How to market your school sports photography business and land more clients.
February 28th, 2025
Photo by Jonathan Leitner
So much of what makes a school sports season special can be captured in the pictures that follow—whether it’s the sideline action, team photos, behind-the-scenes moments, game-winning plays, or even the heart-wrenching moments of defeat. Without school sports photographers, these powerful and emotionally charged moments would only be celebrated and relived through the (often lack-luster) mobile phone captures from parents, athletes, coaches.
What some photographers may not realize is that there are opportunities within the school sports photography niche waiting to be tapped. With the range of sports offered at schools and overlapping game times, no single photographer can cover every game for every sport each season.
At a school where another photographer may already cover some of the sports, the trick can be determining where conflicts–and the resulting event coverage gaps–exist. Look at the sports which may occur off school grounds, like a downhill ski, hockey, or swim team. Keep an open mind; the right approach can help you stand out and carve a space for yourself as a school sports photographer. Simple yet effective strategies like building relationships, showcasing an attractive portfolio, and using social media can also set you apart and help you attract more clients.
Read on for actionable steps you can take to kickstart–or grow–your sports photography business.
Get your name in front of schools and sports organizations.
Nothing is more frustrating than having the right skills, gear, and passion for photography but not getting noticed by the right people. Yes–you need all these things to keep both you and your clients happy, but schools and sports organizations won’t come looking for you. Unless you’re putting yourself out there, you won’t have paying clients around to be impressed and excited about your sports photographs.
The right strategy can make all the difference and help get you booked for school games season after season. Here are some practical tips to get your name and work in front of the people who matter:
1. Offer free coverage of a game.
Most well-paid opportunities start as pro bono work. If you’re just starting out or are new to the area, focus on gaining experience and building your portfolio by offering free coverage for a few games. Reach out to local school districts, club leagues, and/or rec leagues and offer free coverage of a game or two in exchange for showcasing your work.
Make a simple agreement about which sports and/or games you’ll be covering so you both have the same expectations, and then blow them away with your work ethic, images, and gallery delivery.
You can also provide trial sessions for team and individual photos for a sport to demonstrate your skills. By starting with free coverage, you’ll build valuable connections that can lead to paid opportunities down the line.
2. Network with decision-makers.
The key decision-makers in school sports include coaches, booster clubs, parent-teacher associations, school administrators, and athletic directors. These are the people who influence hiring decisions for sports photographers, so building relationships with them is essential.
To get in front of them, start by attending PTA meetings, school board events, and sports banquets. Similarly, show up at games, introduce yourself, and make connections with team managers and sports coordinators. Create a physical and/or digital business card with a QR code linking to your school sports portfolio and be ready to share it with anyone who wants to know more about your work.
The more familiar they are with you and your work, the more likely they’ll think of you when they need a school sports photographer.
Turn your images into income.
Sell your photos online from your own custom store. Set up is quick and your clients will enjoy a seamless shopping experience.
3. Create tailored packages for teams and families.
In a school sports setting, teams and families are typically the ones who care most about getting great photos. While teams may need quality photos for yearbooks, marketing, or social media, families will also want memorable portraits of their athletes.
Parent and athlete must-buy images and products can range from action shots during a game or event to customized templates featuring team and individual photos to keychains to highlight reels. The needs can be slightly different across different sports, so don’t be afraid to test things out and see what is most popular in your area and type of sports photography coverage.
When you offer solutions that cater to their needs, you not only increase your chances of getting booked but also increase your positive word-of-mouth referrals.
4. Cold emailing
With cold emailing, you can reach out to multiple potential clients through personalized messages that stand out. A well-crafted email should be concise, highlight your experience, and include a direct link to your portfolio to showcase your range and expertise.
An alternative to presenting a regular portfolio is using Zenfolio’s galleries to create a professional-looking demo gallery to share with schools–include a range of work that would be in a typical gallery and a few examples of different offerings, like hype or highlight reels and team templates. Bonus points for connecting it to a price list so they can preview your online store experience and products! This makes it easy for schools to browse your work in an organized, visually appealing way, and show the value you bring.
Showcase your work where coaches and parents spend time—on social media.
This might sound like a broken record, but social media isn’t going anywhere. If you want to get booked for the next school sports season, you need to showcase your best work where coaches and parents already spend their time—on social media.
Create and post the kind of content that grabs their attention, showcases your skills, and speaks to their needs. In addition, make sure you tag schools, teams, and local sports organizations featured in your images to increase your chances of being seen and build connections. If they agree, add featured athletes and others as collaborators to your posts in social platforms that support that type of feature.
