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"Need a uniform? Need funds to travel to a tournament? How about money for college? Try asking your Twitter followers or Facebook friends. A new fundraising website, SimpleWayToFundraise, launched this week in beta mode. The site was created by former professional baseball player Jason Romano, who says money for sports tournaments was often difficult to come by when he was a youth sports player. \n\"We didn't grow up with much money and you have to travel to tournaments across the country,\" he said. \nThese days, if teens want a shot at making the major leagues or playing college baseball, they have to play travel baseball and complete in pricey tournaments to get noticed by recruiters. \n\"The low-income families can't afford to play travel baseball,\" Romano said. \nHaving car washes and selling door-to-door can be dangerous and time consuming, Romano says. Online fundraising is where the money's at. \nThe online fundraising websites space is a crowded one. There's DonorsChoose, Causes, Crowdrise, Kickstarter and many, many others. \nRomano says what sets his website apart is the fact it is simple to use and has a sports bent. He said he wants it to be the go-to site when parents, kids or teams think about avenues to raise money for sports. Technically, anyone who needs to raise money can use the site, Romano says, but his passion is helping youth sports players.\nSimpleWayToFundraise officially launches next week. \nHere's how it works: Create a page and link it to your PayPal account. Write a little blip about yourself (or your child), why you're fundraising and how much money you'll need. You can add sponsors to the page, too. Then you'll get a custom link you can email out to friends and family, tweet and post on your Facebook Timeline. \nDonations can be made in any amount \u2014 there is no minimum and no maximum \u2014 but the site does feature buttons for donations in the amounts of $25, $50 and $100. Donors can also be anonymous if they'd like. \nTravel sports usually include showcases and tournaments where college recruiters look for top talent. These events cost about $300-$400 each. That's in addition to unforms (about $150), bats and equipment, and paying just to be on a traveling youth sports team (about $800-$1,200). \n\"The typical family, they probably spend about $4,000-$6,000 for one child for one summer\" of travel baseball, according to Romano.\nRomano played for the Dodgers, Rockies, Rays, Reds and Rangers during his 12-year career. With travel baseball being as expensive as it is these day, Romano says if he were a youth now, he wouldn't have been discovered. \n\"I had a chance to play professional baseball and live my dream,\" he said. \nRomano's been collecting research and talking with numerous sports players for the past two years to figure out how to best develop the site. He's funding the project himself. \nCurrently, there are about 100 fundraising pages. Romano says he hopes to reach 5,000 fundraising pages by late summer and eventually wants to have 100,000 pages. Right now, the average donation is around $50, and the average fundraising campaign earns about $1,200-$1,300, he said. \nWhat do you think about SimpleWayToFundraise? Would you use it? Tell us in the comments. \n\u202APhoto courtesy of iStockphoto, skodonnell\u202C"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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