Today, I was reading Seth Godin’s blog and read a story that made a perfect argument for a TICO Score for ranking soccer tournaments.

It was hidden as a marketing post on green marketing but there, plain as day, made the perfect argument for a service like TICO Score. A simple number that assigns the health of your soccer tournament that tells everyone at a glance if you are good, bad or average.

Our advice: Send your participants to www.ticoscore.com to evaluate your tournament. Also, read www.challengedividend.com.

When we bring a soccer tournament on board, they most likely already have a web site that a volunteer has been managing. Mostly, the demands of the teams with online registration, communications, real-time scoring, schedules etc. has become overwhelming and the tournament is looking to replace that with a commercial product.

Everything usually goes along fine until they attempt to transfer their domain name to point to the new content. Most of the time, it is then that they find out the tournament, the club or the league does not legally own their domain. The volunteer or the web developer who set up the web site as a favor to the tournament back a few years most likely registered it under their own name. If the transfer is amicable, usually the transfer goes smoothly, but most often, it doesn’t. The volunteer is hurt because he/she is being replaced and takes the domain with them, leaving the tournament with a fight or a change to another domain.

Rightly so, the tournament believes they own the domain name and most often, they can prove the volunteer or developer was acting as an agent for them, but that is a very long fight. In the meantime, teams need to apply, etc. While it is always best to pursue securing intellectual property (IP) that you have developed, in many cases, it just is not pragmatic to delay your tournament until you can.

Our Advice: ALWAYS register all domains as property of the club, league or tournament, whatever your legal entity. The registrar, passwords and accounts that pay for the domain should be kept as part of the official record of the entity. And, while you are making sure your domain name is secure, also make sure the data that resides on the Web server, the account that serves the site and the source files on the volunteer’s/developer’s computer are also yours.

It may cost you money to secure your IP, but is sure beats free when you can longer use your data, domain or Web site.

On the surface, a stay-to-play rooming policy may be a good thing for your soccer tournament. It is fast becomes the de facto standard for housing at soccer tournaments. But, be aware that with a stay to play policy, teams are now expecting services.

Some of the services expectations are
– Find them rooms. If you are getting money from your stay to play policy, teams now expect you to find the rooms for them. Giving them a list of hotels and phone numbers is not longer enough for a soccer tournament with a stay to play policy.
– Service complaints. If the teams have problems with hotels, they are YOUR problems, not theirs. Have a contact number and someone on staff to deal with the hotels and resolve issues.
– Cancellation issues. If your tournament cancels or the team cancels, the teams expect a full refund of their room fees and will not tolerate hotels holding cancellation fees, regardless of what was signed. Most of these transactions are credit card transactions and card companies will do chargebacks without regard for agreements. If the room was not used, the charge will most likely not stick.

Our Advice: By all means, establish a stay to play policy for your soccer tournament, but do not expect that to be passive income. Put someone in charge who has the flexible schedule to work with hotels in the daytime and teams on nights and weekends. And, have this person available during registration and on the first day of competition to deal with hotel issues.

Make sure this person also has a relationship with the hotels and that all the GMs know who you are and have all the details about the soccer tournament.

And, lastly, this position is probably too important and demanding to be a volunteer position. Consider paying your housing coordinator a flat fee or a percentage of the rooming charges.

Of course, you can always opt to use a housing agency, but be sure to pick a reputable one who has a history of great customer service. Rooming revenue is nothing if you have to get involved with disputes between the housing agency, teams and hotels with every complaint.

There are a lot of spring tournaments closing registration and accepting teams. For 2008, on average, TourneyCentral applications are up and average of 38% over this time last year and soccer tournaments are cutting more teams due to field limits, referees limits and just overall bad fit.

As you can imagine, this is an increased opportunity for team managers, coaches and club presidents to send vicious email. What I call a drive-by emailing.

Our Advice: First, take a deep breath and fight the urge to reply in the same tone and manner. It may seem personal, but it is not. Email hides the humanity of the conversation and it is easy to blast off on a nameless, faceless machine. It doesn’t make it more excusable or easier to take, but… well, just breath.

Second, do not reply via email. Look up the head coach’s phone number and place a call to him or her. Once you start talking human being to human being, it is a lot harder to say really mean things to each other. There are those people here and there who can say mean thing to anther human being without remorse, but they are few and far between. If the coach you are talking to is one of those people, he/she is only validating your wisdom of choice by not accepting their team. If he/she is that much of a jerk BEFORE they get to your tournament, think about what a handful they will be in person!

Third, follow up the conversation with the email. If it is the head coach that sent you the drive-by, confirm what you talked about. If it is the team manager or club president or other person who has an illusion of influence, confirm that you spoke with the head coach of the team and encourage they to speak directly with the head coach. Leave it at that; do not offer additional details. If the head coach wishes to share, then he/she will. Do not engage further in any additional discussion via reply email.

Rule one: Remove technology as soon as possible from any conversation that is best handled by human beings. Machines have no feelings and they don’t care about yours. People, on the other hand, do and assess the impact of their words and body language many, many times during a single conversation. Use that power.

Look at common things that you see everyday in new and different ways. Here is an example.