The back-to-school season should be an exciting time for Athletic Directors. New rosters, upcoming kickoff, and the smell of freshly cut grass. But for too many ADs, it's also the time when the cracks in outdated systems begin to show before the season kicks off.
We talk to Athletic Directors across the country every day, and the same frustrations come up time and time again. If any of these five challenges sound familiar, you're not alone, and the good news is, there's a better way to tackle it.
1. You're Still Running Cash-Only Gates
Picture this: you've worked hard to host a regional tournament or get ready for the home opener. Teams travel in from across the state, the stands fill up, and then you watch visiting fans walk right past your ticket table because you can't take a card.
It happens more than anyone wants to admit. Card readers that may have been purchased months ago are still sitting in a drawer, unlinked and unused. And at the end of the night, your gate revenue is a fraction of what it should have been, not because people didn't show up, but because the payment system let you down.
With Box Office, Hometown’s digital ticketing solution, fans can purchase tickets in advance online or pay at the gate with a card, thanks to our easy-to-use point-of-sale card reader. We'll work with you to get the right equipment in place so your card readers are actually ready to go before your first home game. Every transaction is tracked automatically, whether it's a card tap at the gate or a QR code scanned from a phone. No more lost revenue from fans who "just didn't have cash.”
2. Your Athletic Budget Runs on Guesswork, Not Real Data
At the end of a busy game night, how do you know how many tickets you sold? For a lot of programs, the answer is: you count the cash in the box and hope the gate-worker with the clicker was paying attention.
That's not a reporting system. It's a gamble. And when your finance team asks for gate revenue numbers, "somewhere around this much" isn't going to cut it for long. Even if you’re using another digital ticketing provider, visibility and reporting can come up short.
Box Office records every transaction automatically, whether cash, card, or advance purchase, so administrators see revenue as it comes in. Gate totals, per-event breakdowns, revenue trends: the data is just there. So when someone asks how the gate did, you can confidently answer in seconds, not a week later after a cash box is reconciled.
3. Your Athletic Teams Are Fundraising in Silos
Here's a scenario that plays out in athletic departments everywhere: volleyball kills it with their fundraiser every fall and raises enough to cover travel, hotels, and new uniforms. Meanwhile, wrestling is in the red. Baseball never fundraises at all. And when the season ends, you're quietly covering deficits out of the general athletics budget so everyone starts July back at zero.
Every sport is doing its own thing: bake sales, raffles, going door-to-door selling discount cards with no oversight, no approval process, and no visibility into who's raising what. Schoolfundr, Hometown's fee-free fundraising solution, gives every program access to the same proven online fundraising tools, so you keep everything you raise, minus standard credit card processing. And with Schoolfundr+, you get a centralized view of every active fundraiser across your entire school: which programs are raising, how much, and what for, all in one easy-to-manage place.
4. You Have No Oversight of What Your Coaches Are Fundraising For
Have your coaches ever launched a fundraiser without telling you? Sold raffle tickets, reached out to local businesses, or made financial commitments before anyone in your office knew it was happening?
Without a formal approval process, anything can happen. That creates compliance headaches, equity issues across programs, and puts you in an awkward position when questions arise later about where the money went and what it was for.
Schoolfundr+ includes a built-in approval workflow that puts you back in control. Coaches submit a request before anything goes live. You review it, approve or deny it with notes, and get an email notification the moment a new request lands. For the first time, you're in front of what your programs are doing, not finding out after the fact.
5. Updating Your Athletic Website Requires a Four-Person Chain of Emails
It’s the start of the season and you have news to share with your athletic community. Maybe it's a schedule change, a tournament announcement, or a shoutout to a student athlete. Simple, right? Except first you have to email a secretary, who emails a web coordinator, who routes it to a developer, who eventually pushes a change live days later.
By the time the update goes up, the moment has passed and your athletic community has missed it.
Engage, Hometown's solution for athletic websites and mobile apps, gives your department its own branded hub that you control directly, no developers or extra IT help required. Post news articles, feature upcoming games, embed your streaming partner, and push updates to Facebook and Twitter in one click. You go from a multi-person email chain to hitting publish yourself in just a few quick minutes.
Ready to Head Into Fall Without the Headaches?
The start of a new school year is the best time to put better processes in place, before the schedule gets busy, the gates open, and revenue goes unaccounted for.
Hometown, your trusted partner for ticketing, fundraising, and communication, is built specifically for athletic departments that want to run more efficiently, raise more money, and spend more time focusing on your student athletes and community.
Get in touch with our team today and let's make this season your most successful fall yet.
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