A first-year drill coach revived the Junior D'velles with a two-day mini clinic anchored to the city parade: exactly 100 kids at $65 each, over $6,000 raised.
Ashlee Scott pulled off the cleanest drill team fundraiser I've seen from a brand new coach, and she did it in her very first months on the job. She coaches the D'velles at Springville High School in Utah, and she walked into a program that had lost its entire coaching staff and needed rebuilding from the studs up. Her tryouts didn't even finish until the end of April. Most coaches would have spent that first summer just learning everyone's names. Ashlee brought back the Junior D'velles instead: a mini drill clinic where her team teaches younger kids, ending in a march down Main Street. She set a goal of 100 kids and hit it exactly. A hundred on the nose, over six thousand dollars raised, and a feeder pipeline started for a program she's trying to revive. I called her up to find out how a first-year coach lands all of that on the first try.
I wasn't sure how one person runs a fundraiser, rebuilds a roster, and reintroduces a town tradition all at once, in her first few months no less, so I asked her to walk me through it. What she described isn't really about drill team at all. It's a model any coach can run: cheer, dance, gymnastics, wrestling, any program with little kids who look up to the big ones.
Start with the definition, because "clinic" sounds more complicated than it is. A clinic fundraiser is when your team charges younger kids a fee to spend a day or two learning the basics from your athletes, usually ending in a small performance. It raises money like any fundraiser, but it does two things a car wash never will: it puts your program in front of the whole community, and it builds the pipeline of younger kids who will want to join in a few years. That double payoff is the entire point, and it's why Ashlee picked it. She didn't just need cash. She needed people to know the D'velles were back.
She said it plainly. The goal was to "start feeding a system where people are interested in the drill team, want to be a part of it, and aware of it." The Junior D'velles had been a Springville thing for a long time before it quietly stopped a few years back, so she was reviving a tradition the town already had warm feelings about. That's the hidden advantage of the clinic model. You're not selling something nobody asked for. You're handing little kids a chance to be part of something their older siblings or neighbors did, and charging a fair price for the experience.
Here's the move I'd steal first. Before Ashlee picked a date or a price, she asked around. She talked to parents whose kids had done clinics before, and one of them put a bug in her ear: her daughter still, years later, could not stop talking about the time she got to march in the parade. That was the whole strategy right there. Ashlee built the clinic around marching in the city's parade, then worked backward from it.
That one decision did three jobs at once. The parade gave parents a real payoff, their kid out on the street in front of the whole town, not just a gym full of folding chairs. It put the D'velles in front of the entire city, which is exactly the awareness she was after. And, quietly, it handed her a deadline she physically could not push. The single best thing a first-time organizer can do is anchor the fundraiser to a fixed event, a parade, a halftime, a tournament, a festival, because the date you can't move forces every other decision and creates urgency you'd never manufacture on your own. Applying for the parade was free and took one form, since the school was already part of it. From there it was simple math: the parade is the finale, so how many clinic days do we need to get a hundred little kids ready to march? She landed on two days of clinic, a short showcase for the parents, and the parade on Saturday morning.
This is where most coaches flinch, and Ashlee didn't. She did her homework and found that comparable clinics around her charged somewhere from $35 to $45, usually for about two hours of instruction. She was offering three hours each day across two days, plus the showcase, plus a parade. So she charged $65, and she told me she wouldn't change a thing. A couple of parents said it was a little steep. She heard them, looked at everything the kids were getting, and held the line.
The part I loved was that she understood price as supply and demand, not as a number to feel guilty about. Price for the experience you're actually delivering, not for what the clinic down the road charges, and remember the price is also a cap. Set it too low and you'll get a thousand kids you can't possibly run in a parade. Set it too high and you'll miss your number. Ashlee wanted 100 kids, because 100 is a crowd you can shepherd down a street and 1,000 is a riot. The $65 did double duty: it valued her team's work fairly, and it kept the clinic at a size one first-year staff could actually manage. She even said if she'd gone lower she'd have been buried. Sometimes the right price is the one that protects your sanity.
A higher price means you have to fill the seats, so the marketing mattered. Ashlee started about a month out, the second week of May. Big posters went up around town. Her parents helped hang them. Then the move that did the most work: flyers, printed and walked into every elementary and middle school that would let her, dropped into backpacks classroom by classroom. Posters at the schools, flyers in the backpacks. Plus social media, Instagram and Facebook, with parents and dancers all sharing the posts.
She also tried giving each of her 18 dancers a personal goal of six signups. That one mostly flopped. Only two of them hit it. The lesson isn't that kids are lazy, it's that the broad community marketing carried the day, not the per-kid quota. For a youth clinic, the flyer in a second-grader's backpack beats almost anything else, because you're going straight to the exact families you want and putting something physical in a parent's hands. When I asked what she'd double down on next year, she didn't say social, she didn't say yard signs. She said make sure I print enough flyers, because she ran a little short this time. Go to where the kids are. The schools are where the kids are.