It may take some time, but here are a few tips to make the process easier:
1. Post your work.
As obvious as it sounds, many people underestimate this one major step—consistently posting your work. Share action shots, team photos, and behind-the-scenes moments on whatever social media platform your audience is on. Take the age of the parents and athletes into account when choosing which social platforms to focus on–parents with younger children are likely to be on Instagram, and teens themselves are more likely to be on TikTok.
The more they see your work, the more trust you build, keeping you at the top of mind. And when the time comes to hire a photographer, you’ll be the first person they think of.
2. Use popular hashtags and key words in your captions.
Your content is much easier to discover on social media when you tag your photos with trending and relevant hashtags, in addition to using key words and phrases in your captions. This is so important because it helps your posts appear in searches and explore feeds where coaches, parents, and sports organizations are already looking.
For example, using hashtags like #SchoolSportsPhotography, #TeamPhotos, and #[YourCity]HighSchoolSports helps to promote your photography business by putting your work in front of the right audience. This helps increase your engagement, attract potential clients, and position you as the go-to sports photographer in your area.
Adding school or field locations to your posts can help, too. Small changes to your posts can add up to better exposure over time.
3. Run targeted ads.
Your social media strategy becomes considerably more effective when you know who your audience is and promote content they care about. Running targeted ads involves choosing the right advertising platform and narrowing down your audience by interests and location. This puts you and your work in the faces of those who actually need your services.
4. Share testimonials from parents and coaches.
A strong testimonial can go a long way in building trust in the minds of potential clients especially when it comes from parents of athletes and coaches. Social proof is pretty valuable these days, and sharing positive feedback can be all it takes to turn a passive observer into a paying client. So, don’t hesitate to showcase reviews from happy parents and coaches–and while you’re at it, add them to your website.
Collaborate with schools and local businesses.
When it comes to scaling in the school photography niche, developing strategic partnerships is a must. As much as creativity and technical skills are necessary to excel in this niche, it’s also super important to build people skills as well.
This comes into play in helping you manage relationships that can give room to new opportunities and help you grow. That said, here are some creative ways to collaborate with schools and local businesses:
1. Team up with local sports-related businesses.
A great way to market your work is to partner with locally owned sporting goods stores, gear repair shops, or local sports leagues. It’s a win-win—your professional images make their products more appealing and in turn, drive more sales while you gain exposure.
If you’re unsure of how to go about it, here’s what you can do: offer to provide professional images for their marketing, whether social media, ads, or in-store displays. In return, they can refer teams to you and even get a small commission for every successful booking.
Pro tip: To make collaboration even easier, create customizable galleries where businesses can easily access and showcase your images.
2. Reward referrals.
When people know there’s a reward for referring others, they’re more likely to spread the word. Not just as a favor to you but because they see value in it.
One way to encourage referrals is by offering a commission-based incentive for schools or coaches who bring teams your way. Another option is to offer discounts toward their next photo session or seasonal coverage.
3. Volunteer to shoot small events.
The idea of volunteering can be controversial among photographers–we all need to start somewhere and we all need to make money for our photography business to succeed. But here’s another way to look at it: when you’re starting out, volunteering is an opportunity to network with coaches, booster club organizers, and parents. In other words, it can serve as a shortcut to fast-tracking your sports photography business.
By offering to photograph a school’s smaller events on occasion, you can build connections and trust while getting more hours of shooting (aka practice!) under your belt. Seeing your dedication and the quality of your work will go a long way to convincing them you can deliver when money is involved.
Create irresistible deals and packages for teams and families.
While the school sports photography niche is competitive, one of the best ways to attract and retain clients is to both give them what they want and teach them what they want (ie. really cool things you offer that they didn’t know about until you told them.) The results? Irresistible product packages. More than capturing amazing sports photos, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your clients. How can they get the most value for their money?
You can stand out by offering customized packages that appeal to both schools and parents—something they can’t easily turn down.
Here are some ideas to explore:
- Offer print and digital packages that include items like group photos, individual portraits, templates with name customizations, and highlight reels.
- If you shoot video, you can also offer bundled service packages that combine both photos and video coverage.
- Provide discounted rates for schools that sign multi-event contracts.
- Run seasonal promotions, such as discounts for booking multiple teams in advance.
- In your gallery shop, leverage upselling with tiered discounts.
Optimize local SEO for your photography business.
Like any business, it is important to make sure that the right audience can easily find you. In this case, schools, coaches, and parents who are actively searching for a sports photographer.
This is where local SEO comes into play. Optimizing local SEO helps your photography business show up when potential clients search for sports photographers in your area. The higher you rank on Google, the more inquiries you get without having to spend on ads.
Even better, a platform that offers an all-in-one solution makes everything easier. With Zenfolio, you can showcase your best work, get booked for sessions, and use built-in SEO tools to better position your website to pop up in local searches.
