Meet Sarah Scheidel. She graduates in 2010 and is top in her class. She is probably a pretty good soccer player. I don’t know much about Sarah, but I know that her profile will stand out from the pile of other profiles that her teammates will have submitted.

Why? Because she understands the purpose of including the photo on her player profile. The photo is there primarily so the college coach can recognize the player when he/she sees them, but a face also communicates who the player is, what kind of personality she has, how confident she is. I’ll leave it to you to determine what kind of person Sarah is and how she handles herself on the field. But, if it was just me, I’d want to see if her confidence on the field matches the confidence she displays in her photo.

Our advice: Encourage player profile photos to be marketing sheets for the players as they are as a person. College coaches will give interesting players with a good photo a second look, even if their playing history is only average if the photo talks to them. Encourage the players to choose their photos as wisely as they choose their words on the profile. After all, 1 photo=1,000 words whereas 1 word=1 word.

Helle Jessen writes:
Kære alle. En lille hilsen med et par billeder af nogle meget glade piger!! De har lige vundet Jysk Mesterskab og er dermed nr. 1 i Danmark i A-gruppen!

Congratulations to the Aab Team. Loosely translated, Hi all. A little hello and a couple of photos of some very happy girls. They have just won the Jysk Mesterskab and are number 1 in Denmark for Group A. (Helle – Correct me if this is wrong)

Do you know the dates for your 2008 soccer tournament? We are trying to plan our team tournaments and need to budget….

You may think this is a question being asked about early spring tournaments, but it is not. Teams are writing in and asking even late summer and fall tournaments!! In fact, it is the #1 question coming in from the contact forms across all our soccer tournaments.

Our advice: Think 365/24/7! When you are done with your 2007 soccer tournament, get sanctioned and get out there with your 2008 dates. Even if your state won’t sanction tournaments until late in the year (Michigan, Colorado, Indiana … are you listening??) get out there with proposed dates. A date range is better than no date at all.

A couple weeks ago, my hi-tech coffee maker broke. All the electronic stuff on it worked just fine, but it failed in the most basic way; the mechanism to bring the hot water from the reservoir through the grounds and into the carafe no longer moved the water. So, I went out to the local Kroger and bought a Melitta coffee cone and carafe for 12.00. I heat my water and pour it through the grounds. My coffee-making experience is now simple and will never break.

What does coffee have to do with a soccer tournament? Well, for one, it fuels a lot of tournament directors, volunteers and soccer moms/dads for early-morning games, but the real correlation here is the lesson to keep things simple and down to its most basic requirements.

It might seem odd that a technology company would advocate for simple gravity instead of a hi-tech coffee-maker, but that doesn’t really seem odd to us. Even when we’re developing soccer tournament web sites and software, we always ask the question, What is the simplest way to do this? Based on the over-loaded technology web site of the average soccer site, keeping things simple is some advice a lot of them could use.

Our advice: Keep it simple, make it work. Nobody cares that you employ the latest AJAX, Java, whatever scoring system on your soccer tournament web site if they can’t find the scores and when they do, they can’t view them on their Blackberry. Apply this to everything, from your sponsorship packages to your web site to the game schedule to your standings and tiebreakers. People understand and accept simple. Like my coffee maker, it can have all the best time-keeping, auto-coffee-making, coffee-to-water-ratio-measuring technology in the world, but if it can’t pour water through coffee grounds, it is a piece of junk. Do the basics well. Keep the rest simple.

Very few people like complexity and fewer still like unnecessary complexity. In an article in the Washington Post examining why Apple is successful, the author states:

Apple’s success doesn’t come from those cute Hi, I’m a Mac ads. It’s a product of a consistent focus on simplicity and elegance…

The emphasis is mine.

Our Advice: Keep your systems SIMPLE and make sure they work. Teams only want a few things from your tournament: 1) To register easily, 2) to find deals and hotels quickly and effortlessly and 3) to find scores, standings and photos with more ease and effort than finding a hotel.

That’s it! There is nothing else to deliver to your guest teams at a soccer tournament. Anything beyond that is a complication the teams won’t accept, regardless of how important you or your sponsors feel it is. So, given that, the challenge is to work within those needs. Serve up ads within the context of scores or email messages. Don’t allow advertising to complicate the system. Don’t force viewers to register to view the scores or photos. Don’t make teams register first to see the available hotels. Don’t make every field on your application required. Get out of their way so they can get to you faster.

Also, keep your systems simple for your staff and volunteers. Entering scores should be a one-click and done action, not a click-click-wait-click-verify-click… you get the idea. A TourneyCentral system keeps everything simple, uncomplicated and just plain works.

Ironically, the simpler the software is to use for the guest teams and your staff, the more time and effort goes into writing it. But, that is where TourneyCentral shines and will continue to do so in an ongoing effort to un-complicate processes as the soccer tournament industry develops.