The equipment we donate is free. However, there is a shipping and handling fee that offsets Good Sports cost of distributing equipment. The fee amounts to 5% of the total donation value.
Good Sports does not provide equipment donations to individual families/children. We are only able to provide equipment to established organizations that provide consistent access to physical activity programming for youth. Equipment provided is meant to stay with the program.
Once payment of the shipping and handling fee has been submitted, it can take 2-4 weeks for it to ship from our warehouse.
We work with a variety of equipment manufacturers and distributors to replenish our inventory throughout the year. While we do receive many different donations of equipment, apparel and footwear, the type of donations will vary from year to year. As a result, we may not always have every item you are looking for at a certain point in time, but we can promise that approved organizations will benefit from a wide range of items to choose from throughout their two-year approval period.
While Good Sports will always have a diverse selection of equipment, apparel and footwear to choose from, there are items that are typically much harder to source than others. Items such as computers/tablets, cardio machines, stationary bikes, playground structures, bleachers, new turf/sodding/flooring and other similar large-ticket items are not part of the donations we are able to distribute.
The size of each donation is determined by two main factors: the requesting organization’s current needs and the equipment Good Sports has available at the time of request. You can request as many items as you would like, as long as quantities requested correlate directly with the amount of athletes you serve (for example, we cannot donate 100 basketballs to an organization with only 50 players). We generally follow a 1:10 ratio for hard goods/team equipment such as soccer balls, baseball bats and basketballs, and a 1:1 ratio for apparel and personal items like sports bras, mouthguards and water bottles. Our access to footwear varies, so we reserve footwear donations for athletes who would not otherwise be able to afford properly fitting shoes. We reserve sports-specific shoes for programs that run sports-specific programming.
Yes. One to two months after each donation is received, organizations are asked to complete a brief online evaluation form which asks for information, pictures and quotes regarding how the donation impacted the receiving organization. Your feedback directly helps you and other programs by providing us with vital information as we continue to request support from our partners. The link to the evaluation form will be sent directly to organizations, and its completion is required in order to receive any future donations.
In order to be fair to all organizations that we work with throughout North America, we are unable to waive the shipping and handling fee for any organization, regardless of their location. These fees allow us to take care of shipping costs and coordination associated with each donation, and ultimately help us maintain essential operating costs required to continue the work we do each and every day.
We require that you submit one application per site. This is because each site will have different equipment needs and will serve a different group of youth. Additionally, we cannot ship to multiple sites on one application.
We prefer to support entire school population. If a coach applies on behalf of a single team, we will request a new application that includes all sports teams, PE programs, and other athletic programs across the whole school.
The Core Program supports organizations with access to equipment donations via the Donation Request Center for two years, before an additional application is required. Donation recipients typically pay a shipping and handling fee for each requested equipment donation that amounts to 5% of the value of the equipment. The Portfolio Program is a deeper support model, supporting organizations with top needed equipment for a five year period and requires an annual administrative fee based on the total number of youth served by the program. You can learn more about the Portfolio Program here.
We hope this answered questions you may have! If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at community@goodsports.org and a Good Sports team member will respond as soon as possible