How to Choose the Perfect WordPress Sports Theme
The SportsPress plugin has everything you need to create a burly, professional sports website packed with engaging stats, profiles, auto-calculated scores and more. But, what about themes?
When you start out with a solid WordPress theme that is compatible with the plugins you want to use, like SportsPress, building a sports website becomes practically effortless.
In this post, I’ll share the top SportsPress-compatible WordPress themes with comparisons so you can select the best one for your sports site.
What to Look for in Your WordPress Sports Theme
Setting up or refurbishing your sports site is an exciting endeavor. But, since there are so many sports themes to choose from, it can quickly become a daunting chore.
You can help make the task more manageable by being clear on exactly what you need with your WordPress site ahead of time. That way, you can figure out if what you want will be provided by a theme or with plugins.
Here are a few questions to consider when selecting your Sports theme:
- What’s more valuable for your team or organization’s web presence: stats or news?
- Do you take a lot of audio or video recordings of games?
- Are you dealing with more than one sport?
- Do you have a web professional to maintain the site or does it need to be easy enough to DIY?
- How much time are you able to devote to site management?
Many themes have similar components and features so distinguishing them can be tricky.
Make a list of everything you want your sports website to have before you choose a WordPress theme and shopping around will be much easier.
On that note, below you can find the best WordPress SportsPress-ready themes to help make choosing the perfect sports theme less overwhelming.
Top Sports WordPress Themes
All the themes below are compatible with SportsPress, regularly updated and well-coded with eye-catching designs. They also include an option for adding demo content to help you hone your design.
Later on, these themes will be compared, but for now, take a look at what these themes have to offer.
Rookie
Rookie is a starter theme for sports clubs, teams and leagues on a budget. Based on the same framework as other premium themes, Rookie has clean, crisp lines for a sleek and professional look. The best part is it’s free!
Rookie Plus
Rookie Plus takes the free Rookie theme and kicks it up several notches by adding key premium features in a clean and crisp design. It’s a great option if you love Rookie but want to take things to the next level with header images, multi-column grid layouts and animated sliders.
Courtside
Courtside’s bold, fresh and striking visuals really let the content shine with angled widget tops catching users’ eyes. The design was inspired by the energy and action on a basketball court, but it’s incredibly versatile and can be used for any sports-themed WordPress site.
Emblem
Emblem is a classic theme as it embodies the feel of a traditional sporting club or league website while incorporating modern design trends. This theme was also originally conceived for a cricket team, but it supports most team sports with a scoring system.
Football Club
Take a look at the Football Club demo and you’ll recognize the layout and format is of a professional football club site with pops of colour for a modern and eye-catching look. Sometimes, you just can’t mess with the greats.
Marquee
The Marquee theme was released in tandem with the free SportsPress for Baseball plugin and was designed with baseball teams in mind.
The theme has sharp pops of colour for a compelling and contemporary design. Its layout is well spaced out providing breathing room for the stats and scores that matter.
Premier
Premier has an exciting, flat aesthetic that’s quite popular with many modern-looking apps and websites. That’s not all, either, since it serves up its premium features inside a totally unique, bold and colourful shell with no distracting textures or gradients.
It’s also an excellent choice for any sports team, club or league that wants to be proudly, and energetically seen and heard.
The Alchemists
The Alchemists is a self-described “super complete sports theme” and one-page SportsPress theme with sharp scrolling to visually distinguish sections of the page. It also features a two-column layout with a full-page image on the left and content on the right.
Splash
Splash has several traditionally styled layout options for different sports that all feature large image areas for greater impact. Each option prominently displays images over stats, but both are laid out in a visually compelling way.
Champion
Champion has full-page slider to greet visitors with daring animated transitions. Its layout is rather traditional, but its design puts it over the edge into a more contemporary footing with a bold display of stats.
It’s also a SportsPress theme that’s WPML translation-ready, making it an excellent choice for international leagues that promote in multiple languages.
