School District Contract Info.

Hey yall, I am seeking some help on securing a few school district contracts and I wanted to talk with some people about details and such. So.. If you could send me a PM or something, Id like to pick your brains.

Thanks.

BTW, I am referring to T&I and such.

Thanks to everyone who has decided to pitch in.

For those wondering. I am asking details about contracts without asking for specifics. This is not a technical thing.

In one town I deal with the Booster Club, in two other towns it's the individual teams (parent clubs) that contact me. I don't even deal with an AD for the T&I or Action although I have developed a good relationship with them. Contracts are unheard of for this type of shooting up here. (Much different than for the yearbook contract). As quickly as you get a team here, you can lose it. It's something that you can never forget. I have not gone looking for work (my marketing skills s***), each team I cover called me based on my work with other teams. So I know that each year has to be fresh or they will call someone else for the following year.

Since it varies this much from neighboring towns, I couldn't imagine how it would be where you are. I have read on here that some photographers have to go through the AD and it can be very difficult to get in. Apperenty there are a lot of AD's that only care "What's in it for me?"

Thanks for your take on it.

I have a meeting with the district AD here in about a month. I already have a proposal ready, but I am looking to get some other perspectives on it. I am looking at doing a full contracted deal with the district, where I become their T&I guy as well as their action guy- allowing me to sell to parents like I already do, but also will supply images for yearbook and other things. Ive talked with several university photogs. and some other people who do the same thing I am planning but I would like to see what some other people think as well.

Thanks for everyone's take and keep them comin.

It really depends on where you are located, and what the different school's policies are. In some areas of the country, the Photographer with the school contract includes the sports teams as part of that contract. In my area that's not the case. Each Varsity coach, or his or her Booster Club, decides who to use for T&I. The District or individual AD's have no say in the matter. I shoot at a dozen or so schools, but I don't shoot all of the sports at any of them. I have a number of AD's who strongly recommend that coaches use me, but some individual coaches use other photographers. In this area, T&I photographers are expected to provide, at no charge, images for the yearbook, images for media guides for those sports that have them, and images for a team's website , if they have one. In addition, I provide complimentary team pictures for each coach.

Although I may be wrong, I seriously doubt that you would be able to secure any type of district wide contract. However, it wouldn't hurt to try.

It really does depend on your area, some are controlled district wide and some are left up to the coach, and anywhere in between for others (AD, Principal, etc). I personally don't do any schools but have looked into it a few times trying to move that way since need something to do in the off-season. Especially while coaching I got to see how the schools I worked at handled it and asked a lot of coaches I knew how their districts went through the process. Always a wide range of answers.

Around here it seems to run two ways most...

A) The same company is hired throughout, they do the yearbook photos (head shots) as well as all portraits for the sports teams. They don't do any action shots and basically have drones with cameras doing the portraits - very basic, auto everything, quality sucks. They do only the head shots and portraits, group shots for some but not all. School is paying them to come out as well as parents buying packages. Some might work on commission of those packages alone but most I talked to said they "thought" the school paid them day fees and everything.

B) It's more independent and left up to the AD. They come in and do the T&I and give the yearbook copies of the team photo and maybe small group photos like seniors, juniors, captains, etc. Parents are paying for portrait packages and believe at some the schools are also paying for them to come out as mentioned, which you have to do because you don't know if the parents are going to buy enough to make it worthwhile.

High school T&I does not sell even close to as well as youth T&I...actually just had that conversation with some parents at the local school who had me do their youth wrestling T&I - the whole criteria was to have them "not fuzzy" or "blurry" like the high school photographer. Apparently the school photographer they hire has problems with having the images in focus and from the ones I've seen I can see why there's been complaints, they are far from...good.

Lastly, not sure if other states have this but in NY you have to go through a background check, fingerprinting, etc. to work in schools in any capacity. This includes the photographers and all assistants. Usually the company you work for is doing that but if you're independent you have to do it on your own.

MJPhotos24 wrote in post #11835828
Lastly, not sure if other states have this but in NY you have to go through a background check, fingerprinting, etc. to work in schools in any capacity. This includes the photographers and all assistants. Usually the company you work for is doing that but if you're independent you have to do it on your own.

This is smart, too bad it's not required in every state.

MJPhotos24 wrote in post #11835828
..... I personally don't do any schools..... High school T&I does not sell even close to as well as youth T&I...

Perhaps if you did photograph High School sports, you would know that the second part of the above quote is not at all accurate. If you are interested in the High School Sports T&I market,you might want to watch this webinar I did for Marathon Press.

http://www.marathonpre​ss.com …-presenter/randy-brister/

RSB wrote in post #11838606
Perhaps if you did photograph High School sports, you would know that the second part of the above quote is not at all accurate. If you are interested in the High School Sports T&I market,you might want to watch this webinar I did for Marathon Press.

http://www.marathonpre​ss.com …-presenter/randy-brister/

Nice little advertisement you have here. This link takes you to a page you have to buy a $25-$200 subscription, isn't posting to try and sell a product or service outside of the classifieds against the rules?

Anyways...

