Website Assessment Checklist for US Youth Sports Organizations

Google your organization's name. Do it right now on your phone. What comes up?

If it's a Facebook page where the last post is from October, you already know the answer. If it's a TeamSnap page that hasn't been touched since last spring, or a WordPress site with a broken image slider and "Spring Registration Now Open - 2024!" still on the homepage, you know the answer to that too. But most organizations never look at their website through a stranger's eyes. They see it as someone who already knows the practice schedule, already has the registrar's number, already knows where the fields are.

A stranger doesn't know any of that. And a stranger is who your website is for.

Why this matters more than you think

Your website is not a communication tool for existing families. (They're in the GroupMe chat. They don't visit your site.) Your website is the front door for four groups of people who are making a judgment about your organization based on what they find online.

Prospective families. A parent Googles "youth soccer league Plano" or "little league near me" and lands on whatever comes up first. They'll spend ten seconds deciding whether this looks like a real, active program or something abandoned years ago. If your homepage answers "what sport, where, and how do I register?" - they'll click through. If it doesn't, they'll try the next organization in the search results.

Sponsors. A local business considering a $2,000 sponsorship will check your website. If it looks professional and current, that signals you'll treat their investment seriously. If it looks like it was built in 2017, they'll wonder whether anyone will even see their logo.

Grant providers. Municipal recreation departments, state youth sports commissions, and private foundations all look at your online presence when evaluating applications. A current website signals an organized program. A dead one signals risk.

Parents doing due diligence. Before signing up their eight-year-old, parents want to know the organization is safe and run by adults who are paying attention. Your website is their first impression. An active, current site with SafeSport information visible tells a parent everything they need to know. A stale one raises questions.

And here's the part that trips people up: a Facebook page is not a substitute. Facebook doesn't rank reliably in Google for location-based queries. You can't control the layout or what appears first. The algorithm decides who sees your posts - and it's not optimizing for "parent looking for a soccer league." You need a web address you own and control.

The 20-point assessment checklist

Print this out. Bring it to your next board meeting. Score each item as Yes, No, or Partially. Be honest - there's no audience here except your own board.

Findability

1. Does your organization appear on the first page of Google when you search "[your sport] league [your city]"? Try it. If your organization doesn't appear, neither you nor Google knows you exist in any useful way. This is the single most important test on this list.

2. Is your website URL on printed materials, uniforms, banners, and social media profiles? Every piece of collateral should drive people to your website. If your banner at the field says the organization name but not the URL, you're missing the easiest path you have.

3. Do you have a Google Business Profile with accurate address, phone number, and hours? Free. Takes fifteen minutes. It's what shows up in the map panel when someone searches for your organization. If you haven't claimed yours, do it today at business.google.com.

First impressions

4. Does your homepage clearly state what sport you run and where you're located? Sounds obvious. But I've seen organization homepages that assume the visitor already knows - a big photo of a field, a logo, and no text explaining what this actually is. Name the sport. Name the city or area. First two lines.

5. Is there a clear "Register" or "Sign Up" button visible without scrolling? Above the fold. Not buried in a menu. Not hidden on a subpage called "Registration Information." A button that says "Register" or "Sign Up Now," visible the moment the page loads.

6. Is the content current? If the most recent news item is from last season, your website looks abandoned. This is the single fastest way to kill credibility with a stranger. If you can't keep content current, remove the news section entirely - a sparse site is better than a stale one.

7. Does it load in under three seconds on mobile? Go to PageSpeed Insights and type in your URL. Over 70% of your visitors are on their phone. If your site takes five seconds to load because of an uncompressed hero image from 2019, people leave before it finishes rendering.

Essential information

8. Are practice times and locations easy to find? This is the number one thing a prospective family wants after they've confirmed what sport and where. If they have to click three pages deep or download a PDF to find practice times, you've lost them.

9. Are contact details visible - phone number, email, or a contact form? At minimum, a contact form and a general organization email. Ideally, a phone number for urgent inquiries. If the only contact method is a Facebook message, you're relying on someone checking Messenger - and that someone might be at their kid's tournament all weekend.

10. Is the current season's schedule available? Not last season's. This season's. If your season hasn't started, say when it starts. A schedule page showing Week 8 from Spring 2024 tells the visitor nobody's maintaining this site.

11. Are fees and registration information published? People want to know what it costs before they get in touch. If your fees aren't on the website, you're forcing every prospective family to email or call just to find out the price. Some will. Most won't.

12. Are board members or key contacts listed? A prospective family - or a sponsor, or a parks department official - wants to know real people are running this program. A page listing the president, registrar, and treasurer (with role-specific contact details, not personal cell numbers) signals legitimacy.

Functionality

13. Can someone register online? If registering requires downloading a PDF, printing it, filling it in by hand, and bringing it to the field on a Saturday morning - you're losing families. Full stop. Online registration isn't a nice-to-have. It's the minimum expectation in 2025.

14. Can someone pay online? Same principle. If a parent has to write a check and hand it to someone at the field, you're creating unnecessary friction. Credit card or ACH payment should be part of the registration flow.

15. Is there an events calendar or upcoming events section? A simple list of what's coming up - registration deadlines, season start, picture day, fundraisers. Doesn't need to be fancy. Needs to exist and be current.

