Create custom trading cards to make your players feel like professional athletes. High school sports are a huge part of students’ lives. Whether they’re playing football, baseball, or basketball, they’re dedicated to their team. Sure, they need uniforms and equipment, but one easy way to make your team players feel like professionals is to print custom trading cards. People can also make trading cards for individual players and gift them to family members and friends.
Whether you’re a dedicated coach or a committed parent, you can easily make custom trading cards to make your team feel appreciated. This gives players, parents, and fans a fun keepsake at the end of an exciting season. And it’s not just for high school sports. Elementary school sports, middle school sports, and college intramural sports can all enjoy custom sports trading cards for their teams.
What is a Trading Card?
Usually made for fans of sports teams, a trading card highlights one athlete and their important details, like their team, accomplishments, and career highlights, alongside a photo. But they can also promote entire teams with a team logo, image, roster details, and statistics. The standard trading card size is 2.5” x 3.5”.
How to Make Custom Trading Cards
Take a Team Photo
Most school teams will take a group photo before the season starts. Get everyone in their uniform, then pose everyone on the field. You can have them hold props, like footballs or lacrosse sticks, that are relevant to your sport. Feel free to include the coaches too, since they’re a crucial part of the team. Now, you don’t have to wait to share your photo in the yearbook. Use this photo of your team for the front of your trading card. A high-quality image will be the focal point of your trading card. Photo cards commemorate your team and serve as a fun keepsake from the season.
Include Important Stats
The design process lets you brag about your talented team. Add your team name, the year, the coach’s name, and any team captains’ names. If you’re waiting to print trading cards until later on in the season, you can include any impressive stats, like how many games you won. If you want, you can also include a short description of the team.
Create a Hierarchy of Information
You don’t want to just upload a photo and list text onto the trading card. Use different fonts, text sizes, and colors to make an engaging trading card layout. Your team name or player name, for example, should be in a large, eye-catching font. Other details should be in smaller fonts. You can bold the details you want to stand out. Use your team colors so your personalized team trading cards match all your other prints.
Deluxe Trading Cards
Make your trading cards look sharp with some special touches. Rounded corners make your customized trading cards look extra-professional and provide smooth edges. Alternatively, you can add Raised Foil or Raised UV sections, like for your team’s name or logo, for a fun 3D design element. Or use GotPrint’s high-end 14 pt. Gloss paper stock for your trading card printing. This cardstock uses full color printing combined with a High Gloss UV Coating to make your colors pop.
Trading Card Examples
You can upload your custom design to create a truly unique collector card. Still need some design inspiration? Browse our free trading card templates to get started.
Customize a football trading card using this free template. Upload a photo of your team to the center of the layout. Then, you can customize the colors on the text boxes and text to match your team’s colors. There’s space on this sports card to add a second image on the back, and you can customize the text.
Create your own baseball card using this customizable template. Choose between the green, blue, gray, and brown color palettes for the decorative dots. Add your team information to the many text areas.
Make custom basketball cards for your whole team with this trading card template. Place your image over a grunge, splattered background. There is a basketball graphic on the back. This basketball card template is available in green, black, brown, and orange color schemes.
Create custom football trading cards using our online card maker. Choose between red, blue, black, brown, and purple accent colors, then customize the card to match your team. There’s a fun football illustration on both sides of the card.
Now that you’re ready to order custom trading cards, you can stock up on other sports essentials. Design team t-shirts to wear on game days and to practice. Print game schedule magnets so families and fans can keep track of the busy schedule. And make sure your field or gym is decked out in team banners.