Custom WordPress League Manager with Stripe Payments: FL Tri-County Challenged Athletes Association

FL Tri-County Challenged Athletes Association is a 501(c)(3) that gives special-needs athletes in Lee, Collier, and Charlotte counties a place to play baseball and bowl. Every athlete plays. Families, group homes, and coaches needed a site that could actually run a season — not a brochure that sent people to a PDF. Digital Fire Creative replaced their GoDaddy Website Builder site with a custom WordPress theme and a custom league manager plugin, including Stripe for registration fees and donations.

The Challenge

The old site could tell the story. It could not run the league. Registration was a downloadable flyer. The schedule was a PDF. Donations were check-by-mail only. Off-the-shelf sports plugins assume one parent, one player, a credit card, and a public roster. This league needed guardian and group-home registration, multiple athletes paid in one checkout, check payments for families who do not use cards, encrypted accommodation notes, and rosters that never appear in public. Accessibility was not a polish pass. It was a product requirement.

What We Built

A Custom League Manager Plugin Inside WordPress

We built TCA League Manager as a first-party WordPress plugin, not a third-party SaaS bolted onto a form. League admins create sports and seasons, set fees, assign teams, and export rosters from wp-admin. Families and group homes register athletes on the public site. Coaches and families get a passwordless Team Portal scoped to their own team. Medical and accommodation notes are encrypted at rest. Athlete names never appear on public schedule pages.

Stripe Payments for Registration and Donations

Registration is $25 per athlete, with a cart so a household or group home can add several athletes and pay once. Stripe handles card payments on the site. Check payments stay available for families who need them. A separate donate flow accepts online gifts with 501(c)(3) tax language, plus the existing mail-a-check option. Receipts and webhook confirmation live in the same plugin that stores the roster — not in a disconnected payment form.

Public Schedules and an Accessible Custom Theme

Game dates, matchups, fields, and special events publish as live HTML — replacing the old schedule PDF — with a downloadable PDF for families who still want one. The public site is a custom block theme built from the league logo: forest green, cream, and tan, with Atkinson Hyperlegible type and WCAG AA as the baseline. Programs, sponsors, in-person signup banners, and the Register Online path sit on the same WordPress install as the plugin. One site. One admin. No extra league software subscription.

The Result

tricountyathletes.com is live. Families register athletes and pay on the site. Donors can give online. The 2027 baseball schedule is a public page instead of a flyer. League admins run seasons, teams, and payments from WordPress. Digital Fire Creative is listed among the sponsors who made the season possible.

Built Into WordPress, Not Bolted On

League software as a service, a form plugin, and a separate Stripe checkout would have left this organization with three systems and a spreadsheet in the middle. The plugin is the product: registration, payments, schedules, donations, and the team portal share one data model inside WordPress. That is the same approach we take on complex custom builds — the website is not a skin on someone else's tool. It is the tool.