4 of 4

Write now Article Tools

One thing your league should consider is a league website. Having your league online helps you streamline the distribution of information to your league's participants. Schedules, standings, directions, forms, FAQs, sponsors and much more can be viewed on your league site. A monetized site can even pay for itself and be a revenue generator as well. You could even elect to make online registration an option for your league.

There are many free options for a league website from blogs to free hosted solutions. A good free hosted solution is eteams.com. If you don't mind their ad banners, a league could easily operate their site on a free eteams site. They also offer domain name hosting, webmail and an adfree hosted solution for under 15 bucks a month. Their interface is straightforward and easy and their site templates are easily customized. Our league used eteams for 3 years. The only drawback was their lack of a good scheduling interface. You need to manually enter your games in order to use it; this is a tedious task for a league with over 120 teams!

We switched to League USA last fall for one reason: we were looking for new scheduling software. Last summer I tested three scheduling programs and League USA's was head and shoulders above the others. The best part is after you generate your schedule, you can publish it with one click onto their hosted sites. All the schedules then populate on your website with drop down menus for divisions and individual teams; standings are automatically updated as you enter the scores of your games. Like eteams, they're under 15 bucks a month. The only thing I'm not crazy about is the limted selection of site templates which they are correcting, partly through their acquisition of Vicid.com.

I'd recommend League USA for a league that wanted to spend the money on a good scheduler and hosting solution. If you don't want to spend money on a website, go with eteams or for a real simple solution blogger.com.

Learn more about this author, Rob Merlino.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

Add your voice

Know something about How to start a community baseball league?
We want to hear your view. Write now!