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A softball club turned its season into booster packs

60 player cards, 20 sets, packed randomly so families had to swap to complete the team — a fundraiser built out of a season that had already happened.

Where it started

The Eden Roskill club committee came to us wanting something for families at the end of the season — covering the U12 Rascals and the Div 3 Flava. Not a trophy, not a photo print. Something the kids would actually keep.

Trading cards were the answer, and the club had most of what was needed already: they supplied all the player photography themselves.

The idea that made it work

The cards weren't sold as complete sets. They were packed randomly into booster packs, the way a kid would buy them at a shop.

That one decision changed the product entirely. A complete set is a keepsake you look at once. A random pack is a reason to open something, find out who you got, and go and swap with a teammate. It turns a fundraiser into a playground economy.

It's also honest about what these are — the format kids already understand, applied to their own team.

What's on the cards

Double-sided, in the standard trading card format kids already collect.

• Front: action photography, the player's name, squad number and season.
• Back: a stats panel with throwing and batting hand, playing position, season highlights, and a personal fun fact chosen by each player.

The fun fact is the bit that lands. Stats matter to some kids; the line about a favourite food or a nickname is what gets read out loud across a clubroom.

Photos from a club, not a studio

The club took the photos. That's normal for this kind of job and it works, as long as the images are sharp and reasonably well lit.

Collecting the photos is almost always the slow part — not the printing. If your prizegiving is six weeks away, the chasing is what fills those six weeks. Start there.

The turnaround surprised them

That reaction is the local-manufacturing difference in miniature. A club committee planning around a fixed prizegiving date can't absorb a three-month production run and a month on a ship. Printing here means the timeline fits inside a season.

Doing this for your club

A single team is a completely normal order. Send us a squad list, your photos and your club logo, and we'll handle the layout and send a proof before anything is printed.

Full details on custom sports trading cards, including what to send and when to order.