Every captain finds out the same way. You walk in for the first match of the session and the other team is standing around the table in matching shirts, and yours are somewhere between a group text and an idea.
The shirts themselves are quick. What runs long is the part where six adults have to answer a question, and that part starts the day you bring it up, not the day you place the order.
Count backward from the first match
- Design 3 to 5 business days
- Approval: ?
- Printing and delivery: 10 business days
That question mark is a loaded weapon, so have the discussion with the team ahead of time. But do not make this decision by committee. That takes the ? from 1-2 days to 2-3 weeks and then it's week 6 of season before you're unpacking the team shirts. The captain and at most one other person approves the design.
The slow part is your own team
Design is measured in business days. Your team is measured in league nights.
You ask for sizes on a Tuesday. Two people answer that night, one answers Thursday, one answers with the word "large" and no other information, and one is out of town until the following Tuesday. You have just spent eight days collecting six numbers, and the printer hasn't done anything yet.
The fix is to do the collecting before the ordering, in one pass, in the room. Sizes and money on league night, in front of the person, with the size chart on your phone. One session of that beats three weeks of texting.
Three weeks is comfortable, two is tight
Three weeks out from the first match, everything fits with room to breathe. You can take a full week to gather sizes, run two rounds of revisions, and still have shirts sitting in your car for week one.
Two weeks works if your team answers fast and you approve the first proof. It leaves nothing for a reprint.
Inside of a week, plan on wearing them at week three and enjoy it anyway. Nobody remembers which week the shirts showed up. They remember the season your team had shirts.
What to do when you are already late
Order anyway, today, and stop trying to make week one. A captain who waits for the next session because they missed a date usually waits two more sessions after that.
Two things make late ordering survivable. There is no minimum, so the four people who answered you can have their shirts and the two stragglers can order theirs whenever they surface. And the design is done once, so the shirts that arrive in week five carry the same graphic as the ones that arrived in week two.
Do not compress the design step to catch up.
After the first order, the deadline goes away
The clock in this article exists because of one thing: the design has to be made before anything can be printed. That happens once.
Every order after that skips the whole first half. Your team's page already has the design on it, so a reorder is the printing and shipping stretch and nothing else. The guy who joins in week nine orders his own, in his own size, and it turns up without you being involved at all.
That is the difference between the first session and every session after it. Session one, you plan around a calendar. Session four, somebody says they want a hoodie with the team graphic on it. They make it happen on their own.
The date to put in your phone
Take your first match, count back three weeks, and put a reminder there that says: sizes and money, tonight.
That reminder is the whole system. Everything downstream of it is measured in business days and handled by somebody else.
The full sequence, from settling the name to reordering next session, is in the captain's guide to team shirts.