A) I do photograph high school sports, a lot of it since I stopped coaching after 17 seasons in five sports of high school. However, I focus on action photography at this time and actually doing pretty good with it now that there's more time, coaching schedule was always insane. I'll be doing T&I next year more than likely, but also in the middle of possibly moving out of state so have not tried to land any gigs, though have studied it and researched the market heavily.

B) I did not make that comment out of thin air, it's from three different sources. First one being T&I photographers or companies who all said the same thing, youth sports does better than high school in both number of orders and packages ordered. Second being a coach I kept tabs, while shooting the local youth league I noticed you'd get a vast majority buying (10/12 for example) but in high school while coaching it would drop significantly (5/12 for example) - also like the others had said the packages were mostly the basic ones. Those are not exact numbers, but it was pretty close to that area. The third was surveying parents who often said they did not buy in high school (past 8th grade) or they bought significantly smaller packages of photos because they have so many.

C) Is the experience in B going to be for everyone, nope. I'm sure there's plenty of areas out there that may have high school doing better than youth leagues. There's just too many factors to have a blanket yes/no answer (quality, winning/losing, prices, demographic of parents, etc). I'd bet any amount though in a survey you'd have youth leagues outweigh high schools any day though. This area may be different, but doubt it's that far off from an average across the country.

First of all, I have already been paid by Marathon Press for conducting the live webinar. If you want to subscribe to their webinar services, you pay them, not me, and you have access to dozens of their webinars covering a wide variety of topics. If providing access to an on topic educational opportunity broke any forum rule, I apologize.

I certainly agree that youth leagues offer more volume. But a typical high school sport will usually have 3-4 teams and 50-60 players, with some sports like football, track and field, cross country, swimming as many as 150-250. I have an 85%-90% buy rate, with an average sale of $35-$40. Most of these sports can be photographed in under an hour, by a single photographer with an assistant. That may not be the case in your market area, but it is in many areas of the country where High School T&I is both marketed and photographed properly.

RSB wrote in post #11839786
First of all, I have already been paid by Marathon Press for conducting the live webinar. If you want to subscribe to their webinar services, you pay them, not me, and you have access to dozens of their webinars covering a wide variety of topics. If providing access to an on topic educational opportunity broke any forum rule, I apologize.

I certainly agree that youth leagues offer more volume. But a typical high school sport will usually have 3-4 teams and 50-60 players, with some sports like football, track and field, cross country, swimming as many as 150-250. I have an 85%-90% buy rate, with an average sale of $35-$40. Most of these sports can be photographed in under an hour, by a single photographer with an assistant. That may not be the case in your market area, but it is in many areas of the country where High School T&I is both marketed and photographed properly.

See, we're talking TOTALLY different numbers. Around here it's 120-200 kids in youth soccer and 60-80 in high school for all levels (7th - varsity), it starts to thin out because kids lose interest, they change sports, join other activities, etc. If just talking high school it's maybe 30-40 kids and that's it. Of course one thing I didn't take into affect was the other sports, so it's really hard to come up with exact numbers unless you compare directly, if both sports have a youth program. Basketball for example we have none, zero sales vs. any at the high school level is easy math.

Nobody I talked to out here was getting 85%, think the highest personally saw (my team) was around 50% including varsity and JV. However, modified was more around those numbers, higher, youth league as well.

Thanks for the input guys. Just a few things to note.

-the contract would include all sports and activites throughout the district. T&I, game photos, performances etc. Would be included.
-this would be the main draw of my income but I will still have youth contracts for off season sports like summer leagues and such.
For this area, sales are looking positive. A very small knit community that takes large amounts of pride in their athletics and activities. Kids come to this district for the sports.

Volunteer to shoot Special Olympics.

You will get more calls because you were there than you can imagine. (Parents have SO kids and 'regular' kids, your presence is a huge promo; they also host events at local schools in the districts, so as you shoot the people you need to talk to are on the next field)

See:
https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1000491

BTW, when I remember the name of the POTN member who landed a bunch of contracts in northern NY state I'll post it. I bet I remember it on my way home.

So I guess my main concern is scaring off the district with a legitimate price and such. I guess it is hard to make an educated proposal without knowing how much they are currently paying and other benefits they are receiving from their current contracted photgrapher. Another thing to think about is the added business coming from portrait work that could come from this. How have you all handled such pricing/proposal issues?

canonnoob wrote in post #11842214
So I guess my main concern is scaring off the district with a legitimate price and such. I guess it is hard to make an educated proposal without knowing how much they are currently paying and other benefits they are receiving from their current contracted photgrapher. Another thing to think about is the added business coming from portrait work that could come from this. How have you all handled such pricing/proposal issues?

I've hired them.

If you ask, they'll give you a copy of the old contract. Just ask. I have not seen one which didn't have a 'kickback' to the organizers in the range of 10% of gross dollar sales.

And you can know the pricing; call your competition or just pop by and ask the receptionist for an order form to get prints from, say, the last HS championship game.

Or, go to their website, hit an event, try to order prints.

They really don't hide price.

And they compete on contacts, not price.