks from now. So you wanna be presenting your three on three league to people while their calendar is not already full of other activities and even if my son was available four weeks from now to sign up for a three on three league, three on three is something where they need other people to play with. So if he called up his friend, the chances that his friend is also free four weeks from now is unlikely as well. So you really wanna make sure you're getting this opportunity presented to people while their calendar is still pretty clear. So three months of promotion time. The other problem that I see people have with their promotion efforts is they don't have enough people to email about their opportunities. So how many people do you have on your email list that you can send out information about your league? Now, yep, there's all kinds of other things you can do. You can do flyers, you can do yard signs, lots of other things for promoting, but the very best, most effective way to promote your league is with emails. So if you aren't maybe a coach that has an email list maybe from camps that you've run or maybe you're a trainer and you have emails, that's great, but if you don't have those emails, well, how do you get started with this and how do you build an email list? And one of the things that we do with almost all of our leagues is we work with what we call a co-promoter. A co-promoter tends to be say a varsity or a high school basketball program, the coach or the board members of the fundraising group for the high school team, or it might be like the local traveling team or traveling association for five on five. Those types of groups have the email addresses that you want. You wanna be emailing the youth basketball players in your community. And oftentimes those groups are looking for ways to fundraise. And so what you wanna do is set up some sort of agreement that's a win-win for both sides where what you want that co-promoter to do is send some emails out to their database and you can give them the actual tax, the information about your league to put in an email that they can send out and then you can make a donation to their program as part of a fundraiser. So it's a win-win situation and all of our agreements with co-promoters look a little bit different because what you wanna do is sit down and have a chat with them about how this could be beneficial to them, okay? While you're trying to get emails out to people. So mistake number one again is in promotion, people don't give themselves enough time to promote their league where people actually have a free calendar where they could sign up for your league or they just don't have enough people to email. So that's where working with a co-promoting group can help you start building that email list. All right, let's move on to mistake number two. Mistake number two is I see people excluding potential people to sign up for their league and they can do this in a number of different ways. Some of them are obvious and some of them are less obvious. So let's talk about how people exclude people from signing up. The first thing I see people do is they overpriced their league and many people are coming into the three-on-three league business or idea of doing this from maybe a trainer background or a trainer mindset. And if you're a trainer, a lot of times what you're doing is you are serving a small number of people who are paying a premium price. And we got to kind of flip that mindset for three-on-three basketball leagues because what you really want is to have as many teams as possible, sign up for your league because that makes it easier for you to build schedules and make sure teams are playing appropriate competition. So you'd rather have a bigger volume, more teams paying a lower price versus fewer teams paying a higher price, if that makes sense. So when it comes time to price your league, you want to be really affordable for families and you want to make it a really easy yes because families are already spending so much money on activities for their kids. So if you can be something where they say, hey, that's a great deal to sign my kid up for this opportunity, that's gonna bode really well for you and you're gonna just have a lot more people saying yes and signing up and then you're gonna be able to offer a better experience. Another way that people exclude people from signing up for their leagues is they market their leagues just to maybe elite basketball players or if they're doing a three-on-three tournament or something and they're just marketing it to the high level elite year round type basketball players and we want those people in the leagues obviously but we also wanna offer our leagues to people who are casual basketball players. Maybe a different sports, their main sport but they like to play basketball and they would sign up for your league if they knew about it and we also want to open this up to the beginner basketball players, kids that are just trying basketball or maybe they're not even very good at basketball, whatever, we want this to be open to all levels of players which some people then worry about and they say well then we're gonna have blowout games and it's not gonna be a good experience but this is where scheduling comes into play. When you schedule your league, you wanna try to watch those matchups and make sure that you're having the right teams play each other and one way that you can do that is you collect some information in your registration form. So let's say you have a seventh grade boys team sign up, you can have a question and ask them about their level of play and so if they are elite A team kind of players then you know who else you might match them up when you're scheduling, okay? And sometimes you schedule, if you have some beginning seventh graders and they're just new to basketball maybe you're gonna schedule them against some sixth graders that are a little bit more experienced and see if you can't make those some good matchups. So scheduling is how you're gonna deal with having all those different levels of competition in your league. All right, so how else do people exclude