According to the Alaska Public Radio network, a youth sports registration company, Count Me In, has told Fairbanks Youth Soccer and other youth sports groups that they cannot currently pay them registration fees they are owed. Many youth sports leagues use online registration services to not only register their players and help manage the league, but to also collect registration fees from parents via credit cards. The service then pays the league the collected registration fees. Apparently, Count Me In has run into financial difficulty and is strapped for cash, so they can’t pay the leagues the fees they collected. Count Me In responded that they were working with their investors to get leagues the money they are owed, but it might be paid in installments.
If these leagues don’t get the money that is owed to them, or they get it over time, this could have a huge impact on their ability to function. While leagues usually have reserves to help with unexpected expenses, losing most of a season’s registration payments would be a huge hit and might prevent many kids from playing if referees and coaches can’t be paid. Even if a league has reserves, this could significantly reduce money they have saved for fields, equipment, and other purposes.
Here’s hoping that Count Me In can find the funding to pay what they owe, otherwise a number of youth sports associations could be in significant trouble. Amounts of 50 to 150 thousand were mentioned, which is a lot of money for most non-profit sports leagues. If you use an online league management company, do you know what the fine print stipulates in terms of money that is collected on your behalf? How quickly is it paid? How often? What are your rights? Can you pursue payment if they go bankrupt or do your parents have to? It would be horribly inefficient to expect transfers after every payment, but I would expect a league could ask for payment after the collected balance exceeds a certain threshold or every X weeks. This would minimize any losses related to a company’s financial troubles.
I wonder how many leagues used Count Me In and are affected by this…
UPDATE: Turns out a LOT of leagues are affected by this. Two Tampa Bay leagues are together owed close to $150,000! You have to expect that there are many more leagues affected by this and that the total amount owed is in the millions. I personally think it’s criminal for a company to include collected registration fees as any part of their balance sheet, money they KNOW they have to immediately pay back out. Given the amounts they can’t currently pay, they had to know for some time that they were in serious financial trouble and it sounds like (just conjecture here) they tried to ride out tough times using the float of registration fees for operational expenses (vs. actual income), only to end up deeper in the hole and owing clubs millions.
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December 24th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
With free, open source applications like Joomla’s VirtueMart, teamed with Google Checkout, if a league can have someone tech-savvy volunteer and set it up there’s little reason to use third parties.
If the only function of league registration is get a parent’s name, athlete name, contact info and athlete info and then charge a fee (and insert all of this to a database) this isn’t rocket science…seems like something that could be pretty easily worked into an open source shopping website.
December 24th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
It tends to be a lot more involved than that, though it varies by vendor. Some of the better systems provide complete league management – registration, player records, volunteer calendar mgmt, risk management, practice/match schedule, picture galleries, email notification, and much more. I’ve written our league’s software with a focus on administration ease – we still do cash/checks for fees. But even if we moved to a commercial mgmt system, I’d probably push for an in-house setup using Google Checkout or PayPal. The fees are a ‘bit’ higher (PayPal costs you about 3%), you get the money directly. We’ll probably add online payments in the next year or two – mostly to save backoffice hassles.
Granted, this is only one company out of many – but it does highlight the problems that can arise if a company goes under and they’re collecting money for you.