The clinic itself is a logistics puzzle, and Ashlee solved it by dividing and simplifying. She has 18 dancers, so she split them into six groups of three, each group assigned to an age band. The eight and nine year olds were a huge group, so she split that one further. The little ones, the five and six year olds, got extra dancers to help manage. Each trio prepared a simple routine to teach, plus the parade march, and they practiced marching outside ahead of time so the day wasn't a surprise. She also learned to simplify hard. Little legs and little feet can't do what a varsity routine does, so you teach a kick line and a clean march and you let that be enough.
Then there's the most human lesson in the whole interview. Her single biggest regret was not buying a megaphone sooner. Picture one new coach trying to herd a hundred small children, plus her own team, into parade formation in the summer heat, yelling instructions until her voice gives out. The clinic lives or dies on small operational things: split the kids by age, simplify the routine to what little legs can actually do, and buy the megaphone before parade day, not after. One more she'd enforce harder next time: tell parents not to send their kids with backpacks and water bottles for the parade. They mean well, but the kids never drink from them and just end up lugging the weight the whole route. Hydrate and sunscreen before, popsicles and water at the end. Nothing to carry in between.
Ashlee did one smart thing on her signup form and missed one, and both are worth copying. The smart thing: she added a dropdown asking which D'velle referred you, so she could see which of her dancers actually drove enrollment. The miss: she forgot to ask "how did you hear about us." So when it was over, she had no way to know whether the posters, the backpack flyers, or the social posts brought people in. She's flying blind on her own marketing for one more year. Put a "how did you hear about us" question on the registration form from day one. It costs you nothing and it tells you exactly where to spend your effort next time.
Two more things she learned that I want you to hear, because they'll save you a panic. First, the last-week surge is real. Ashlee started to spiral in the final days, sure she hadn't marketed enough, eyeing yard signs and farmers-market tables. Then a flux of signups came in on their own, the way they almost always do, and she hit 100 without the extra scramble. Those final days tend to be the productive ones, so don't make a frantic decision when you're three days out. Second, the money she left on the table: she didn't think to set up a swag table. Little shorts, bows, flowers for after the showcase, the kind of thing every parent buys without blinking. First rodeo. Next year that's easy extra revenue, and now it's on your list too.
Springville D'velles Junior clinic, at a glance: a Utah high school drill program in its first year under a brand new coaching staff, reviving a lapsed "Junior D'velles" tradition. A two-day mini clinic (three hours each day) plus a parent showcase, finishing with the kids marching in the city parade. Open to boys and girls, ages roughly 5 to 12. Priced at $65 per child, higher than the local going rate of $35 to $45, on purpose. Goal: 100 kids. Result: exactly 100, and over $6,000 raised, in the coach's first few months on the job.
Ashlee ran her clinic enrollment on SuccessFund, which is the only reason I'll say my piece, and yes, I'm the founder, so take this with the necessary grain of salt. The reason it fits a clinic like hers is exactly the stuff she was juggling. You set the clinic up as a signup page, parents register and pay the $65 right there, and your roster builds itself into one live list instead of a spreadsheet you're updating by hand at midnight. That "which D'velle referred you" dropdown is just a custom question on the form, and so is the "how did you hear about us" she wished she'd added. People can pay by Venmo, not only card, which matters when you're asking a parent to sign up from their phone in the school pickup line. And the running count of how many kids have signed up toward your goal of 100 is the live-standings feature doing exactly what it's built for.
I've never had to rebuild a program from nothing, hire a whole staff, and run a fundraiser before my team had a single routine of its own to show, all in my first few months on a job, and I can only imagine what that spring felt like. Ashlee lived it, so I'll take her word over any checklist. And her parting advice was the least fancy thing in the whole conversation: just do it, and figure it out as you go. Put the timeline together. Anchor it to an event you can't move. Lean on the parents to get the flyers out and the dancers to teach. You won't know what to fix until you've run it once, and the only way to run it once is to start. She already made a Junior D'velles banner she plans to use for years, because she knows this is the first run of something, not a one-off.
If you coach or run any youth program, drill, cheer, dance, gymnastics, wrestling, anything where younger kids look up to your athletes, forward this to whoever you'd plan it with. The most valuable idea in here is also the most reassuring: your fundraiser can do more than raise money. Run it right and it fills your pipeline and reintroduces your program to the whole town in one weekend. Go to SuccessFund, set up a clinic signup with your price and your questions, and click around to see how it feels. It's free, there's nothing to commit to, and you'll understand it faster than you would reading another word from me.
And when you hit the real questions, what to charge, how many clinic days you need, how to keep a hundred little kids in a line without losing your voice, ask in the SuccessFund community forum. Odds are another coach has already run the exact clinic you're staring down, megaphone and all, and they'll tell you what actually happened.
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