The Do's and Don'ts to Sponsorship!

The most common question that we come across from visitors is:  will you sponsor my team?  Due to the popularity of this question I will tell you how to go about acquiring sponsorship.

First you will need to have a team resume.  A paintball resume is similar to that of a job resume.  We broke our resume into seven sections.

We started out the resume by saying that our team is currently seeking paintball sponsorship for the current season and beyond.  This will give the person reading it a sense of why you are writing.  

The first section was “Our plans for 2002.”  Under this section we highlighted all the tournaments that we were planning on attending.  This included some big names like Skyball, Zap Amateur, and some local tournaments in our hometown. 

The second section was “What can we do for you.”  This is very important and many teams overlook this aspect of sponsorship.  Sponsorship is a two-way street.  You will get some compensation of some sort, but in return for this you will have to earn it.  Nobody gets a free ride for nothing.  For our team we use our website as a main promoter of our sponsors.  For many teams this won’t be an option.  The majority of teams will have to have other means of satisfying sponsors.  There isn’t any company out there that is 100 percent focused on winning.  Don’t use that as we will win and you will benefit from it.  You have to show good sportsmanship, a love for the game, win as a team, lose as a team, represent paintball in a positive light, and be able to do something in excess of all of this!

The next section was “Our Status.”  In this section, we told what divisions we compete in and what we intend to do in the future. 

After that we had a section about “Team Practices.”  What are your team policies regarding practices?  How many times a month do you meet?  Are they required?  What do you do at practices? 

The fifth section was “other sponsorships.”  Here we told about the discounts we receive from major stores like 888 paintball.com and that our website actually sponsors our team.

The next section was “team history.”  This is where we talked about how long we have been playing paintball, how long our teams been together, how many tournaments we’ve played in, and where we rank on the average within those tournaments. 

The last section that we did for our resume was the player roster.  Here we started with the team captain and moved down the ranks from there.  We had all our players sign under their names.  We included some contact information for he captain and the co-captain. 

General tips for acquiring sponsorship:

1.          Do not beg for sponsorship.  If they give it to you, great!  If not, look elsewhere.

2.          I would avoid saying that we have angels, tricked out autocockers, spyders with everything, and nitrogen systems.  If you have all of these things then why are you seeking sponsorship.

3.          I would avoid the big manufacturers unless you are semi-pro or professional.  I really don’t see them giving sponsorships to beginner teams (for the most part).

4.          Approach local fields/paintball stores with sponsorship requests.  These stores usually need young guys to work their fields, ref, or do other things around their field.  I would recommend going to the field a few times, playing, talking to a bunch of people, and then a few weeks later approach them with a sponsorship request.  This way the owner will see how your team acts and what you know about the game.

5.          Don’t ask for guns, barrels, nitrogen tanks, and other big-ticket items.  Nobody is going to give a gun away to a novice team for sponsorship.

6.              I would recommend going to raven paintball, 888- paintball, other big stores that    offer sponsorship on their websites, and other clothing manufacturers that offer sponsorship.  These are your most likely sponsors starting out.  Please note that these sponsors will still charge you for your purchases.  They will give you team discounts for buying their products.  This is entry-level sponsorship.  (You have to start somewhere)

7.          Be patient.  It takes time to review your application.  Many times sponsorship is done early in the year usually January.  Knowing this apply for sponsorships in late November or December.

8.          Add a team picture with your resume.  Hopefully you will all have some sort of uniforms that match when you take this picture so you don’t look like just a couple of recreation players trying to get hooked up.

9.    Make sure that all your documents that you send them are free from typos and grammatical errors!  You must look as professional as possible. 

I will add more tips as I think of them.

Written by:  Nick Palumbo