This may involve starting your soccer shopping several weeks before the season begins, but it may save you enough money that you’ll be glad you started early.
Get the team together and measure everyone for their jerseys, or have each team member bring in their measurements from home. Place an order for all the jerseys at once to simplify the parents’ lives and save time, while assuring there won’t be differences in color or style.
Polyester is the fabric of choice for soccer jerseys (in fact, for nearly all sports jerseys) because it is lightweight, stain and shrink resistant, moisture-wicking and easy to care for. Polyester is usually washed in cold water, and since most stains can be removed with cold water and detergent, polyester is an ideal fabric for jerseys that come into contact with the ground, grass, sweat and blood. Pre-soaking can remove most stains, and a quick rub with cold water and bar soap is often enough to prevent a stain from setting long enough to get it into the washer.
Thanks to polyester’s way with water, sweat is easily absorbed and removed from the skin’s surface into the cloth, where it is breathed away (or "wicked"). This capacity for wicking means that jerseys can be hung up where they will quickly dry without shrinking.
If you can train your child to remove the soccer jersey right after the game, rub a little soap and water on the worst stains, and then either bring it to you or put it in the hamper, you’ll be ahead of the stain game come laundry day. ( Ideally, laundry day would take place right after soccer practice or games, so stains don’t have time to set.)Teach your child to turn the jersey inside-out before putting it in the hamper, so you won’t have to hunt through the dirty clothes for it later.
Careful laundering and labeling of soccer jerseys can save you money on uniforms you would otherwise have to replace. Because jerseys have custom details (numbers, logos, names), they will also have laundry instructions telling you how to treat the jerseys to keep the custom parts fresh and attached to the shirt. Dryers are enemies of the jersey: they can shrink the jerseys, detach the applied details and leave jerseys wrinkled. Take the jersey from the washer and hang it up to dry.