Big Slam
Big Slam features a conventional layout with a forward design that prominently layers full-width images in each section without padding in between.
It also comes with a Europe Union-friendly, built-in GDPR tool that lets visitors give consent to cookies on your site.
The League
The League takes a commonplace blog layout and design and injects it with plenty of locations to place sponsor ads including a wallpaper ad. It’s a fantastic theme for a sports news site or blog since it also contains eight article layouts, four featured post layouts and unlimited ad units.
Breaking It Down Comparison-Style
With so many amazing SportsPress themes to choose from, parsing through all your options can be frustrating and stressful. To make things quick and easy for you, we made an overview chart of each theme’s specialties in two parts.
SportsPress Themes at a Glance
Below are the quick and dirty details of each SportsPress theme listed above including prices, money-back guarantees and the sports that are best suited for each theme.
| Theme | Price | Money Back Guarantee | Specialized for Which Sports? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rookie | Free | — |
|
| Rookie Plus | $59 | Yes |
|
| Courtside | $59 | Yes |
|
| Marquee | $59 | Yes |
|
| Premier | $59 | Yes |
|
| Emblem | $59 | Yes |
|
| Football Club | $59 | Yes |
|
| The Alchemists | $59 | No |
|
| Splash | $59 | No |
|
| Champion | $59 | No |
|
| Big Slam | $59 | No |
|
| The League | $54 | No |
|
Best Features Compared
The top features for each listed theme is compared below with details about the plugins that are included as well as page builders and WooCommerce-compatibility.
| Theme | Included Plugins | WooCommerce Compatibility | Drag-and-Drop Page Builder |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rookie |
|
With Extension | No |
| Rookie Plus |
|
With Extension | No |
| Courtside |
|
With Extension | No |
| Marquee |
|
With Extension | No |
| Premier |
|
With Extension | No |
| Emblem |
|
With Extension | No |
| Football Club |
|
With Extension | No |
| The Alchemists |
|
Yes | Yes |
| Splash |
|
Yes | Yes |
| Champion |
|
Yes | Yes |
| Big Slam |
|
Yes | Yes |
| The League | None | Yes | Yes |
Still Can’t Decide? Let Us Help
Listed below are our honest recommendations. But, don’t just take our word for it. Test out the demos, see which one feels right for your needs and go with the one that’s the best fit.
- If you have no or few sponsors and you’re strapped for cash – Rookie
- Are you looking for a standard all-purpose theme? – Rookie Plus or Premier
- If you’re looking for an easy to use drag-and-drop builder – Alchemists, Splash, Champion, Big Slam or The League
- If you’re looking for a sports news or blog site – The League
- When you’re highly focused on the SportsPress plugin and utilizing it to its fullest capacity – Rookie, Rookie Plus, Courtside, Marquee, Premier, Emblem or Football Club
Styling Your New Theme and Adding Content
Once you have chosen the SportsPress theme you want, and you’re ready to start adding your content and design flair, you have unlimited options.
Here are several resources to get you started:
- How to Add Demo Content to a Fresh Installation of SportsPress
- 9 Ways to Improve Your Sports Team Website Design
- How to Integrate SportsPress into Any WordPress Theme
- How to Start Building a Free Sports Club Website with WordPress
- Making a Slam-Dunk Tournament WordPress Site with SportsPress Pro
- How to Create a Sports WordPress Website for Any Sport
- How to Create a Gaming Tournament Site with WordPress
- Displaying Striking Future Tournament Matches on Your Sports Site
Bring It Home
Trying to decide what SportsPress theme to use for your website can be tricky. So, using the tips in this post to breakdown your needs should make it easier.
You can’t go wrong with any of the sports-centric themes listed here, but by being strategic and thoughtful about the theme you pick, you can come as close as possible to perfection.
Have you used a SportsPress-compatible theme before? Which theme looks the most appealing to you and why? What features would you like to see in more of these themes? Let us know over at Twitter or Facebook.
Photo by Álvaro Mendoza on Unsplash.
