2026 ALLIANCE FASTPITCH OPEN NATIONALS

(AFON)

Connect Sports, in partnership with the Alliance Fastpitch, produces the Alliance Fastpitch Open Nationals (AFON): a six-day national championship in Chattanooga, TN for 14U, 16U, and 18U travel softball programs. Unlike The Alliance's qualifier-based championship (AFCS), AFON is open to every Alliance-registered team with no qualifying berth required, pairing elite competition with real college recruiting exposure.

Challenge

In the world of travel softball, there are TONS of events to choose from, especially for an end-of-season championship experience. AFON Chattanooga competes against other tournaments, including the qualifier-based AFCS. The deeper issue was awareness: as a newer event, our intended audience didn't yet understand the value of attending Connect Sports’ event — the athlete-first, holistic championship experience AFON delivers across exceptional facilities in Chattanooga, TN.

While we’ve run paid social ads for Connect previously, we had yet to run segmented campaigns for AFON specifically. Coming off a slower year which saw lower AFON registrations in 2025, we decided to run a dedicated campaign specific to AFON in 2026.

Results

AFON 2026 closed with 268 total team registrations, the highest total in event history, and an 85% increase over 2025's total at 145.

Meta-attributed purchases increased by over 200% YoY, on just a 41% increase in spend. Even though the 2026 campaign was in-market a full month longer, the internal data speaks for itself, while the new campaign structure and dedicated targeting converted at a much higher rate.

HOW WE HELPED

24 Sports Marketing built and managed AFON's first full-funnel paid social campaign, dedicated specifically to the event rather than folded into Connect Sports' broader promotion, and launched it March 2026.

We led:

End-to-end management of the first-ever full-funnel paid social campaign targeting AFON-specific audiences.
- Budget pacing, bid management, and creative testing across the flight.
New segmented Meta audiences built ahead of launch: an AFON website audience (vs. Connect Sports' broader site) and an AFON social engagers audience (vs. Connect Sports' own social accounts).
Coordinated partnership ads with the Alliance Fastpitch, expanding reach into Alliance's audience alongside Connect Sports'.
Year-over-year performance tracking against 2025.

WHY IT WORKED

When we relaunched ads in 2026, we initially followed the same setup and structure, targeting the broader Connect Sports’ audience. Working closely with the team and their internal data, we discovered the purchases coming through our campaign were at a lower value - and pointed to individual event sign ups for other Connect Sports events, like All Star Games, rather than a team registration for AFON (a higher value purchase).

The fix wasn't just tracking, it was targeting: building dedicated AFON website and social engagement audiences, separate from Connect Sports' broader audiences, allowed the new full-funnel campaign to speak directly to people already interested in AFON specifically. We ran dedicated ads for four months ahead of the event and registration continued to grow well ahead of the previous year’s mark.

This one campaign was a perfect example of how important audience targeting truly is. You can have the best event, the greatest messaging or killer creative, but served to the wrong audience you likely won’t see tangible results in a client’s internal data. The better data the ad platform algorithms have to work with, the better the performance.