For a limited time if you use any link on this page you can get 20% off your socks when you also order a set of jerseys!
My love for hockey jerseys and my experience with the tedious process of ordering beer league hockey jerseys has led to me working with JerseysMadeEasy.com to create this guide to help understand the different options when you are trying to outfit your team. All the prices listed below are in Canadian funds (hello friendly exchange rate for the Americans!) and are correct as of the publishing date.
While I suggest watching the video above, below I will go over the different jersey fabrics and types and explain what I like about them and what might work best for you.
Setting your budget
Everyone wants their team to look like their favourite hockey team with triple stacked twill numbers and fully embroidered crests… but the honest truth is most beer league players are CHEAP when it comes to coughing up money for actually purchasing the kits. Players always want to look good but most end up wanting to spend their money on beer or sticks rather than jerseys.
Finding a realistic and affordable budget is the first step in the process so you can set reasonable expectations of what to expect and to ensure you don’t keep adding those costly extras. Don’t forget to include socks if you want the full matching experience!
Selecting the jersey type
With JerseysMadeEasy.com there are 3 different classes of jersey to choose from, each fulfill different price points and have different goals in mind.
Basic “mid weight” jerseys
JerseysMadeEasy has two different Kobe models that fall under the Budget or “midweight” category, which are the Kobe 5200 & Kobe XJ5 series (click the link to see the colour options!). Both the Kobe 5200 & Kobe KJ5 series come in at a beer-kitty friendly $23
The basic jersey is made of a lighter fabric and feels similar to a practice style of jersey. This is the budget option that is designed to keep costs low while still giving your team a matching look. Colour & design options here are more limited and the style is consistent between the different jersey models. You won’t find pro or complicated patterns here, but if you team’s colours match up it is an economical way into creating your on ice identity. These jerseys help any team get kitted out even with a smaller budget.
Even with the budget jerseys you can get some awesome and unique designs like the Trash Pandas below.
Limitless sublimated custom hockey jerseys
My favourite style of beer league jersey falls right in the middle in terms of cost, and that is the sublimated jersey. If you don’t know what dye-sublimation printing is, I will take a quick definition from Wikipedia to explain it. “Dye-sublimation printing is a computer printing technique which uses heat to transfer dye onto materials such as a plastic, card, paper, or fabric… The end result of the sublimation process is a nearly permanent, high resolution, full color print… the prints will not crack, fade or peel from the substrate under normal conditions.”
In other words, you can get a lot of details onto the fabric and it should last forever and overall is very durable.
There are 3 different types of sublimated jerseys that JerseysMadeEasy offers: $55 hybrid sublimated, $75 fully sublimated, and $110 reversible.
Fully Sublimated jerseys are used on all of my beer league teams, and if you have seen the designs they range from very complicated (Tigers) to pretty boring (Bulldogs) but offer a wide array of options. Do you have multiple sponsors you need to put on the jersey? No up charge or cost increase with sublimation. Sublimation allows you to add names, shoulder “patches”, captain’s “patches”, arm numbers, and anything else you can thing of onto the jersey without raising the cost from the flat $75 cost. A perfect example of this is the Wolves jersey below, without sublimation the shoulder logos, assistant captains “patch”, wolf head, and arm numbers would add to the cost of a jersey and would push even a screen printed jersey on lower quality materials to over $80 and that is without being able to choose your own jersey design.
The material of sublimated jerseys is similar to that of the heavy weight pro jerseys that Kobe offers. All of the JerseysMadeEasy sublimated jerseys I have seen are higher quality than the sublimated jerseys my beer league teams use and they have been going on strong for 5+ years now.
The $55 hybrid sublimated jersey is my recommended choice. You get the freedom of having a unique and complicated design on the front and back (as can be seen above with the stars and stripes) while still being budget conscious. The draw back for this style of jersey is that you have to have a single solid colour making up the shoulders and the arms. A white or black based jersey with the details on the body of the jersey and the plain arms would be fine for me because in beer league no one ever notices the arm numbers AND most of the time the players roll the sleeves up or some even tape them to hold up elbow pads… While JerseysMadeEasy has stated they can’t match colours exact between the arms and the body, the slight difference I noticed on the Tampa Bay Blades jerseys I had wasn’t enough to make a self-proclaimed jersey fanatic have any issues or reservations.
Finally we come to the $110 full sublimated reversible jerseys. Which give you a unique light and dark look all in one. I will never recommend this jersey as I don’t believe the cost savings outweigh the benefits of the all in one jersey. My issue is that with a reversible you end up with exactly the number of jerseys your team needs to wear, if someone forgets a jersey a teammate won’t have at least a matching colour scheme… It does come in for cost saving if doing a fully sublimated design, but it is still dropping $110 per player for jersey at once and I know that would never fly on my teams.
Sublimated jerseys allow team’s creativity and identity come out, while offering high performance and quality without the high price tag.
Heavy weight pro twill hockey jerseys
Kobe offers different levels of “heavy weight” fabrics that range from $28 to $46 for the jersey itself. All of these materials are significantly heavier than the mid weight jerseys mentioned in the budget section. There are more budget level jerseys and designs to save on cost but still offering a high quality material. An example of that jersey can be seen above (Kobe XJ6), and is a solid jersey material for $28.
Then you come to the more simple striping patterns on the Kobe 6200 jerseys but these have many more colour options including this Might Ducks inspired eggplant and teal jersey also for $28. Both of these styles offer a high quality jersey fabric and double layered elbow and shoulders for extra durability. Here you can get unique colours and simple striping patterns without branching into the more expensive categories.
With over 83 patterns to choose from we get to the Kobe 6100 jerseys are based off of professional hockey teams pre-Reebok Edge style. This includes the classic green and yellow North Stars style seen above. I love scrolling through this list to bring back all of the classic designs I used to see on TV during my childhood! These come in at $44 and offer the widest range of different styles available.
Finally we hit the Kobe K3G Pro jerseys that are based off of current pro hockey team cuts and designs since the Reebok Edge style started in the mid 2000s. These come in at $46 and are VERY close to the actually NHL authentic jerseys (see the video up top for proof of that!).
The heavy weight pro knit style of jerseys are perfect for the team looking for the highest quality while picking a pre-existing jersey template. These are the closest you can get to a pro jersey and are side by side much better quality and value compared to the CCM/Reebok ones of similar style (again, proof in my video!).
What’s next?
Once you have decided on what jersey type fits your team’s budget and have a weight and design picked out, the next step is to decide on what logo and numbers to put on it! This step is skipped for the fully sublimated jerseys since they are put onto the jersey itself without having to add on later!
Here is my guide to the different logo types & numbers you can put on your jerseys
*Disclaimer*
JerseysMadeEasy sent me these jerseys, logos, and number kits so I could make the videos and these blog posts to go over the different type of products they offer. If you make a purchase after clicking any of the links to JerseysMadeEasy.com through this page I will get a kickback which will help fund my YouTube channel and this website and help me continue making reviews and hockey gear content. I wanted to see the products before agreeing to this as I would never promote a product I didn’t believe in and one I wouldn’t want to wear or use myself.
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