Just like traditional school yearbooks, sports team yearbooks are a special way to capture memories and celebrate the end of a season. Whether your child is a serious athlete or just having fun learning a sport, their ever-growing skillset, sense of sportsmanship, and growth as both an individual and team mate are all worth celebrating.
Custom sports photo books capture the highlights of a season along with day-to-day lessons, practices, and dynamic team spirit. Preserving those memories in a book ensures they’ll be remembered—and treasured—by all the team’s members for many years to come.
Mixbook’s comprehensive collection of sports photo book themes will jump-start your own personalized sports team yearbook. Find themes specifically designed for all kinds of sports, including baseball, soccer, hockey, football, volleyball, cheerleading, dance and more. Further, you can easily customize any theme to perfectly suit any team and any sport.
Reasons to make custom sports photo books
The top reasons for making a custom sports photo book are the same reasons kids—and their parents—pursue sports in the first place. All the following benefits of sports for kids are worth remembering and celebrating, and a custom photo book is a great way to do so.
- Self-esteem: A sports yearbook showcases the growing skillset of every team member as well as the team as a whole, reinforcing the lesson that everyone has an important role to play.
- Community: A sports team depends on its collective actions, encouraging a sense of community spirit. Your photo book can capture that spirit on the page.
- Adaptability: Kids who play sports learn to roll with the ups and downs. Long after experiencing those highs and lows, they’ll be able to flip through their sports yearbooks and just recall all the fun they had with friends.
A sports team yearbook is also an awesome giveaway item to commemorate the end-of-season milestone. It’s a meaningful addition (or even alternative) to giving out trophies or medals, because a photo book has the power to preserve memories in a way those trinkets cannot. You can also leave blank spaces in your sports yearbook for gathering signatures, so players can add personal messages alongside the photo memories.
Why not make it a tradition? Players who are on a team for multiple seasons or years can collect a full set of books. This is a unique opportunity for them to look back upon their progress and all the memories of their childhood sports activities.
How to create a custom sports photo book
Making a customized sports photo book is a much easier project when you begin with one of our professionally designed themes. These templates feature motifs and text prompts that fit the particular sport, and they’re ready to be personalized with your own team’s colors, logos, text, and photo collections.
Read more about creating a sports team yearbook here: Celebrating Youth Athletes with a Stunning Photo Book
Gather photos
The first step in creating a sports photo book is to gather all the photos from the season. Look for official team pics, photos shared by parents, and photos shared on the team’s or league’s social media pages. Start with every photo you can find, then curate a balanced collection to feature in the photo book.
Try to achieve a balance between action shots and posed portraits, pics of practices as well as games/matches, and close-up, mid-range, and long-range perspectives. Take some photos of trophies or awards, sporting equipment, uniforms, and key venues. It’s important for the photo book to be inclusive and fair to all, so make sure you have a profile pic for every single player and staff member.
This kind of variety makes the book more visually interesting, and better captures the multi-faceted experience of a full sporting season.
Choose a theme
Browse Mixbook’s sports photo book themes and choose one that best matches the sport, the team, and a fitting aesthetic style. The Sports Collection offers cohesive and versatile themes for baseball, hockey, soccer, football, basketball, volleyball, lacrosse, swim, dance, and tennis. It offers a neutral black and white color palette, prompts and phrases fitting each particular sport, and sports-inspired motifs, textures, and patterns.
Your team might like to embrace the nostalgic look of the Vintage Baseball or Vintage Football themes. For a kid who plays multiple sports, consider the Kids Sports Book by Ampersand Design Studio. Create a personalized profile of a student athlete who is graduating with the Athletic Grad theme. Don’t forget the High School Band—we have a book theme designed just for these sports-adjacent musicians, too!
Remember, every design element in our photo book themes can be easily customized. So, if you can’t find the perfect theme, pick the closest and transform the design to fit your own unique vision.
Content ideas
One of the biggest advantages to creating a sports team yearbook with a theme is their content prompts. You don’t have to design each page or spread from scratch—instead, just replace the placeholder text and images with your own.
Tip: It’s a good idea to browse other sports book themes for content ideas, even if you don’t use that theme for your own book.
Examples of content ideas for a sports book include:
- Individual player profiles and optional stats (be sure to feature every player)
- A full team roster
- A letter or message from the coach
- Profiles of coaches, assistant coaches, volunteers, and other support staff
- A brief history or background of the team or league
- Final scores from all the games of the season
- Highlights of the season
- A list of the new skills learned this season
Customize the book
In Mixbook Studio™, it’s easy to customize every part of your sports team photo book. Find all the tools you need in the panels to the left of the workspace:
- Photos: Upload and manage the photo collection you’re using for the sports yearbook in this panel. After you drag and drop photos into the book, use the pop-up menu to make edits.
- Layouts: Browse different compositions of photos, text, and other design elements for a custom look across each page or two-page spread. Auto-layouts make this super easy.
- Backgrounds: Switch the theme’s backgrounds to solid team colors or a new pattern.
- Stickers: Browse sports-related motifs and accents to accessorize your book. You can also edit the color schemes of stickers.
- Text: Include player’s names, stats, captions, and longer pieces of writing. Also customize the text size, font, color, and more.
- Themes: Switch to a different theme at any time without having to start over.
- Maps: Consider adding a custom map to show all the places your team traveled this season.
Get great deals on sports yearbooks for the whole team!
Here’s one more reason to create sports yearbooks for the team: You get exclusive pricing on any order of 10 or more, plus free and fast shipping. Visit Mixbook’s sports yearbooks and school activities page for a speedy quote!
