The hardest part of a team order is not the template and it is not the colour. It is the count. A basketball squad of twelve people needs a different number of jerseys than a college programme of fifteen, and both need more than the number of names on the sheet — because the people on the bench outnumber the people who start, because the season runs longer than the size chart, and because a listing on a shop page very often carries one size rather than the full range of sizes, so the size ladders a squad actually needs have to be checked one listing at a time. Work the count down from the roster rules, through the playing time, down to what the shop actually stocks, and the number arrives on its own.
Start at the roster, not at the shopping cart
Most sizing mistakes are not sizing mistakes at all. They are count mistakes that arrive wearing a size, and they come from skipping the step that sits above the size chart. A team order is really four questions stacked on top of each other, and each one narrows the answer before the next one is asked.
- 1How many people does the rulebook allow on this roster? That is the ceiling, and it is set by a league, not by a coach.
- 2How many of them actually put on a jersey on a game night? A club carries more players than it dresses, and that gap is where the spares come from.
- 3Which sizes does the listing you want actually carry? A page with one size is a page with one size, and a squad needs a ladder.
- 4How many garments should go on the order? That is the only number you can hand to a shop, and it is the sum of the three above.
Each layer narrows the one below it, and each one is checkable before money moves. Skipping straight to the last layer is what produces the classic team-order failure: a dozen jerseys, all the same size, all with the same number on the back, arriving three weeks after the first game.
What each level actually puts on a roster
The ceiling differs enormously by level, and the difference is set in documents rather than in practice. A professional club works to a contractual limit; a college programme works to a bylaw; an international squad works to a tournament registration; a high school works to whatever its state association decides.
Two details in that table carry most of the practical weight. The first is that a professional club is allowed to attach players on a two-way arrangement on top of its standard contracts, which is why the ceiling can reach eighteen rather than stopping at fifteen; a two-way player may be active for as many as fifty regular-season games, which is exactly why the arrangement exists. The second is that the high school figure is not a rulebook number at all. There is no national cap, and a state association can set a different figure from its neighbour.
For a school squad, the practical consequence is that the number you order is set by the number of children who will actually be on the roster, not by a published limit. For a college programme, the roster limit changed shape recently: the old system capped how many scholarships a programme could hand out, and the new system caps how many athletes it may list, with the funding decisions left to each school. Either way, the ceiling that matters for a uniform order is the one on the roster sheet.
The number that decides how deep the bench goes
A roster size is an abstract number. Playing time is what turns it into a number of jerseys. A high school game is four eight-minute quarters, which is thirty-two minutes of clock, and with five players on the floor for the whole of it that is 160 player-minutes to share. Spread across twelve players it works out at roughly thirteen minutes each; spread across fifteen it is closer to eleven. Nobody plays a full game, and the rotation is what decides how many bodies a squad needs to keep healthy.
This is the step most order forms skip, and skipping it is what produces the order that is technically correct and practically useless. A twelve-player roster with four minutes of bench time is a starting five plus a rotation of seven. Order for the five and the squad plays the second half in its good shirts.
What the size ladders on our listings actually look like
The last step is the one that turns a planning exercise into an order, and it depends on what the shop is actually able to supply. We scanned all 4,969 listings in our store, of which 4,926 carry the word jersey in the title, and then opened 253 of them individually to read the real size options rather than the one a page summary shows.
That table is the reason a quantity on its own is not an order. If most listings publish one size, then a squad that needs a small and a large is not buying one item twice — it is buying two different listings, and the two have to be found, checked and combined before anything is stitched. It is also why we measured it rather than assuming it. The number of sizes a shop lists is not something anyone publishes, and a page that shows a size dropdown is not proof that the whole ladder is stocked.
The rest of the catalogue tells the same story from a different angle. Of the 4,926 jersey listings, 3,952 carry an edition name, and the icon edition is by far the most common at 1,889 listings, followed by the statement, association and city editions. Youth listings account for 1,035 and adult listings for 3,401. Name-and-number listings, the ones a team order is actually built from, account for 953.
