Harbor Team Clubhouse
I’m a single mom with 7 kids, that’s right, seven. I am in school for design and web development, which I've grown to have a passion for. My kids really love playing sports, and I really love watching them. I love the teamwork, hard work, goals, determination, direction, and fun that they experience while learning to play on a team sport. The kids’ coaches are awesome: they love kids, teach new skills and are good role models. I love doing sports photography designs because it allows me to be creative and still have my kids around.
I have a degree in photography and 20 years of professional experience. I've been a work at home mother since the oldest of my three kids was born. I homeschools my kids and work very hard to teach them new things, appreciation for the world around them, and respect for others. I'm always looking for ways to use my talents and skills service to the community. In addition to sports photography I enjoy many other photography opportunities, and writting.
Blog Post
This is the future home of our blog posts and favorite sports pictures. Look for more regular posts for soccer 2017. For now here are my thoughts on why we wanted to do this business.
Trophy Rant
I started thinking about sports my kids have played, and some of the sports my siblings and I played as a kid. We’ve accumulated a store of broken plastic trophies that can’t be thrown away because they’re too important to my kids. Also, I’ve watched my mom take a huge box of my brother’s plastic trophies to the dump. Once we grow up, cheap trophies take too much space and give too little meaning. We have a name, date and maybe a team name but we still don’t know:
- Who was the coach that year?
- Who else was on the team?
- What was great about that season?
With traditional trophies there isn’t enough value.
An Epiphany
One thing I noticed was that none of my kids’ teams had official team pictures being taken. Around the time my son started baseball with PenMet, I created a custom magazine cover introducing myself to my graphic design class. I loved how it turned out, but what I really wanted to see was the cute faces of my kids on magazine covers. So, I created one for each of the kids. They would have friends over who would look at our walls and say, “Hey! Your kid is on a magazine cover!” Then I realized that it would be really fun to give sports magazine covers to other players on my son’s baseball team.
Sports Design Uses
I thought that if I combined the need for sports pictures with the need for a better end of season award, people could have something they would appreciate now, and be priceless in the long term. Parents, and coaches could hang them up in their living room as an interesting alternative to ordinary photos, or in their kids’ rooms, or give them to grandparents. They can be stacked in the same frame the next year (what a neat time capsule), or used as a gallery, commemorating many special things about their kids.
So, I offered magazine covers to other parents and they really loved them. I used “Team Clubhouse” for the name of the magazine, rather than risking copyright and trademark infringement by using famous sports magazine titles. Then the next year, I did it again, offering it to more teams. This time I started offering trading cards as well as magazine covers and people loved them! Since baseball was wrapping up for the year people bought them just as a keepsake, but I can see a future for these types of meaningful end of season awards. This season we are offering trading cards, magazine covers and posters. We are offering a free end of season “year book” to the league, and team pictures emailed to the coaches for free.
