NetRiders Trophies

I am in charge of buying trophies for my son’s school and have recently discovered I can do much better on quality and price by buying the trophies online. Primarily, I am interested in purchasing sports trophies. As our school includes grades 1 through 12 our trophy needs vary greatly. And they tend to be built around the individual sports and the seasons for each.

While our school participates in around a dozen sports, the main sport trophies I am always purchasing are in the areas of baseball, football, soccer, and basketball, I also purchase online engraved plaques for teacher awards et cetera. During the course of my online purchases I have learned a few things that may be helpful to anyone else involved in trophy purchasing.

The first consideration when buying trophies online is time! We usually don’t know how many awards we will need until late in a season. And of course we have no idea who the winners will be. While many schools hand out generic awards we prefer to plan a bit and give our winners and participants a trophy with their name and the name of our school along with their achievement engraved on the trophy plate. A quality online trophy company will always include this custom engraving free of charge.

The two major advantages to buying trophies online are price and variety. I buy from AmeriTrophy and they have a huge assortment of figures, sizes and colors for every sport. For baseball trophies I like first, second, and third place finish awards with a single oval column on a marble base. These cost only around $10.00 each with the price including shipping. A smaller version of the trophy is available at a very low price. Cheap trophies are used primarily as participation awards. I usually choose the traditional gold swinging batter figure on these trophies and because our school has girls’ softball I can easily choose a female figure.

Most of our younger students are involved in soccer and for this I choose soccer trophies with the column matching one of our school colors. As our soccer teams are coed I choose awards with a non-gender figure on top such as a spinning soccer ball. Most of our soccer players are under 12 so I also make sure every player gets a simple soccer trophy award for participation.
As I said most of our awards are for major team sports such as football. While I don’t purchase the football trophies given by district and state championships, we do have a small awards banquet for our football team at season’s end. At this we hand out engraved plaques for the coaches and assistants as well as special football trophy awards for players showing inspirational qualities.

Our school offers both ladies and men’s intramural basketball and for this I need quite a few basketball trophies every year. With over 80 players participating I need to keep and eye on these expenses. I find I can purchase an excellent 10 inch basketball trophy for around $8.00 and because I purchase in bulk I receive free shipping and a 10% discount. I spend 30% less by buying my basketball trophies (or for that matter all of my sports trophies) online.