Ask most league operators how they’ll get more teams next season, and you’ll hear the same answer… better marketing. A flashier website, more social posts, maybe some paid ads. But talk to the leagues that have actually grown fast, and a different story comes out.
Growth rarely starts with a marketing push. It starts with fixing the things that quietly turn teams away, or that eat up all the time you’d otherwise spend finding new ones.
Here’s what that looks like in practice, drawn from leagues who’ve actually done it.
1. Stop losing sign-ups on the way in
Every extra step in your registration process is a chance for someone to give up halfway through and never come back. A form, then a separate email, then a bank transfer chased up manually: each of those handoffs is a point where a team can lose interest or simply forget to finish.
Registering and paying in one step removes that entirely. Nets85 League saw a 20% jump in registrations compared to previous seasons after doing exactly this, processing 150 registrations in its first full season with the friction gone.
Do this today: Walk through your own sign-up process as if you were a new team. Count how many separate steps, forms, or payment methods it takes from “interested” to “confirmed.” Cut it to one wherever you can.
2. Turn your waiting list into a growth engine, not a graveyard
A waiting list is one of the simplest ways to test demand before you commit to a new venue or season. But it only works if you keep it warm. Players who sit untouched on a spreadsheet move on, and you often don’t find out until you email them to say a space has opened up and get silence back.
A live waiting list that updates automatically as spaces free up means you’re offering places to people who are still interested, not chasing down players who checked out months ago.
Do this today: If you’re keeping a waiting list on paper or in a spreadsheet, set a reminder to check in with everyone on it at least once a month, so you’re not offering spaces to people who’ve already moved on.
3. Know that your admin capacity sets your growth ceiling
It’s tempting to think growth is limited by demand, by how many teams want to join. In practice, it’s often limited by how much admin capacity you have to onboard and manage them. Play Netball’s Rob Fulker described the pattern plainly: “we tended to have one admin for 20 leagues, and then it quickly went to 40, which meant two admins.” Every jump in leagues meant hiring another admin, right up until the business was running around 80 leagues still on spreadsheets.
If your growth plan depends on adding a person for every batch of new teams, your growth is capped by your hiring budget, not by demand.
Do this today: Work out how many teams one admin can currently manage before things start slipping. That number is your real growth ceiling, and it’s worth knowing before you take on the next batch of teams.
4. Make it easy for captains to fill their own squads
A big driver of teams dropping out or forfeiting isn’t lack of interest. It’s a captain stuck short of players with no easy way to fix it.
Giving captains a way to invite people directly into their team, rather than relying on WhatsApp groups and word of mouth, keeps existing teams full and reduces the forfeits that cost leagues both revenue and reputation.
A team that’s easy to keep topped up is a team that sticks around long enough to bring friends into the next season.
Do this today: Ask your captains how they currently find replacement players when someone drops out. If the answer is “I message around,” give them a simple way to invite people directly instead.
5. Look like a business teams can trust
This one gets overlooked because it feels cosmetic, but it isn’t. Leagues running everything through WhatsApp, spreadsheets, and scattered emails come across as amateurish, and that has a real cost: it’s harder to attract sponsors, and harder to convince a new team that this league is worth the money and the commitment.
A branded portal, your own colours, logo, and web address, rather than a generic system, signals that this is a proper operation, not a side project that might fold at the end of the season.
Do this today: Look at your league through a new team’s eyes. If fixtures, results, and sign-up all live in different places with no consistent branding, that’s the first thing to fix before you spend money attracting anyone new.
6. Free up your week to actually go and find new teams
Growth doesn’t happen in the hours you don’t have. It happens in the hours admin stops taking from you. Netball Now scaled from 1 league to 5 in just six months, and put the time that would otherwise have gone on admin straight back into sourcing new venues and growing the leagues instead.
Do this today: Track how many hours a week actually go on admin versus growth tasks like sourcing venues or reaching out to new teams. If admin is winning, that’s the imbalance to fix first.
7. Track the numbers that tell you where to push
You can’t decide where to focus your growth efforts, which league to expand, which venue to add next, if you’re not looking at the numbers that show you what’s actually working. A simple view of profitability and new sign-ups by league is exactly the kind of thing operators don’t know to ask for, but use constantly once it’s in front of them.
Do this today: Pick your top three leagues or venues by team count, and check whether they’re actually your most profitable. Growth decisions based on gut feel and growth decisions based on the numbers don’t always point the same way.
None of this requires a bigger marketing budget. It requires making it easier for teams to join, easier for them to stay, and easier for you to spend your time chasing growth instead of chasing admin.