Read that as a shopping signal rather than a market share. The editions that dominate the range are the ones that are easiest to keep in stock across a whole ladder, which is exactly what a team order needs. A design that exists in a single size per colourway is useless to a coach with twelve players, no matter how good it looks on a single model.
One list, one deadline, every body on it
Everything above reduces to a single artefact: a written list with one row per person. The format matters less than the fact that it exists and that it is sent once. A list that arrives as a chain of messages with the third player's size in a reply to the fourth is a list that will be misread.
Four columns do the real work. The name has to be spelled the way it will be stitched, because a spelling that changes after production starts is a second jersey rather than a correction. The number has to be unique within the squad, which is a rule rather than a preference at most levels and a practical necessity everywhere else. The size has to come from a measurement of the person rather than from their age, and it is the one field most likely to be wrong when it is guessed. The note column carries the judgement that no form has a box for: worn over a sweatshirt, growing fast this year, or needing to fit a protector underneath.
- 1Write it once and send it once. One message, one table, one date attached to it.
- 2Put the deadline on the sheet, not in a separate conversation. The date the shirts are needed on the bench is the date everything else is measured backwards from.
- 3Leave room for two spares, one size up. They cover a growth spurt, a body that sits differently on game day, and the substitute who was not on the sheet yet.
- 4Say who is on the order. Coaches, helpers and anyone who wants a shirt in the same colourway belong on the list, not added on later.
- 5Confirm the size ladder before the order is placed. If a listing carries one size, decide early whether to buy across two listings or to change the design.
What cannot change once the work has started is narrow and worth naming plainly. The name, the digits, the size and the template are fixed the moment stitching begins. What can always change is a fault in the garment itself, which is remade rather than refunded, and that is a completely different thing from changing your mind. That distinction is the reason the written confirmation step exists at all.
The mistakes that cost a squad a re-order
- 1Counting only the starters. Five on the floor, everyone else on the bench, and a rotation that runs deeper than the order did.
- 2Ordering one size and hoping. Sizes are not interchangeable, and a squad that is one shirt short in one size and one shirt long in another has to reorder the whole thing to fix it.
- 3Letting the number be decided twice. A number that changes after the first jersey is stitched means a second garment for that player and a mismatch for the rest of the squad.
- 4Ordering a design that only exists in one size. It looks right on the page and it cannot be bought in a ladder, which turns a twelve-piece order into a sourcing problem.
- 5Leaving the deadline out of the sheet. Production windows, inspection and the run up to a first game all stack up, and only one of them is visible from the order date.
None of these are expensive problems when they are caught on the sheet. All of them become expensive when the finished set is sitting in a box on the night of the first game.
Build the list first
Send us the roster as one written list with a name, a number and a size for every person, and we will confirm what is available in that size ladder before anything is placed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Five questions that come up every time a squad puts in a team order.
Q1How many jerseys does a basketball team need to order?
For a recreational or school squad, order one jersey per person on the roster plus two spares, so a twelve-player team needs fourteen. Professional and college programs run larger numbers, and a professional club can attach up to eighteen players to one team under the standard and two-way contracts.
Q2Should a team order extra jerseys in a larger size?
Yes, and it is the cheapest insurance in the whole order. A spare one size up covers a growth spurt and a body that sits differently under a sweatshirt. Two spares in a larger size will cover almost every substitution a squad actually needs to make during a season.
Q3How far ahead should a team order personalised jerseys?
Personalisation adds stitching and inspection time on top of the base production window, so the order has to be placed earlier than a shelf-ready jersey would need. The date the squad needs the shirts on the bench is the date to work backwards from, not the date the season starts.
Q4Can every size in the ladder be ordered in the same jersey?
Not always. In our own catalogue most listings publish a single size rather than a full ladder, and the complete adult run from small to five extra large appears on only a small share of them. That is why a team order needs a size list attached to it, rather than a quantity on its own.
Q5What should a team put in writing before ordering?
One list, one deadline, every name and number spelled out, plus the size for each person and any note about how it is worn. A name that changes after stitching has started cannot be changed, so the list is the point where everything is still adjustable.