How Much Should You Charge for an Athlete Testing Day?

Most facilities running testing days pick one of two pricing models: a flat fee per team, or a fee per individual athlete. Both work. The right one depends on who is booking - a coach paying for a whole roster, or parents signing their kid up one at a time. Picking the wrong model for your audience is the most common pricing mistake we see: a flat team fee quoted to an individual parent looks expensive for one athlete, and a per-athlete price quoted to a coach with a 20-player roster looks needlessly complicated next to a single invoice.

Per-team pricing is simple to sell to a coach or club: one invoice, one line item, no chasing twenty individual payments. In our experience running testing days, a flat per-team rate works best when it is set once, priced to cover a full roster comfortably, and then held steady regardless of roster size within a normal range - a coach values the certainty of one number over a formula that shifts with headcount. Per-athlete pricing tends to work better for open, public testing days where anyone can sign up - a parent scrolling social media comparing your event to a combine company's flyer is thinking in per-athlete dollars, not team invoices.

Combine and testing vendors that operate across North America publish, or will quietly confirm, pricing that gives you a useful benchmark. Athlon Combine, which runs school and club combines, lists its standard packages at $30 per participant for a 7-test package and $40 per participant for a 10-test package. TeamGenius runs a more instrumented event - force plates, Wingate testing, a physiologist review - and prices its High Performance Combine at $199 per athlete.

That is roughly a $30 to $199 per-athlete range depending on how instrumented the testing is (check the currency and current package inclusions on each vendor's own site before quoting a parent - packages change). A facility running basic field tests - jump, sprint, agility - with equipment it already owns sits closer to the Athlon end. Add force plates or a written performance report and you can justify pricing closer to the TeamGenius end. For how L4 bundles testing into the rest of the platform instead of pricing it as a standalone product, see our comparison of TeamBuildr, TrainHeroic, and L4.

You do not have to pick one price point. Most facilities are better served by two tiers: a basic field-test package priced near the Athlon end for teams and budget-conscious families, and a premium package - the same protocols, plus a printed or digital report, ranked player card, and a short consult on what to train next - priced closer to the TeamGenius end.

The premium tier is where a testing day starts to look less like a one-off event and more like a sales funnel. A parent who pays extra for the report and the ranking has already told you they are willing to pay for ongoing visibility into their kid's progress, which is exactly what a parent-paid subscription sells month to month. See the revenue stream most gyms are missing for how that follow-on works.

A flat team rate makes discounting easy to reason about. A club bringing five teams through in one day is worth more to your calendar than five separate bookings spread across a month, so a modest per-team discount for a multi-team block is a fair trade for the scheduling efficiency, not a giveaway. The same logic applies to a club that books the same testing day every off-season - a repeat-customer rate rewards the relationship without undercutting what a new team pays for their first visit.

Resist the urge to discount the public, per-athlete price the same way. A parent signing up individually is not bringing you a full roster in one booking, and dropping your per-athlete price to match a bulk team rate just trains that audience to wait for a sale instead of paying the standing price.

The equipment cost for a basic testing day is close to zero if you already run a training facility. A jump mat, a tape measure, cones, and a stopwatch cover four of five common stations, and most gyms already own all of it. The real cost is staff time: in our experience, a single-team testing day takes at least two coaches for a couple of hours, including setup and teardown.

Facility overhead - the floor, the lighting, the parking lot - is already sunk into your monthly rent whether or not you run a testing day at all. That is what makes testing days a high-margin event compared to a full training block: you are largely paying for staff hours, not new equipment or new square footage.

Work backward from your cost, then check it against what parents are used to paying elsewhere. Take the Athlon Pro benchmark of $30 per athlete: for a 17-athlete roster, that works out to $510 total, a clean number to round into a flat per-team rate when you quote a coach. Weigh that total against your own staff-time cost for the day - budget a couple of hours and at least two coaches for a single team - to make sure the margin actually works before you commit to a price.

For a public, open-enrollment event, run the same math from the other direction: price per athlete first, then multiply by expected signups to see whether the total clears your staff-time cost for the day. A $40-$60 per-athlete price sits comfortably between the Athlon and TeamGenius benchmarks while still reading as reasonable to a parent who has seen combine pricing online. Public, open-enrollment testing days can charge closer to individual-vendor pricing, since you are competing directly with combine companies for a parent's attention rather than with a coach's team budget. See how to run a youth athlete testing day for the operational side of delivering an event worth that price.

Before you commit to a price, run one number: total revenue for the day divided by total staff hours, compared to what you would otherwise bill for that same floor time. If a testing day for a 20-athlete team priced at the Athlon Pro rate of $30 per athlete (about $600 total) takes three staff two hours each, that is six staff-hours generating $600, or $100 an hour of staff time against a room you were not otherwise booking. Compare that figure to your normal hourly training rate - if a testing day clears less than a regular session block once you account for staff time, either your price is too low or your staffing ratio is too heavy for the format.

A testing day that ends with a spreadsheet is a one-time fee. A testing day that ends with a parent looking at their kid's ranked player card on their phone is the start of a subscription. See the revenue stream most gyms are missing for how testing-day data becomes a $9.99-a-month subscription instead of a single invoice. For the full pricing and software picture, our testing day guide covers both ends of the operation.