If you coach high school cheer, there is a good chance your athletic director already picked sportsYou for you. It markets itself as the communication platform for high school athletics, it signs student data privacy agreements with districts, and its App Store listing carries a 4.8 rating from more than 34,000 US reviews. So the cost question usually arrives sideways: a coach sees a "Time To Go Pro" badge in the feed and wonders whether the free version is about to run out. It is not. Here is exactly what is free, what the paid upgrades cost, and what a cheer program ends up paying for anyway.
sportsYou pricing at a glance
Swipe sideways to see the full table
| Product | Price | Who pays | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| sportsYou (core) | $0 | Nobody | Unlimited teams and members, posts, chat, team calendar, files, media gallery, polls |
| sportsYou Pro, monthly | $1.99 / month | One account, bought in the app | Scheduled chat messages, four calendar views and a team filter, Pro Search, download all media, print calendar, dark mode, premium support |
| sportsYou Pro, yearly | $19.99 / year | One account, bought in the app | Same as monthly, about 16 percent cheaper over twelve months |
| sportsYou Video | Not published | The school or team, by quote | Film upload, clips, playlists, drawing tools, comments, sharing |
Is sportsYou free?
Yes, and in a more generous way than most team apps. There is no player cap, no team cap and no feature that stops working when the roster passes fifteen, which is where TeamSnap's free plan ends. A head coach can create a varsity squad, a JV squad, a captains group and a parents group, post the game schedule, share the tryout packet as a file and run a poll on bus sign ups without paying anything. sportsYou also says it never sells student data, stores data encrypted in the US and will review a district's student data privacy agreement, which is why ADs adopt it building wide.
If you are weighing it against the other free option coaches use, the TeamSnap vs BAND comparison for cheer teams covers BAND's ad supported free model and TeamSnap's per team pricing in the same format as this page.
How much is sportsYou Pro, and does a cheer coach need it?
sportsYou Pro is $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year on the US App Store. It is a personal subscription, bought through Apple or Google, that follows one account to every device, renews automatically and is cancelled in the app store settings rather than inside sportsYou. It is not a team plan. The athletes and parents on your squad do not need it and will not notice whether you have it, apart from messages that now arrive on a schedule.
According to the sportsYou Help Center, Pro unlocks:
- Scheduled chat messages. Write the 5:30 a.m. game day reminder the night before and let it send itself.
- Extra calendar views. Detail, week and day views plus a filter by team, useful when varsity, JV and competition dates sit on one calendar.
- Pro Search across posts, chats, files and events, grouped by type.
- Download all media from a post in one tap, handy after a competition when forty photos land in the feed.
- Print calendar, dark mode and premium support through in-app chat.
One catch worth knowing before you pay: the Help Center says Pro does not run on iPhones still on iOS 15 or 16, so update first. For a coach who sends the same reminders every week of football season, $19.99 a year for scheduled messages is a fair trade. For a coach who posts twice a week, the free version already does the job.
What sportsYou Video costs
sportsYou Video is the one product that is priced like school software: there is no number on the website, only a request for a demo. sportsYou positions it as an affordable alternative to Hudl for uploading film, cutting clips, building playlists and drawing on video, with no multiyear contract. Cheer coaches rarely buy film software for themselves, but if your athletic department is shopping for football, ask whether the spirit program can be included, because routine video reviewed frame by frame is how stunt groups fix a bobble before the judges see it.
What a cheer program actually pays, all in
The free price is real, and it is also the first line of a longer bill. sportsYou handles talking to the team. It does not score tryouts, track which athlete has which skill at which level, place athletes onto squads, check a stunt sequence against the NFHS cheerleading rules, or collect money. A school program that needs those things pays for them somewhere, usually in coach hours and spreadsheets.
