This past weekend had at least two members of our family at a basketball tournament. Last weekend it was volleyball.

If you have kids like I do who play sports, then you know that your weekends and free time are often spent shuttling kids to games, practices and tournaments. And in the process you could be shelling out tons of money. That’s why I’ve come up with ways to save not only my family money but, in the case of my daughter’s basketball team, for which I am the manager, the team money, too. Here are my 5 tips:

1. Bring your own Gatorade. At every tournament we’ve been to, Gatorade costs $1.50 to $2 per bottle. Play four games in a weekend and for that money, you could have bought a couple of 12 packs of Gatorade or your favorite sports drink. (We favor the G2 drink, since it is lower in calories.) That’s why whenever sports drinks are on sale at the supermarket, I stock up and then grab a few and go on sports mornings.
2. See about discount admission fees. The one thing I hate about the basketball tournaments that we attend is that they charge the parents to come into the gym. Then again my high school does this with varsity sports, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. However, our school district started a discount program, whereby if you bought 10 tickets to any upcoming varsity game, they gave you two tickets for free (or something like that). In addition, some of the two-day tournaments we attend will give you a discounted admission fee if you pay for both Saturday and Sunday upfront. (They usually give you those wristbands you get at amusement parks.)
3. Ask if you can get a team discount. This is a discount you should ask about when you register for the tournament itself. For example, the last tournament our team (and the three others from our school) attended, you got a $20-per-team discount for registering three or more teams. When I registered those same four teams for this past weekend’s tournament, there was no mention of a discount for registering multiple teams. So I asked. And we got $150 knocked off the total registration fee, which we could put back into the teams’ funds.
4. Plan to picnic with your team. Again, like the Gatorade, buying your lunch at a sporting event or going out to eat with the team can get pricey and fast. Last year, with my daughter’s basketball team, we made a picnic schedule, and two families took each day of the tournament. They brought bread, fixings for sandwiches, drinks and fruit. The weekend that it was my turn to contribute to the picnic lunch, I think I spent $20 or $25 on supplies. That may seem like a lot of money for a single day but if that’s all I had to spend on lunches for the whole season, that’s a good deal to me.
5. Look into hand-me-down uniforms. My daughter started playing on her AAU basketball team three years ago, and this season was the first to have had girls “graduate” from the program. (Our league ages out in middle school.) Some of the incoming, new-to-us families were smart to ask if any of the “graduates” would mind handing down their uniforms to save those new families the cost of buying one. I think a couple of people were able to take advantage of this opportunity and offered the folks a nominal fee to cover the hand me down. So while they still spent some money on uniforms, they spend a lot less than they would have, had they bought the uniforms new. (My daughter had a growth spurt last year and needs new shorts so she isn’t out on the court, playing in Daisy Duke’s; I’m thinking of checking in with one of the graduate families myself to get replacement shorts.)

What are some of the ways that you save money at or for your kids’ sporting events–or on teams you play on yourself?