Here are some useful tips to improve your local SEO and make it easy for clients to find you online:
- Use keywords like “school sports photographer based in [Your City]” and “[Your City] team photography” on your website page descriptions.
- Add location-specific keywords to text boxes on your site pages. On your portfolio pages, this can be as simple as header text at the top saying “Team Sports Photographer in [Your City]”
- Add alt-text to the images in your public-facing portfolios galleries or pages–keep it simple but clear and avoid keyword stuffing.
- List your business on Google My Business.
- Ask satisfied parents and schools to leave reviews on Google and Facebook.
Use email marketing to stay connected.
When done right, email marketing is a very useful strategy for securing more clients. Unlike social media posts that may feel less personal, a well-crafted email goes straight to a potential client’s inbox, which encourages direct communication.
Sending regular emails and updates not only boosts your chances of booking new clients but also encourages repeat business from existing ones.
To stay top of mind with schools and sports teams using email marketing, here’s what you need to do:
- Create an email list of athletic directors, school administrators, and parents you’ve worked with before, or who have opted in to receiving your emails.
- Bulk emails (best with a CRM or email platform): Send updates about your availability, educational tips that can improve their experiences while being photographed, seasonal promotions, and sample galleries to most or all of your list, depending on the topic.
- Individual emails (best sent via your regular email host or through your gallery contacts): Individual Follow up after events with exclusive offers on orders or thank-you notes to strengthen relationships.
- Targeted emails (to Athletic Directors, coaches, booster contact): Send event reminders to people and organizations that don’t have contracts with you yet to keep yourself front of mind–and remind them of the need to book their dates for professional sports photography in advance.
Pro tips from Seth Fontenot on launching and succeeding in school sports photography.
We’ve covered a lot, but nothing beats real, practical advice from someone who has done it successfully.
Seth Fontenot, a professional sports photographer and videographer with over five years in the field, has captured the action, emotion, and energy of countless school games. Here are his top tips to help you grow your school sports photography business:
1. Build your interpersonal skills.
“….make the kids feel comfortable and disarm them.”
As a sports photographer, especially when working with high school or college students, having strong interpersonal skills is important. During team and individual photoshoots or hype sessions, you’ll have a lot of interaction with athletes, and sometimes, you’ll be managing large groups during volume shoots with minimal assistance from coaches.
To keep the shoot running smoothly, you’ll need to engage with the students in a way that makes them feel comfortable, and helps them let their guard down. While you need to stay in control of the shoot to keep things on track, make it fun with music, conversing about the kids’ interests, and friendly encouragement. The more comfortable they are, the easier for both you and the athletes to create great images together.
2. Proper shoot preparation.
“It’s good to think the scenario through in your head before you get out there.”
Going to the location of your shoot unprepared can lead, at best, to a less than stellar client experience. At worst, you might end up with poorly lit, blurry, or generally disastrous photos. Proper shoot preparation looks a bit different depending on whether you’re photographing team photos, action photos at a game, or a hype session, but always involves packing and double checking your camera gear, lighting, and other equipment.
For games and events, checking the weather forecast, sun position for daytime games, and previewing the field or location in advance if possible. With hype sessions, a lot of creative planning goes on in advance so you can go in with a plan.
3. Be invisible.
“Get as close to the action as you can without being seen.”
Your goal during gameplay should be to remain unnoticed, and at the very least don’t obstruct the action for the audience and any referees. Focus on capturing clear action shots of athletes without becoming a distraction or obstruction in their way.
While getting close to the action is important, avoid positioning yourself so close that you risk injury or damage to your camera. This is where having the zoom lenses–and more than one camera body with an alternate lens attached–can make a huge difference.
4. Stop undercutting pricing.
“As far as undercutting pricing, I would suggest sticking to what you think you’re worth.”
There’s a growing trend of photographers lowering their prices to stay competitive. But in reality, it’s not just about price; it’s about the quality of work, creativity, and the talent you bring.
Constantly worrying about what others charge and trying to charge the same—or less—devalues your craft and expertise. Having solid planning behind your photography pricing; expenses + time and experience, divided by how many jobs per year, is a good place to start.
Once your pricing is solidly backed by the actual costs and needs of your business, you can focus on delivering impressive work and let your talent speak for itself.
Sharpen your skills and market your work.
School sports photography and videography is more than just taking images of a game; it’s about capturing the emotion, athleticism, and dynamic moments in every event.
Whether you’re just getting started, starting over in a new location, or just looking to grow your existing school sports photography business, the marketing tips we discussed here will definitely come in handy.Ready to optimize your growth as a school sports photographer? Try Zenfolio for free and get access to amazing built-in tools to leverage your skills and ultimately land you more clients.
