Are you up or down in application for your soccer tournament? How do you know? Are you comparing from last year? Why?
Here is an interesting and perhaps more reasonable way of looking at your numbers. Look up the birth statistics for the areas that you draw from. If you have a TourneyCentral Web site, log into your admin area and click on the Tournament PulsePoint™ tab to see where your teams are coming from.
Graph the birth rates by age. That is your potential market. If you see one year dramatically low, why spend more money trying to attract that age group? You may already have a large percentage of the available pool.
Just another way of looking at your marketing dollars.