Tag Archives: soccer tournament software

soccer tournament software

Hope Foundation for Greater Dayton

Partnering with a nonprofit at your soccer tournament

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Partnering with a non-profit organization is a great way to connect with your community. However it can get challenging.

When working with a non-profit, know what will truly help their cause. Listen carefully, as most will not assert themselves aggressively. For example, collecting canned goods for a food pantry might seem to be helpful, but finding transportation and distribution for the goods could become more of a hassle (and more costly!) than a cash donation to the organization. Most non-profit organizations could use donations more efficiently than the tangible items that are donated at the fields.

While it is up to you to determine how best to partner with a non-profit, once you have crafted a relationship, TourneyCentral has a lot of tools to help you push your message out. (An example of these features can be seen on the MASC tournament site. They partnered with the Butler County Special Olympics for their 2014 event. Check out what the MASC is doing!)

Our advice:
1. Use DEALS. You can add to five non-profit, community-based organizations like Special Olympics, parks dept, museums, etc., that do not involve ad placement or in-kind donations free of charge. They would appear under the DEALS and in the sponsors just as your paid placement woudld. You can rank them so that they always appear at the top of the list.

This includes as much content as they want to provide, including a deal, link to their donation page, a flyer (downloadable pdf), a video, twitter, and facebook.

2. Include news stories on the front page. Our latest software update allows you to make one story sticky, i.e., always appear at the top. The news story can include photos and a video as well.

3. Use the broadcast tool to send out a special email to the teams that only include the charity..this can be a rich HTML email (we can help with that…)

4. Use your twitter, facebook, vine, Instagram and Google Plus accounts. Promote, promote, promote. Be generous.(Start here if you are new to social media.)

Regardless of how your program shapes up, do something cool enough for us to write about (like the MASC) and keep us in the loop. We love bragging about our TourneyCentral soccer tournament events.

Advice on this article offered by Scott Sliver. Scott Sliver (Sly-ver) is Executive Director of The Hope Foundation of Greater Dayton. On twitter, he is @hope4dayton or @scottsliver and by email scott@hope4dayton.com.

Meeting friends at the NSCAA

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Working hard at the booth. Annalisa Van Houten tournament director of the
Novi Jaguar Invitational and Carol Maas, tournament director of the
adidas Warrior Classic and Fall Classic.

Thursday night, we ran into our good friends Bobby Kramig, head coach for the Championship
Miami RedHawks and Carol Maas, tournament director of the
adidas Warrior Classic and Fall Classic.

Elizabeth Weimer of Site Search and Carol Maas, tournament director of the
adidas Warrior Classic and Fall Classic.

Start your new soccer tournament off right – VIDEO

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Marcy has just been named her club's soccer tournament director. She searches for the best solution to help her manage all the tasks that go along with hosting a soccer tournament. What she finds is a hodge-podge of solutions, all held together with digital duct tape. Click play to see what her solution was.

Our first video

Grandma and grandpa want to see their grandson Billy play in his first away soccer tournament. How will they find the right field and times Billy plays?

Fortunately, Billy's coach applied to a TourneyCentral soccer tournament so finding all this information was easy.
Billy's grandma went to the website, clicked on Schedules, found Billy's team name and got his schedule in seconds.

The dangers of a single-interest at a soccer tournament

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Five blind men with an elephant

There is an old joke about five blind men describing an elephant. The one who feels the tusks insist that an elephant is made up of hard stone, shaped to a pointy end. The man feeling the ears swears an elephant is a huge tarp. And so on, each forming his own opinion on what an elephant is based on his own personal experience. Of course, any seeing person would recognize the elephant is the sum total of all of these observations, even though each’s observations are entirely accurate.

This is what a soccer tournament is like sometimes. The referee assignor may be entirely focused on getting referees assigned that he forgets the game scheduler has coaches with special scheduling needs. The game scheduler may forget that the field coordinator has to work with restrictions on field use imposed by the parks department. The ad sales person may forget that the tournament director has profit considerations and can’t pay for the extra three field banners, and so on.

Gone are the days when a few coaches could get some teams together and play some games over the weekend and call it a tournament. The modern soccer tournament is less about soccer and more about building an event around soccer. It must be efficient, comprehensive, competitive and collaborative, both with the soccer community and the community at large.

Here at TourneyCentral, we think that is a very good thing. It shows that soccer is evolving into the mainstream of American culture.

Our Advice: A successful soccer tournament is a complicated organization with a lot of moving parts, many of which appear to be in conflict with each other. It needs a general manager (tournament director) who has the skills to motivate each “department” to excellence, but also keep the overall goal in mind and on track.

When the referee assignor, the college coach coordinator or the game scheduler is enabled to drive the mission of the tournament, s/he will most likely do so to the detriment of the other departments. We have seen tournaments go bust in the span of a year simply because the focus shifted to accommodate one person’s myopic vision.

Don’t be that kind of event. The teams come to your tournament with an overall expectation of excellence in ALL areas, from a website that is easy and quick to use to frictionless hotel accommodations to great scheduling and easy access to the fields. Your community expects your soccer tournament to reflect positively on it and produce guest teams that have a good experience visiting, win or lose.

In the end, your teams should never see the individual “departments” that make up your tournament.

Setting clear expectations for scheduling conflicts

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I was tooling around on one of our tournament web sites, prepping up for the weekend and making sure everything was ready to go when I ran across this frequently-asked question. I thought the answer was brilliant in that it set clear expectations for scheduling conflicts, far in advance and in plain view of the public.

What is the policy on schedule requests?

We will do what we can to accommodate your requests, however, the following types of conflict requests WILL NOT be considered as a legitimate request:

  • Can you schedule a game no earlier than noon because our coach is not available?
  • Can you schedule a game in the afternoon because we are arriving from out of state the night before or first morning of the tournament?
  • I have 6 teams in the tournament and want to get to all the games in one weekend?
  • I have 4 teams in the tournament and want to get to all the games in one weekend?
  • I have 3 teams in the tournament and want to get to all the games in one weekend?
  • Can you schedule one game the first day, and two on the second?
  • Can you schedule two games on the first day, and one on the second?
  • Can you reschedule the semi-finals and/or finals to accommodate the 2+ teams I have in the semi-finals and/or finals?
  • Can you reschedule Sunday games to accommodate my teams departure flight times?
  • Can you schedule games on adjacent fields so I can coach two games at once?

Please note that it takes hours and hours to make the tournament game and referee assignment schedule and every schedule change is a big deal. It is impossible to take in to consideration 3 or more teams playing the same weekend. For coaches taking multiple teams to a tournament we encourage you to have assistant coaches who can coach the team in your absence. At best we can try to accommodate 2 teams playing in the same weekend.

I especially like that the requests are termed “not legitimate.” It is a bit like running out of gas on the freeway. While it may be an emergency to you, it is not a legitimate break down as it was foreseen and highly preventable. You will still get a ticket for stopping on the freeway.

Our Advice: We’ve commented on multiple team coaches, late Saturday starts and game conflicts before and our views are pretty well-known. (Go ahead and read the blog posts if you want.. we’ve been ranting on this since 2006.) It is not enough to merely have a policy about multi-team coaches and conflicts; you have to communicate the expectations and boundaries clearly and make sure your staff is 100% on board.

Coaches will keep chipping away at you, your staff or a club coach to find that soft spot in the armor. Don’t let them. Whatever your policy is, stick with it or you will end up with a lot more stress than one coach’s grousing. It’s always better to have one coach irritated at you for not getting what s/he wanted than all of them mad as heck because you didn’t play fairly by your own rules.