people from their league? And some of these are less obvious but here's a big one and I see this all the time. I have people ask me to look at their registration form for their league and a really common mistake is on their registration form they require four players on a team. It says sometimes like three players in a sub and I question that like why are you restricting it to four players? What if a team has three players, can they sign up? What if it's a group of five friends or six friends or seven friends and they wanna play together and you're saying that that's not okay they can't have five players on a team now they might not sign up and sometimes people will say their reason for that is to make sure everyone's getting good playing time or whatever but the parents know this if they're signing their player up to be on a team of six they know that that's less playing time than if there's three players on a team but let them make that decision you don't wanna exclude people from signing up because they don't have this magical number of players on their team. So three, four, five, six, seven sometimes we have teams that have seven players on a team that's fine. That's fine. And then another less obvious way I see people maybe turn people away from their league is they preadvertise their divisions as being combined grade levels so for example they might have third and fourth grade boys for this division and fifth and sixth grade boys for this division and I wouldn't preadvertise that because if I am a parent of a really good fourth grade boy and I see that they're combined with third graders I already know that this isn't gonna be a great playing experience for my son who's a really good player and now is gonna be playing against beginning third graders I probably am not gonna sign him up the other side of that is your beginning third graders aren't gonna sign up for a league if they know they have to play really good fourth graders or whatever grades you're combining so don't advertise it that way I would have in the registration just have people sign up for a third grade boys fourth grade boys, fifth grade boys and then as you see what your teams are in the registration and you're asking those questions about their level I might have that really strong fourth grade boys team play against the fifth grade boys team I will make that decision in scheduling but I'm not gonna preadvertise how I'm gonna combine those grades otherwise you're gonna exclude some people okay so that's mistake number two is excluding people from your league and mistake number three I know that if you're watching this video there's a high chance it's very likely that you are a coach of some sort of basketball so this might not sit right with you but hear me out so mistake number three is having coaches for your three on three league I'm gonna tell you we don't do any coaches in our leagues and this is what I recommend why do we not have coaches in our league well by not having coaches what you are offering kids is this opportunity to play basketball in a very fun low stress environment where they're not getting yelled at it's not overly controlled they're not being constantly told what they should be doing they just get to play freely it's not over structured kids get a chance to kind of develop some leadership skills in this situation where there isn't an adult telling them what to do and it's a really safe environment for them to learn from their own mistakes so no coaches really just gives them that free play opportunity that's missing right now in kids basketball experiences not having coaches means you don't have to pay coaches so this is good for your pricing your league low and you making more of a profit in the end if you don't have to pay coaches it's also gonna remove the liability from you so you don't have to maybe do background checks on coaches or if the coach has inappropriate behavior of some sort all that liability you don't have to worry about if you don't have coaches also if you have coaches there's going to be some stress involved because you're gonna have to manage their behavior make sure that they're doing a good job as coaching it's just another thing for you to monitor and you know that you're gonna have parents complaining either about their coach or the opposing teams coach or whatever and you're just gonna be dealing with a lot of things that it's just unnecessary and then kind of piggybacking on our mistake number two of excluding people from signing up what if you have a team that wants to sign up and they can't find a coach now they're not gonna sign up so that's gonna just add to that mistake as well okay so you wanna offer something with your three on three league that's different than what's already out there kids already have so many opportunities to play five on five basketball with coaches with practices with the high stress with winning prizes and things like that how can you make your three on three offering something that's different than they're already doing something that kids need something that they really enjoy and that families can afford to do with their kids so those are some of the mistakes that I've seen people make they kind of approach the three on three league idea really with a similar mindset to how five on five is already being done so you gotta think outside the box a little bit so I hope that these tips will help you avoid some of the common mistakes that I see when people are starting their three on three basketball league business if you'd like to learn more about what we're doing with our three on three leagues and how we've built our business and how we're doing things please join me in a free 90 minute training where I'm gonna teach you the seven specific steps to running your own profitable three on three basketball league so check out the link posted below I'd love to help you get this going in your community by sharing our experience and our model and our system what's working for us and I've used this to help so many others and I would love to help you too so click on the link below grab a spot in the training and I'll see you soon.