16. Is the site mobile-responsive? Open your website on your phone. Does it look right? Can you read the text without zooming? Can you tap the buttons without hitting the wrong one? If the answer is no, your website doesn't work for the majority of your visitors.

Maintenance

17. Who updates it - and is that person still on the board? This is the question most organizations avoid. If the answer is "Mike built it three years ago and he moved to Austin," you have a problem. Every organization website needs a named, current board member responsible for updates.

18. How often is it actually updated? Monthly is the minimum. If it hasn't been touched in three months, it's drifting toward irrelevance. Your CMS or hosting dashboard will tell you when a page was last modified.

19. Is the domain name owned by the organization, or by a person who might leave? If the domain is registered in Mike-who-moved-to-Austin's personal GoDaddy account, the organization doesn't own its own web address. Transfer it to an organization account. Non-negotiable.

20. Is the hosting and CMS maintainable by a non-technical volunteer? This is the big one. WordPress requires regular updates - core software, plugins, themes, PHP versions. When those updates don't happen (and they don't, because the volunteer has a day job and three kids), the site breaks or gets hacked. SportsEngine, LeagueApps, and TeamSnap are decent sports-specific platforms, but they come with their own limitations. The real question isn't "do we need a website?" It's "can a volunteer maintain this website without a web developer?"

The WordPress and SportsEngine conversation

We need to talk about platforms because roughly half the youth sports websites we see are built on WordPress, and many of the rest are on SportsEngine, LeagueApps, or Blue Star Sports.

WordPress is genuinely good software. It powers about 40% of the internet. But it was designed for publishers and adapted for everything else through plugins. A typical organization WordPress site has a theme, a page builder, a forms plugin, a payments plugin, a security plugin, and a caching plugin. Each one needs updating. Each one can conflict with the others. Each one is a point of failure that no volunteer should have to troubleshoot on a Wednesday evening.

SportsEngine and similar sports platforms solve some of this - they're designed for youth sports, they handle schedules and standings, and they're easier to maintain. But your website and your membership system are often still separate. Someone fills out a form on the website, and then someone manually enters that information into whatever spreadsheet or system tracks registrations. That double-handling creates errors and eats volunteer time.

We're biased - we'll say that upfront - but TidyHQ's built-in website builder exists specifically because of this problem. When someone registers through your TidyHQ website, they're already in your membership database. Payment recorded. Contact details stored. No second system. No CSV export. No "can someone update the spreadsheet?"

The trade-off is real: WordPress and SportsEngine give you more design flexibility. TidyHQ gives you less design control but dramatically less maintenance - and the integration between your website and your member data is automatic. For most volunteer-run organizations, that trade-off lands clearly on the side of less maintenance.

How TidyHQ helps

We built the TidyHQ website builder for the board member who's been told "we need a website" and does not have time to learn WordPress, manage hosting, or chase a developer every time the practice schedule changes. The builder sits inside the same platform that manages your memberships, events, and contacts - so your website pulls directly from live data. Update practice times in TidyHQ and they update on the website. A family registers through the site and they appear in your member list immediately.

It won't win design awards. It's not trying to. It's trying to give your organization a professional, mobile-friendly web presence that a volunteer can maintain in twenty minutes a month - and that checks most of the 20 points on the checklist above without requiring a separate plugin, a separate system, or a separate person to manage it.

Frequently asked questions

How much should a US youth sports organization spend on a website?

You shouldn't need to spend more than $150–300 a year on domain registration and hosting for a standalone platform. If you're using TidyHQ, the website builder is included - the only additional cost is your domain name (around $12–20 per year for a .com or .org domain). Where organizations get into trouble is paying $3,000 for a custom WordPress build and then having nobody to maintain it after the developer moves on. The cheapest website is the one your current board can actually keep updated.

Our Facebook page has more followers than our website gets visitors. Why bother with a website?

Because they serve different purposes. Your Facebook page talks to people who already know you. Your website talks to people who don't - the parent Googling "youth baseball near me," the sponsor doing due diligence, the parks department reviewing your field permit application. Facebook also controls who sees your posts through its algorithm. You post an announcement and maybe 15% of your followers see it. Your website shows the same information to 100% of visitors. Different tools, different jobs.

We scored badly on this checklist. Where do we start?

Start with items 1, 4, 5, and 6 - they affect whether a prospective family sticks around past the first ten seconds. Claim your Google Business Profile (item 3) while you're at it - it's free and takes fifteen minutes. Then tackle items 13 and 14 - online registration and payment. Those six items alone will change how many inquiries turn into actual registrations. The rest can follow over the next few board meetings.

If you scored well on most of these points, your website is doing its job. If you didn't - and particularly if items 17 through 20 are the problem - it might be time to rethink the platform, not just the content. [See TidyHQ's website builder](/products/web-pages), or [start a free trial](/pricing) and build a test page before you commit.

References

• The Aspen Institute - Project Play - Research on youth sports organizations, including digital presence and parent engagement strategies
• National Council of Youth Sports (NCYS) - Organizational resources and standards for youth sports programs across the US
• Positive Coaching Alliance - Parent communication and community-building resources for youth sports
• USA Swimming - Club website standards and digital presence guidance for member organizations
• Seth Godin - First impressions, permission marketing, and digital presence philosophy