The Silent Auction Fundraiser a Football Coach Bolted Onto a Barbecue He Already Threw

Nick Wisely runs a silent auction fundraiser the way a busy person should: he didn't add a single thing to his calendar. He's the head football coach at Heritage High School, and as of last week he's also the athletic director, and he coaches shot put and discus, and he teaches freshmen, and he has kids of his own and he coaches in everything they touch. So when he wanted to raise money for his program this spring, the last thing he had room for was a brand-new event. What he did instead is the most quietly smart fundraising move I've heard in a while, and it's the reason I wanted to write this one up. He took the barbecue his team already throws at the end of spring ball, and he set a silent auction down right next to it. Same night, same field, same families. Close to $2,000 raised on an event that had never before made a dime.

I talked with Nick about exactly how it came together, and I'm going to hand it to you the way he handed it to me, because almost nothing about it requires you to be less busy than he is.

The fundraiser you already run, you just don't charge for yet

Here's the part worth saying plainly, because it reframes the whole thing. The easiest silent auction fundraiser is the one you bolt onto an event you already hold. Heritage already gathered everyone after the spring game for a team barbecue, hot dogs and hamburgers, dads on four grills, little siblings running the field. It was a good night and it made zero dollars. Nick didn't invent a gala. He put an auction next to the food, kept everything in the same two hours, and the same crowd that was already standing there raised about two grand. You don't need a new event. You need to fundraise the gathering you already have.

And the money was almost the smaller win. Nick's read on it afterward was that even if they'd spent a little out of pocket, the camaraderie alone was worth it. Families stayed later. Parents who hadn't seen each other since the fall stood around talking. He half-joked that he had to shoo people out at 8:30. An event that used to end the second the food was gone became a reunion that kicked off the season. The auction gave people a reason to stick around, and sticking around is half of what a program is.

Heritage High's spring auction, at a glance: a 2,500-student California high school, football program of 150-plus. The event was the end-of-spring-ball barbecue, held right on the field after the spring game in late May. Idea floated in late February, most of the real work happened in May. A team mom gathered about 15 donated baskets from the community. The team contributed retired gear it couldn't sell anywhere else. Result: close to $2,000 on a night that historically netted nothing, with essentially no cost, because the food was all donated by families.

What you already own is worth more than you think

Before the donated baskets ever showed up, Nick had three things he could auction that no store sells. A retired varsity helmet, the kind you cycle out every year and can't put back on a kid's head. A coach's polo. And a season pass of tickets for a family of four. That's the whole insight: a program is sitting on gear and access that fans actually want and literally cannot buy. The helmet went to a kid whose parents surprised him with it, and he lost his mind, in the good way. Nick's already planning to have next year's team sign a helmet at the start of the season and let it ride as an auction all year long.

Then the baskets. Nick figured maybe four or five would be plenty. His team mom came back with about fifteen, pulled together from families, local businesses, even a youth football academy that put up a package for a young player. She runs a local farm and knows everybody, and she just went and did it. Across the schools we work with, this is the pattern almost every time: the organizer underestimates how much the community will give, and one well-connected volunteer blows the number out of the water. Aim higher than you think you should. The "no" you're scared of is rarer than the "of course, what do you need."

You cannot do this without a team mom, and that's the actual lesson

Ask Nick what made it work and he doesn't say the platform or the helmet. He says his team mom. He'll tell you straight that he can be the coach, the AD, the teacher, and the face of the program, but he cannot also be the event planner and the auction coordinator, and he shouldn't try. So he found the person who could, and then he did the hard part for a lot of coaches: he got out of her way. She'd bring him an idea, he'd say that sounds great, she'd ask if she could run with it, and he'd say go. Take it off my plate.

What I found most useful was how he thinks about that handoff. A lot of coaches won't give up control, and he named the reason out loud: it can feel like losing power. His take is the opposite. The trust is the power. He keeps a pipeline of parents coming up the same way he keeps a pipeline of players, talking to freshman families early about helping down the road, so there's always a "bullpen" ready. And he keeps his assistant coaches almost entirely out of the fundraising, on purpose, so they can stay locked on football. The job of the head coach in a fundraiser isn't to run it. It's to bless it, protect the people running it, and keep everyone else focused on the kids. That's the part the busiest person in the building actually has to do.

The one thing Nick would do differently: start the bidding early

This is the line I'd underline if you take nothing else. Nick ran the auction mostly as a one-night, day-of thing, with a few items online and the baskets on paper bid sheets. Now that he's seen how it works, the change he wants is simple: put the items up online weeks ahead and let people bid the whole time, then close it at the event. Promote the helmet in early May, let the bidding build for a month, and bring it in for a landing during the barbecue.

Two things happen when you do that. First, you stop depending on one night's crowd and one night's energy. The bids accumulate, the number climbs, and people check back. Second, and this is the part Nick lit up about, you open the door to everyone who can't be there. His example was a grandma in Nevada who wants to win her grandson that helmet. Day-of, she's out. A bid that's been live online for a month, she's in, and she might just win it for him. The people who love your kids the most are often the ones who can't make the drive. An auction that only exists for two hours in a stadium quietly locks them out. One that runs for a month online invites them in.

Run it online without the day-of headache

Nick gave one piece of hard-won advice for anyone bidding online at the event: make sure the Wi-Fi actually works. They had a small hiccup, survived it because only three items were online and the rest were on paper, but he flagged it for a reason. And here's the thing, the early-bidding move solves the Wi-Fi problem too. If most of the bidding happens on people's own phones over the month before, you're not depending on stadium signal at 7pm with a line of parents trying to load a page at once. By game night the auction is mostly decided and the room is just the finale.

This is where I'll say my piece, and yes, I'm the founder, so take this with the necessary grain of salt. I built SuccessFund for exactly this. You can put the helmet and the baskets up as an online silent auction that runs for as long as you want and closes when you say. Bidders enter a card when they register and get charged automatically the moment they win, so there's no chasing anyone down for money after the fact. People can pay by Venmo, not just card, which matters when you're asking a parent to give from their phone between bites of a hot dog. You can throw live standings up on a screen so the room watches the numbers climb, which is half the fun of an auction anyway. And the grandma in Nevada can bid from her couch.

If you take one thing from Coach Wisely

I've never coached a team while also being the athletic director, the shot put coach, the teacher, and the dad, all at once. I can only imagine what that calendar looks like. Nick lives it, so I'll take his word over any checklist, and his word is basically this: don't build a new event you don't have time for. Take the gathering you already hold, set an auction next to it, put your program's own gear and a stack of donated baskets up for bid, find the one volunteer who can actually run it and then trust her completely, and start the bidding early so the people who can't show up still get to give. The software is the easy part. Go to SuccessFund, set up an auction, and put one item in it just to see how it feels. It's free, there's nothing to commit to, and you'll understand the whole thing faster than you would reading another word about it.

If you coach, or you're the parent who's about to get asked to be the team mom, forward this to whoever you'd run it with before your next team dinner. The highest-leverage idea in here is the cheapest one: fundraise the event you're already throwing. The sooner the right two people see that, the sooner you've got a plan instead of a to-do.

And when you hit the specific wall, what's worth auctioning, how to price the baskets, how to get parents to bid online without the Wi-Fi falling over, ask it in the SuccessFund community forum. Odds are another coach or team mom already ran into the exact thing you're about to, and they'll tell you what actually happened, not what the brochure says.