Our NCSAA booth is out of the case and ready for the 2009 design
Hey soccer fans, we’re getting ready for the NSCAA in St. Louis and we got our display booth up and ready for our 2009 design.
It doesn’t look like much now, but stay tuned and follow along as we start adding really cool stuff to it!
We’re in booth 1735. I don’t know if that is a good spot of not (I’m told it is) but be sure to put us on your list of folks to see when you are at the convention.
In the Internet world, we have a term called stickiness which means: Something about the Web site compels the reader to stay longer, read more pages, bookmark you, etc. The test of stickiness of a soccer tournament is: do they come back, do they bookmark, do they remember you.
Today, an email came across my desk sent from a coach who played in the 2007 Ohio Cup in July. It read:
Just wanted to let you know that I am down to my last game of regular season. We are currently 8-3-4. Two of our losses went to the same team in some very close games. I just wanted to thank you for your inspiration at the beginning of my season. It has been a wonderful year and I just felt the need to say thank you!!!
Wow! Whatever the Ohio Cup did for that coach we all should aspire to. To be remembered as the tournament that sparked a great season is a goal that we should all look to achieve. To have a coach drop an email three months later is perhaps the ultimate testament to the achievement of that goal.
Our Advice: Be memorable! Whatever your goals are; to be the first of the season, to be the largest, to attract the most State Cup winners, to be.. whatever, first and foremost in that list of goals should to be memorable.
Cameron Woo, the publisher of The Bark, the New Yorker of Dog Magazines, shares some insight for building a brand within a niche market. Woo started The Bark as a newsletter to increase the amount of dog-friendly park space and expanded to become the premium dog magazine brand fewer than ten years later. The path he carved mirrors a soccer tournament growth plan almost turn for turn. Start with your loyal core group, find some common interests with those who can help you grow but may not be as passionate and.. well, I’ll let him tell it…
Listen now on 
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My daughter had a high school tournament to play this weekend on she asked for pasta for Friday night dinner. I remembered the Pizza Hut commercials where they showed these big trays of “3 pounds of pasta.” So, I ordered the Tuscan chicken alfredo, thinking that it would be somewhat delicious. Everyone on the commercial seemed happy enough.
We got the box of pasta, flipped open the lid and were let down almost immediately. The pasta was not a deep dish of cheesy goodness, smothered in rich, creamy alfredo sauce like they showed on TV. Instead, it was a single layer of helpless, lifeless, over-cooked pasta curls with some quasi-grilled chicken barely there on top. It tasted like pizza and had the texture of oatmeal. Rufus enjoyed most of it the day after.
Our advice: Don’t oversell your tournament! Make sure what you deliver at least looks like the product you are advertising. You may be able to get one or two teams to buy a really good sales job, but they won’t be back. And, chance are, they will tell friends.
TourneyCentral now has a Twitter account. If you also have a Twitter account, you can follow our Tweets at http://twitter.com/tourneycentral.
If you really don’t know what Twitter is, watch the video.