Somebody on your team said it last session, probably around week six, probably after the other squad walked in wearing matching shirts with their room's name across the back. We should get shirts. Everybody agreed. Nothing happened.
That's how it usually goes. Ordering team shirts for a pool league is five or six small decisions, and each one is easy on its own, but the whole thing stalls because nobody wants to be the person holding a hundred and eighty dollars of other people's money. This is the order those decisions come in, and what to do at each one.
Decide it, don't put it to a vote
A team of six will never reach consensus by text message. Somebody's out of town, somebody reads it Thursday and answers Sunday, and the guy who cares most about the color is the one who shoots last.
So make the call yourself and bring the team a plan with a price on it. We're doing shirts, it's $30 a head, I need your size by Sunday. That gets answered. "Hey, what does everyone think about team shirts?" gets four thumbs-up and no sizes.
You already do this with the lineup. Same job.
The team name comes before the shirt
Half the teams in your division are named after a pun somebody's ex-teammate made in 2019. If your name is already locked in the league app, fine, you're working with it. If it's still loose, settle it before anybody starts drawing, because the name decides how the front of the shirt reads.
Short names print bigger. A name that fits in three or four words across a chest will always look better than a full sentence shrunk to fit. And a name that only works if you explain it will get explained roughly two hundred times a season, which is two hundred more times than it's funny.
Ask the hall before you ask the team
The money problem kills more team shirts than anything else, and most captains never try the one move that solves it. Your hall already backs you in some fashion. They put your team in their league, they hold the table every week, and your six players plus whoever tags along shoot there thirteen Tuesdays in a row.
Their name on the back of six shirts, walking into every other room in the division, is cheap advertising by any measure an owner cares about. Ask the owner directly, in person, on a slow night, with a number attached. Some will cover the whole run. Plenty will split it. A few will say no, and then you're exactly where you started.
What it actually costs
Most printed prices you'll find online are quoted at fifty shirts. Your team has six. That gap is the reason the quotes you get back never match what you read.
Those prices also assume you're showing up with the artwork. Somebody still has to make it, either in the site's design tool or by uploading a file you already own. Do you have a graphic ready to go? Or did you upload one and get the resolution-too-low message back?
Our numbers, plainly, for six tees, all of them on the custom design service page:
- Design service: $50 or $75 depending on what you need, one flat fee.
- First order: $142.74 for the shirts. $23.79 a shirt at six.
- Reorders: same per-shirt price at six or more, no new design cost. Smaller reorders are $25.19 at three to five, $27.99 for one or two.
So six shirts and the standard design, first time out, runs $192.74. Every shirt after that is $23.79, whether you order six of them or one.
The design fee is the part people ask about. It pays for somebody sitting down and drawing your team's shirt, revising it until you sign off, and it buys you a design that belongs to your team and nobody else. Pay it once. It doesn't come back next session, or the session after, when you add two players and reorder three shirts.
A bulk printer will beat that first-order number. At fifty units they should. Year two is where the arithmetic turns, because a fifty-shirt price has no answer for the guy who joins in March and needs one large.
Collect the money first
Fronting the cash yourself and collecting later is how captains end up chasing $24 from a teammate for eleven weeks while both of you pretend it isn't happening. Set a deadline, take the money before you place the order, and order for the people who paid.
Nobody has to be shamed about it. The rule does the work: money in by Sunday, shirts get ordered Monday, and if you miss it you're on the next batch. Since there's no minimum order, a straggler can always get a shirt later. It just costs more: six or more is $23.79 a shirt, three to five is $25.19, and one or two is full price. That's the whole reason to run it this way — one batch, everybody in, everybody pays the six-shirt rate.
Get the sizes without sending nine texts
Ask for a size and you'll get "large" from a guy who has worn a 2XL for six years. Send the actual size chart with the measurements on it and ask people to check a shirt they already own. Takes them ninety seconds and saves you a wrong shirt.
Then get all six sizes into one list. That's the actual job here, and it's the part captains skip. Sizes that live in four separate texts, two conversations at the table and your memory of what Mike said last week are not sizes you have, they're sizes you're going to have to ask for again.
Write them down on league night, in front of the person, while they're standing there telling you. Six names, six sizes, and a mark next to whoever's paid.
Paper handles this fine for now. So does a note on your phone. One session with six players only asks the list to survive until Monday. It gets harder in session three, when two of the six have left, one has changed sizes, and the reorder has to match a design file somebody emailed you in February. Worry about that when you get there.
If one comes back wrong, that is a one-unit reorder. Order the one shirt.
Design it so it doesn't look homemade
The shirts that look thrown together usually share the same few problems. Too many elements fighting for the chest. A stock clip-art 8-ball that every gift shop in America has been selling since 1994. Type that shrinks to fit instead of a layout built around the name.
One strong idea, printed big enough to read across a room, holds up for three seasons. A graphic that shows you know the game will always beat decoration, and your division notices which one you brought. A motto, or an inside joke only your six get, does more for the team than a clean logo does.
And the back
Sponsor name, last names, or nicknames. Nicknames are the pool answer and the one your team will actually enjoy wearing, because half your roster already has one whether they like it or not. If the hall is paying, their name goes back there and the question is settled for you.
Order early enough to wear them week one
Work backward from the first match. Design takes three to five business days, then you'll want a day or two to look at it and ask for changes, then printing, then shipping. Start three weeks out and you're comfortable. Start the week before and you'll be wearing them at week four, which is fine, but you'll have watched another team walk in with theirs first.
Then do it again next session
Rosters move. You'll pick up two players, lose one to a work schedule, and somebody will put theirs through the dryer on high. With the design already done and paid for, that's a reorder of three shirts at the same per-shirt price, and it takes you about four minutes.
Reorders don't have to come through you
We recommend the captain places the first order, because one person collecting sizes and money once is the fastest way to get everybody in a shirt. After that, the running around should stop.
One gets ripped at work. Somebody drops a burger down the front of theirs in April. A new player joins in week three and wants one. On most sites that lands back on you, and you're placing a one-shirt order and collecting twenty-two dollars from somebody you see once a week.
Send us their email instead. We send them a link to your team's page, and they order the size and quantity they need themselves, at the same per-shirt price. Nothing goes through you.
Same process when someone wants the design on something else. Your best player wants the team graphic on a hoodie for the winter session, or somebody wants a long sleeve. Give us the email, they get the link, they pick the garment.
That's the part that makes a team shirt stick around long enough to mean something. Two sessions in, new players ask for theirs before you've offered.
Get the name settled, ask the hall, take the sizes on league night. The rest of it is one afternoon.