A good registration process is the most important component of increasing participation in a youth soccer league. Allowing participants to sign up as easily as possible will increase overall participation (and help your league earn more).
One great way to do this is through a well-designed and easy-to-use soccer registration form. However, you also need to make registration as accessible as possible, often by moving the process online.
Throughout this article, we’ll talk about what needs to go into a good soccer registration form, how to design one, and tools you can use to make this process as seamless as possible.
The basics of a soccer registration form
The sole purpose of a soccer registration form is to register players for a soccer league. This means your registration form and process ideally need to do these four things:
- Collect player information
- Store player information
- Make registration simple
- Help organize players into teams
Without player registration, you have no league. So, it's essential to put together the right form that gathers all of the information you need while also being user-friendly.
Let’s talk more about the tools you can use and the must-have form fields to include.
Choose the right tools
In the past, the youth soccer registration process has gone something like this:
- Parents either print off a form online or swing by the league office to pick one up.
- Parents fill out the form at home and print/copy any other key documents.
- Parents drop the form off at the league office.
- The league office has paper copies of registration forms, liability waivers, birth certificates, and other information to store in a physical file cabinet.
This process is outdated and ineffective, making organizing player information much harder for your league staff.
Using the right tools, like Jersey Watch, you can create a seamless online soccer team registration experience that doesn’t require you to physically store personal player information and hand-pick individual teams.
With Jersey Watch’s easy-to-use registration form builder, you can drag-and-drop form fields into place, ensuring you don’t miss any pertinent information. Place the form right on your league website to make it accessible for parents.
Your team registration forms can also collect files, like waivers, birth certificates, team photos, or anything else you need to collect to fully register each new soccer player. More than that, you can accept payments online— in the form of registration fees and donations for fundraising.
In addition, Jersey Watch makes it easy to offer refunds to players who can no longer participate, set up payment plans for families who need them, or even sell items (like team merchandise).
Once all of your players have been registered, you can easily manage them in your league dashboard. You can view player information online, organize them into teams, and contact parents about practice and game schedules.
Stop living in the past and switch your youth player registration process to an easy online form with software like Jersey Watch. On top of sports registration, other features you’ll get access to include:
- Communication tools
- Game scheduling
- Background check capabilities
Essentials to include in your soccer registration form
Now, let's start building out your registration form. Every league needs to collect some basic fields to ensure they have key information and consent forms for every player.
If you’re not sure where to start, take advantage of this soccer registration form template:
- Player information: Create a section that collects basic information for each player. This will include fields such as:
- Player’s name
- Date of birth
- Age group
- Gender
- Parent/guardian information: This section gathers information about the player’s parent or legal guardian for safety reasons. Insert fields like:
- Parent name(s)
- Street address
- Phone number
- Email address
- Emergency contact details: Even though many leagues allow parent drop-off, having emergency contact information is still important. You know, in case of emergencies. Those fields may include:
- Emergency contact name
- Emergency contact phone number
- Relationship to player
- Preferred hospital
- Doctor’s contact information
- Medical information and consent: Including release forms for medical emergencies and gathering information about each player's potential medical conditions are important. While this section won’t apply to every player, you still need to ask. Include fields like:
- Doctor’s name
- Doctor’s phone number
- Medical conditions/concerns
- Required medical treatment
- Sports information: Consider including a section to get information specific to the sport, especially from returning players. Those fields may include:
- Preferred uniform number
- Uniform size
- Preferred position
- Years of experience/skill levels
- Payment information: Include a form field to collect payment. Jersey Watch allows parents to pay via credit or debit card during registration.
- Document upload: If you need additional waivers or documentation uploaded, add a field that enables this.
- Agreement to terms and conditions: Outline your league’s policies, terms and conditions, and anything else parents need to know and agree to before submission.
🧠 Learn: How To Start a Youth Soccer Team in 2024
How to design a user-friendly form
A basic understanding of form design best practices will help ensure your form is user-friendly and visually appealing, making the process a piece of cake. Here are six steps to take when designing your registration form.
1. Use the right form builder
We've already discussed Jersey Watch and everything you can access with our sports management software. But there are other tools you can use if you're looking for a solo form builder.
- JotForm
- Typeform
- Google Forms
- Heyflow
- Zoho
- Paperform
- Formstack
2. Put functionality over design
Who doesn’t love a pretty form? However, you still need to prioritize functionality over looks. You may like the look of a two-column form, but it can actually be much more difficult to navigate—especially on mobile, but more on that later—than a one-column form.
You also don’t want to introduce too many colors, fonts, and other design elements. Keep it simple, but appealing. Easy-to-use, but with an air of design.
Remember, the most important thing is that people can quickly sign up for your league. The design doesn’t matter if the form is so complicated to use that potential participants give up and change their minds.
3. Create clear cut sections
Section out your form fields into similar groups. This makes the form more digestible, and can make it easier to organize the information as well.
Look back to the sample form template we created in the last section. We broke all of the fields down into eight potential sections. While you might not need that many sections, keeping similar questions together helps the form become easier to complete.
4. Don’t require unnecessary fields
There will be fields that need to be filled out for your organization to be able to accept the form. Player name and age along with parent information, for example.
But if you’re including fields like “Nickname” or “Preferred uniform number” and marking them as required, even though they’re not, you’re going to make the form submission process more frustrating than it has to be.
Only select “required” on fields that are absolutely necessary. And make it obvious which ones are optional so that parents aren’t spending more time on the registration form than they have to.
5. Make it mobile friendly
It’s very likely that some parents are going to be registering their kids for your sports league while on the go. Many soccer website templates will already be optimized for mobile viewing but you should always verify this before selecting a platform.
Features that ensure a form is easy to use on mobile include:
- Single column layout
- Readable fonts that aren’t too small
- Options or multiple choice whenever possible
- Easy-to-access buttons
- Fast load times
6. Test your form before launch
Finally, once you’ve finalized your form, make sure to test it out a few times—both on desktop and on mobile—to make sure it fully works, is easy to use, and the information stores where it’s supposed to.
You never want to launch a form without first trying it out yourself. By testing it, you may discover typos in form fields, required fields that don’t need to be, errors and bugs, and other issues that need to be resolved before it’s sent to parents.
Create your soccer registration form today
Open registration for your youth soccer team with a well-built, easy-to-use soccer registration form. If you need help putting your online form together, look no further than Jersey Watch’s registration software. Create your own league website, accept registration forms online, and so much more.