Swipe sideways to see the full table
| What a cheer coach needs | sportsYou | Cheer specific software |
|---|---|---|
| Team announcements and chat | Free, unlimited teams | Keep sportsYou for it |
| Scheduled reminders | Pro, $19.99 a year per coach | Keep sportsYou for it |
| Tryout score sheets and ranked results | No | Program plan |
| Skill tracking per athlete and level | No | Program plan |
| Roster with birth year, uniform size, parent contacts | Member list only | Every plan |
| Practice planner and season calendar | Calendar only | Every plan |
| Fee collection | Not in the feature list | Handled through your school or booster account |
| Price for one squad | $0 to $19.99 a year | Team plan $29 a month, $288 a year |
| Price for a multi team program | $0 plus Pro for each coach who wants it | Program plan $79 a month for up to 5 teams and 3 coach seats |
Read that table honestly and sportsYou wins the price column for a program that only needs to communicate. Where it stops winning is the week of tryouts. Three judges on paper, scores typed into a spreadsheet at 9 p.m., a results list posted to the feed, and the next morning a parent asking why her daughter missed by a point. None of that is a messaging problem. It is the work a digital cheer tryout setup exists to do, and it is the reason school coaches pay for a second tool even when the first one is free.
Keep sportsYou, add the cheer tool, or switch?
Most school programs should not fight their district. If sportsYou is the building standard, parents already have it, the AD can see every team from one dashboard and the privacy paperwork is done. Keep it for announcements. What changes is where the cheer work lives:
- Sideline squad, one coach, no tryouts to speak of: sportsYou free, and Pro only if you want scheduled reminders.
- School program with tryouts, JV and varsity, and a competition team: keep sportsYou for messages and run tryouts, skills and placements in cheer software. That is our Program plan at $79 a month.
- Rec or youth program that places athletes by skill: use sportsYou or BAND for messages, and our Team plan at $29 a month for the roster, practice planner and season calendar of one squad, or Program at $79 once tryouts and levels come in.
- All star gym: sportsYou is built for school athletics, and a gym with tuition, several teams and USASF paperwork needs a roster that understands levels and birth years.
One more practical point for coaches who run a gym or a private program on the side. The reason sportsYou sells itself on keeping personal numbers private is that coaches texting minors from a personal cell is a real problem. If your families still expect a phone call rather than an app notification, a second business phone number on the same handset keeps the program line separate from your own, and it goes with the program if you ever hand it over.
If you are comparing more than two apps, the roundup of apps for cheer coaches puts sportsYou's category next to the cheer specific ones, and the cheerleading team app for school programs page shows what tryouts, skills and practice plans look like on one athlete record.
sportsYou cost: questions coaches ask
Is sportsYou free?
Yes. The core sportsYou app is free for coaches, athletes and parents, with unlimited teams and unlimited members per team. Posts, chat, the team calendar, files and the media gallery are all in the free version. The only paid parts are sportsYou Pro, an optional personal upgrade sold in the app, and sportsYou Video, a film package sold through a demo.
How much does sportsYou Pro cost?
sportsYou Pro costs $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year on the US App Store as of September 2026, bought as an in-app subscription through Apple or Google and renewed automatically. It unlocks scheduled chat messages, extra calendar views and a team filter, Pro Search, one tap media downloads, calendar printing, dark mode and premium support. It needs iOS 17 or later on iPhone.
Do parents have to pay for sportsYou?
No. Parents and athletes join a team for free with the team code, and nothing in the free app is gated behind the Pro upgrade for them. Pro is a personal subscription that follows one account, so the coach who wants scheduled messages pays for it and nobody else on the team has to. A parent can buy Pro for themselves, but there is no reason to.
How much does sportsYou Video cost?
sportsYou does not publish a price for sportsYou Video. It is sold as a package through a demo request on sportsyou.com, and is pitched as a lower cost alternative to Hudl for uploading, clipping and annotating game and practice film without a multiyear contract. Ask for a quote per school or per team, and compare it against the video tools your athletic department already pays for.
Can you collect cheer fees on sportsYou?
Not as a built in feature. The sportsYou App Store listing and the Pro feature list describe messaging, calendars, files, media and search, and neither mentions payments or registration. A coach can post a fee reminder and a link, but the money itself moves through a school payment portal, a booster club account or another tool, and someone still reconciles who paid.
What is the best sportsYou alternative for a cheer team?
It depends on what the squad actually needs beyond messaging. If sportsYou is the district standard, keep it for announcements. If the program runs tryouts, tracks skills by level or places athletes onto several teams, a cheer specific tool does that work and messaging comes with it. Our Team plan is $29 a month and the Program plan with tryouts and skill tracking is $79.