All posts by Gerard McLean

When anger turns into creativity

Tournaments

Watch the video above. It was written and produced by Dave Carroll after an unpleasant experience with United Airlines. As of this writing, the video has been viewed 433,294 times on YouTube, had 3,274 comments and appeared in the Wall Street Journal web site, the Huffington Post, LA Times, the Consumerist and various other news sites.. We’ve also sent out the link to a lot of our clients and friends who are in the customer experience business every day. You can read the back story here.

Dave Carrroll may have just written the next United Airlines jingle that will be chasing through travelers’ heads when they see the United Airlines logo in any airport anywhere. Nothing worms into the brain more effectively than music or scent. And country music is really, really sticky. I know it is in my head right now!

Our Advice: Don’t design team satisfaction systems that require levels and level of approvals for the purpose of frustrating the team. Resolve issues quickly and don’t let them fester. Answer emails quickly. Recognize the difference between the coach’s need to blow off steam at a simple frustration and a legitimate concern for which your soccer tournament may be liable. And buy Dave Carroll’s album, Perfect Blue on iTunes. 🙂

Kids are clever and you don’t want a negative “playground chant” or derogatory description about your tournament to get viral. (Northworst, US Scare, etc… )

Soccer Photos from South Africa (2003)

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In 2003, the Warrior Soccer Club of Dayton, Ohio, donated uniforms, soccer boots and balls to Emthonjeni, a foundation that operates school and youth programs in Soweto and Sweetwaters, communities south of Johannesburg. More than 200 uniforms were donated.

In light of the renewed soccer focus on South Africa, I thought it would be a really cool idea to share these photos.

The story appeared originally in the Dayton Daily News

You Can Measure Return On Sponsorship

Tournaments

by Larry Albus, 33 minutes ago

Originally posted at MediaPost.com

The sponsorship industry has advanced a great deal since the time the phrase “sponsorship can’t be measured” typically went unchallenged. As all aspects of the industry have grown more sophisticated, and as the dollar value and prominence of partnerships has grown substantially, the need for accountability has become vitally important.

We are hearing questions such as: Can I measure the impact of my sponsorship activation? What is the return on my venue naming rights deal? As a property, how can I demonstrate return to the sponsors of my event? And the list goes on.

Existing approaches to measurement — which merely transfer advertising surrogates such as media equivalencies and impressions to sponsorship, or use intermediate metrics such as awareness and attitude shifts to gauge performance – miss the mark. They don’t consider either the differences the sponsorship environment requires or the inherent flaws in the way advertising is measured.

Read the entire article at MediaPost.com

TourneyCentral sends scores and news to Twitter

News

TourneyCentral, an online service available to Soccer Tournament Directors, announced that the users of its service now receive the added benefit of having their scores, schedules, announcements and information automatically “tweeted” out to followers on Twitter at @tourneycentral. Twitter is a micro-blogging application and is currently the hottest social media tool on the market. The development is an added feature because it centralizes soccer event updates for parents and fans, who can turn on the notification if they are at a TourneyCentral tournament and turn it off afterward.

“Many people are at soccer matches tweeting updates to their contacts using their iPhone, Blackberry and cell phones,” says TourneyCentral President Gerard McLean, “It just makes sense that we would automate the process from a single point of contact.” He adds, “This feature of our TourneyCentral product allows tournament directors to maximize the benefits of a very effective social networking medium by pushing out their message on Twitter.”

The tweet uses the #tag of the event (i.e. #WSC is Warrior Classic, #WLI is Westlake Invitational, etc.) and shows which divisions that were updated. In addition to scores and news, the spirit center for each event will be resurrected using Twitter. The calendar of soccer tournament events is available here.

ABOUT TOURNEYCENTRAL
TourneyCentral.com provides comprehensive, event-focused, web-based solutions for youth soccer tournaments and is wholly owned by Rivershark, Inc. an Ohio Corporation. Since 1999, TourneyCentral has been producing web sites that provide youth soccer tournaments with end-to-end integrated experience management for guest teams, from marketing through scoring. In addition, the advertising tools provide the tournaments with an increased opportunity for advertising and sponsorship revenue as a result of significantly increased traffic to the web site. For more information, visit www.tourneycentral.com.

Companion and marketing partner properties consist of: The Soccer Tournament Review, a blog and iTunes podcast for tournament directors, MyTournamentSpace, a photo-sharing site linked directly into the tournament game schedule and www.ticoscore.com, a single-source database and ranking system for soccer tournaments.

TourneyCentral will be attending the NSCAA Conference in Philadelphia in January 2010.

Contact for more information
Gerard McLean
gmclean [at] rivershark.com
937-836-6255

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Your game schedule is wrong

Tournaments

Right after you release the game schedules, no matter how much work you have put into seeding the teams, researching, trying to minimize conflicts, etc. you will get a rash of emails from coaches acknowledging that scheduling is hard, but that you screwed it all up for them.

Among the more popular complaints are:
– You seeded my team wrong and my kids are going to get killed/not challenged
– You have my games too early/late/too much time/not enough time between
– I coach multiple teams and there are conflicts
– I don’t want to play this team/club

And on and on. The more you try to make someone happy, the less happy someone else is going to be because while coach A thought you did a thoroughly crappy job, coach B in the same division thinks you are a genius. When you mess with coach A’s schedule, you have to mess with coach B’s as well. Now, you have two coaches mad at you.

Our advice: Adjusting a schedule for all but the most egregious oversights is a zero-sum game and best to not do it. State early and often that coaching conflicts are the team’s responsibility to resolve, not the tournament. It was the club/team/coach who decided that multiple-team coaching was a good approach for whatever reason, not your tournament. The team needs to live with the impact of their decision.

There will always be some ranking system that one coach likes better than another. Take these with a grain of salt as teams change, even in mid-season. If you decide to use a ranking system, make sure that you publish this and that everyone is held to the same standard, even if they decide that the system is weighted incorrectly.

Above all, be courteous, but firm. Don’t expect that coaches will understand, but keep in mind they are looking to position their team best while you have the overall brand and reputation of the tournament to consider.

Don’t allow yourself to be bullied by one coach or club. Other coaches will notice and steer clear from you next year.