How to Live Stream Your Upcoming Youth Sports Season

This is the second article in our Roadmap to Success: SportsEngine Play series. Explore the full series and learn more about what SportsEngine Play can offer you here.

It’s the most exciting time of the year, no, not the holidays—it’s time for you to prepare for your upcoming season! The anticipation grows over the weeks as you work to get athletes signed up, coaches prepared, and teams created. It’s likely one of the most hectic times of the year for your organization, but the work you put in to prepare for the season will ensure smooth sailing throughout.  

For some of you, this could be your first time, but for most of you, this is just another year – however, you might be exploring setting up a video solution to live broadcast games within your organization. If so, we’ll review some best practices and things to keep in mind during this process to help you prepare. 

Pick the Right Provider

As with anything in life, you have choices, some better than others. It’s important that you really understand both what you and your organization want to accomplish by providing video as well as understanding what providers are in the space. Here are a couple of things we think are important to keep in mind: 

1. What do you want to provide your members? Do you want to provide players and coaches with a tool for analytics and game film, or do you want to provide a great viewing experience for your entire fan community, or do you want the ability for people to create highlights and share them with their personal community? Understanding exactly what you want to provide and get out of a video solution is critical. 

2. You are likely using another software provider for online registration, team creation, website and season management. It’s important to consider how this new solution will work with your existing one. At SportsEngine, we have a connected ecosystem, which means our products have single sign-on, integrated data, and a shared support team. You can manage your organization with a single provider instead of multiple by using SportsEngine Play with your SportsEngine HQ account.  

Streamline Your On-Boarding Experience

Once you’ve selected your new software provider, and for the sake of this article, we will assume its SportsEngine Play – you will get a dedicated rep helping you get set up within your new account. This is vital to your success as it’s likely you have a lot of momentum within your organization and board to get this up and running before the season begins

Set Up Your Season to Broadcast

So, you’ve made your choice on a video software solution and got set up in your new system. Who did you select? If your answer is SportsEngine Play, please continue on this journey.

Here’s how to get your organization’s information and season setup in SportsEngine Play.  Let the games begin! 

1. Meet with Your Administrators and Coaches

Now this may seem silly and basic, but it’s important to sit down with your admins or board and lay out exactly what your video strategy will be for the upcoming season. When you lay out a plan for yourself, it gives you something to work towards. Many organizations can feel overwhelmed at first when this step is not taken seriously. 

Pro Tip: Start small – maybe select a few teams or events at the start of the season to get set up first. These should be teams and coaches who are willing to try out the new video process and are likely more tech-savvy. Once you’ve got a good plan with those teams, you can expand and roll out to all your teams, games, and events. 

2. Integrate SportsEngine HQ with SportsEngine Play 
If you utilize SportsEngine Play and SportsEngine HQ, you are unlocking access to an integration that will make setting up your season and live streams even easier. We have a direct integration with your schedules on SportsEngine HQ, meaning you won’t have to enter those games into SportsEngine Play or create live streams for them.

Pro Tip: Do you like saving precious time and money? We thought so…If you haven’t signed up for SportsEngine Play yet, here’s your chance! Learn more >

Continue on to Phase 3 of the Roadmap: Setup Your Team for Streaming