Midwest Speed was not a struggling program. Registration was growing. Families were engaged. The coaching staff was strong. But underneath all of that, the platform they were running on was quietly costing them in money, in time, and in frustration they had mostly learned to live with.
The fees were the most visible problem. Their previous platform charged processing rates that ate into every transaction. At their volume, that meant tens of thousands of dollars leaving the program every year that had nothing to do with baseball.
We knew we were paying a lot in fees. We just did not know how much until we actually did the math. It was the kind of number that makes you feel a little sick.
But the fees were only part of it. The platform was rigid in ways that made the day-to-day harder than it needed to be. Payment options were limited. Families either paid in full or they did not,, which meant the program was running informal side arrangements to work around a system that could not keep up with how real families actually pay for youth sports.
And then there was the annual fee collection. Every year, staff were coordinating in-person check collection events. People were driving to a facility to hand over a check, staff were processing and depositing manually, and the whole operation was eating hours that nobody had to spare.
- Processing fees draining the program every transaction
- No flexible payment plan options for families
- In-person check collection events every season
- Support tickets going unresolved for weeks
- Registration taking weeks to set up and run
- Parents emailing staff for information the app should show them
- 2% processing rate. Roughly half what they were paying.
- Flexible payment plans set up in minutes
- All payments processed online, no check events
- Support from former coaches and ADs, within the hour
- Registration cut by 50%. Days instead of weeks.
- 30% fewer inbound parent messages to staff
The support situation may have been the breaking point. When things went wrong on the platform, and they did regularly. The response was a ticket queue. Days would pass. Problems would persist. The team at Midwest Speed was spending time they did not have managing around a tool that was supposed to make their operation easier.
The decision to switch was not impulsive. Mike had been through a platform migration before and knew the risks. The last thing a program mid-season needs is a broken registration system or families who cannot access their accounts. He was skeptical about the timeline and about how much his team would have to take on to get everything moved over.
I had done a platform switch before. It was miserable. We lost two weeks of productivity and I spent more time on hold with support than I did coaching. I was not in a hurry to go through that again.
What made the difference was how MemberTraxx approached the onboarding. MemberTraxx did not hand over a login and a help center link. The team assigned a dedicated onboarding specialist who already understood what a youth baseball program actually looks like. Products, payment structures, staff permissions, member data. Everything was configured before Midwest Speed went live, not after.
The data migration took the pressure off the staff entirely. Member records, payment history, registration data. All of it came over without Midwest Speed having to rebuild from scratch. The team that had been dreading the switch found themselves live and running before they expected to be.
We went live faster than I thought possible. Our onboarding specialist had clearly done this before. She knew what questions to ask and what we were going to need before we even knew to ask for it.
The fee savings were immediate and visible. At 2%, Midwest Speed was paying roughly half what their previous platform charged per transaction. Across a full year of processing, that difference compounded into $30,000. That is money that stayed in the program instead of going to a software company.
Registration was the second major shift. The previous platform required weeks of setup, coordination, and manual follow-up to run a registration cycle. On MemberTraxx, the same process took half the time. Payment plans could be configured in minutes, families completed registration online without staff intervention, and the admin team had real-time visibility into who had paid, who had not, and who needed a follow-up.
For the coaching staff, the most noticeable change was the reduction in parent messages. When families can see their schedule, their account balance, their kid’s session credits, and any program updates in one place, the volume of questions that come back to staff drops. At Midwest Speed, that drop was about 30%.
Parents used to message us constantly because the old app did not give them what they needed. Now they can see everything themselves. It has changed how much time we spend on admin versus actually coaching.
Credit Wallet became one of the more unexpected wins. The structure, where families purchase credit blocks upfront and draw them down across sessions, shifted the program’s cash flow in a meaningful way. Revenue was coming in before sessions happened rather than after, and the low-balance alerts were driving reloads automatically without any staff involvement.