Why local businesses want what your program offers, and the relationships, strategy, and systems it takes to actually capture it.
Picture a high school football game on a Friday night in any town in America. Full bleachers an hour before kickoff. A booster grilling hot dogs off a trailer. Parents, grandparents, and neighbors who haven't had a kid in the building for 20 years, all showing up because that's what this community does. There's no TV contract and no national sponsor's logo on the field — and for a local business trying to reach the families in that town, there is no more powerful marketing environment on the planet.
I've spent a long time in athletic administration, in districts as small as 100 kids per class and as large as 800. The lesson is always the same: high school athletics is one of the most undervalued marketing assets in America, and most of us running departments have no idea what we're sitting on. I wrote a full breakdown of the research and the playbook on LinkedIn. Here's the short version.
This isn't a feel-good hunch. National research has put hard numbers behind it: a large majority of parents say they're more likely to buy from and stay loyal to a company that sponsors their local high school, and most believe high school sports carry more positive community influence — and more integrity — than professional or college sports. When asked which sponsorship would influence their purchasing more, a local high school or a pro team, parents pick the high school by a wide margin. That's your market position. The job is to walk into business meetings prepared to make that case with confidence.
Sponsorship is the fastest-growing marketing medium in the country, and every reason works in your favor. Traditional ads are getting more expensive and easier to skip, while a banner in your gym or a halftime PA read is embedded in the experience and can't be muted. Today's millennial and Gen Z parents buy based on a company's community values, and nothing signals those values like backing local kids.
Sponsorship invites two-way community conversation instead of interrupting it. And cause marketing is powerful. High school athletics isn't an abstract cause, it's the most personal one in town.
Category exclusivity even lets a small local business own a space the national giants can't buy their way into.
Most programs run on a car wash, a spring golf tournament, and a cash-box concession stand tracked in a notebook. That's not a failure of effort; it's a failure of infrastructure, and it leaves real money on the table.
When I became athletic director at Burnsville High School in Minnesota, the first thing I built was a written strategic plan: a mission, defined goals, and a clear case for what we needed and why. The difference it made was dramatic: once community members could see exactly what their dollars would buy, they stopped seeing a donation and started seeing an investment.
Know your own product first — attendance, website traffic, the families in your stands and what they purchase — and you're no longer asking for a favor. You're offering one.
The single most important rule: never lead with the ask. Business owners get buried in sponsorship letters that all look alike. I never opened with a dollar amount. I opened as someone who cared about the kids and wanted to understand the owner's business and customers first. Bring something to that first meeting: tickets, a school hat, a tangible connection before they've spent a dime. Send a handwritten thank-you. Invite them to a game and let them feel Friday night from the sideline. More sponsorships closed themselves that way than any brochure ever did.
Standard tiers give you a professional starting point, but my best partnerships went off-menu entirely. A new performance gym that needed a halftime table and free-trial coupons. A product company that paid the program a cut of each unit sold. A fast-food spot that started with a cross-promotion and became a multi-year sponsor.
The trick is to stop selling banners and start selling access to their customer. And the game-day ideas can get genuinely creative: car-lease raffles, performance-based payouts from a local bank announced over the PA, a sponsor cake auction that raised five figures in a single night.
None of it required a big budget — just creativity, relationships, and a willingness to try something new.
No athletic director can run a serious revenue operation alone. Match the right people to the right roles, lean on boosters, alumni, and your chamber of commerce, and give student-athletes real experience in the work. The idea I'm most excited about is collaborative models across schools: a dozen Friday night games across a region deliver the marketing reach of a pro game to a more local, more loyal audience. Conferences that package that together will unlock revenue individual programs never could.
The fundamentals haven't changed since I first wrote about this: relationships, strategy, creative packages, team effort. What's changed is the infrastructure. We built everything by hand back then. Today, platforms like Bound handle concessions, online fundraising, sponsorship management, and year-round school stores, removing the operational drag that stops most programs before they start. The tools don't replace the relationships; they free up your time for them.
I've watched the principles in this piece play out with the friction removed. At Cedar Rapids Jefferson in Iowa, band director Carl Rowles set a $6,000 goal, spelled out exactly what the money would buy, leaned on a loyal alumni base, and reached hundreds of supporters in minutes through automated outreach. His program cleared that goal in three days and raised nearly $10,000, the most in school history.
Across town at Cedar Rapids Kennedy, boys track coach Curt Pakkebier ran (pun intended) what he described as the "least painful" fundraiser of his career using Bound and still sailed past a $10,000 target.
Same fundamentals I've preached for years — communicate the tangible need, activate the alumni network — just without the manual grind that used to make it all feel impossible.
If you're just beginning: start with one business. Bring two tickets and a hat, ask about their customers before you mention a number, and listen more than you talk. One conversation, one small commitment, one relationship — that's how nearly every great program started. The passion was never the hard part. Translating it into a business case the owner down the street will write a check for is the work, and it's worth doing.
🔗 READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON LINKEDIN — it goes deep on the national research, the exact sponsorship tiers we used, and the game-day promotions that worked. I'd love to hear how you're approaching this: drop your take in the comments on LinkedIn and tell me what's working in your program.