You just finished a very long several months planning your soccer tournament, jostling schedules and missing family dinners, leading up to a very frantic and hectic weekend of a soccer tournament. You are tired, your arches have fallen and you are swearing that you will NOT go through this again next year.

Then, you open your email and this is there from a team:

Just wanted to drop you a line to tell you we really enjoyed your tournament over the weekend. The facilities were very nice and the fields were amazing! The competition was fantastic as well – really got us ready for the upcoming spring season! We will definately look to come back next year.*

And it makes it all worthwhile. And, you’re now already planning next year.

*Real email that was sent by a team to a tournament on March 23, 2009 at 7:37 am GMT-6. You know who you are and thank you.

This started out to be an inside joke with one of our hotel sales managers, but then got me thinking about the power of a brand, a place and a customer experience. Watch the video first.

I know the song is a parody, but I also know people who have this level of respect and need for Chick-fil-A, (Rufus being one of them!)

Our advice: Make your soccer tournament a must-attend event each year by being a Chick-fil-A. And also notice that they are not open on Sundays, probably never will be in spite of the number of critics who say you can’t be in the fast food business without being everything to everyone all the time. Yet, their drive-through lines are always busy, customers crave their food and don’t seem to mind them being closed on Sundays.

And remember, if you put on an awesome tournament, you CAN play by YOUR rules and not the rules that guest coaches want to make you do. In the end, they are coming to your event because of who you are, not because of what they want you to do for them at the moment.

Sometimes, the customer does not get what they want.

We routinely send out postcards to most of the soccer tournaments we know of. The photo to the left is typically what comes back after a mailing. In all, we get about 20% of all postcards we send out returned back because the address is no longer valid.

The really sad thing is that the tournament is still being held, but someone else is in charge or they moved the PO Box or some other reason why the address is not longer valid. If TourneyCentral can’t even send a postcard to the right address because it moves so often, how do these tournaments expect teams to find them and apply?

And many teams don’t find them. Many teams that know where the tournament are being held, know the people putting on the tournament, etc. find and apply, but how do new teams find existing tournaments? Well, the sad truth is most of the time, they don’t!

Our Advice: Your life blood of growth is new teams coming to your tournament each year. Stay put! Get and keep a PO Box where teams can contact you. Get and keep a domain name for your tournament Web site so that when teams bookmark you one year, they can find you the next. Quit bouncing around and act like you want to be found.

Keep your listings up-to-date in the directories. It may be a small amount of work to stay current, but if one more new team finds you and applies, the effort pays for itself.

In this economy, coupons are hot! When your sponsors are running ads in your program and on your web site, you may want to encourage them to make it look like a coupon. Put a bar code on it, give it a dashed line, put a scissors clipping out the ad.

Take a look at this article before reading further.

Do you know where Del Mar is? Not by looking at the newspaper Web site. But then you are probably not their target market, so it probably doesn’t matter all that much. Unless you want to link to this story from your blog (like I wanted to do here.) Many newspaper Web sites o this. So do college Web site. You are here and if you don’t know where here is, well, we’re sure as heck are not going to tell you.

Now, take a look at your soccer tournament Web site. Can out-of-town teams figure out where you are without clicking through to several pages, maybe going to your map page? You know where you are, but do your guest teams — which you are trying to attract to your tournament — know where you are? When you write directions to the fields, do you assume the team is from out of town and write it from their point of view? Or, do you assume everyone knows that the 10 mile stretch of road is named three different things as it meanders through three different municipalities?

Our Advice: Build your Web site as if nobody knows who you are and WHERE you are. Assume the reader doesn’t know where “here” is and write directions so that they can find your fields and their hotel without any help from third-party tools.

We saw this concern from a team traveling in to a rather competitive tournament coming up in the next several months. We removed the names from the message.

Just an FYI. When I first communicated with the HOTEL REMOVED two weeks ago about reserving 18 rooms for the tournament in late April, the front desk told me I must speak with the Sales Manager (NAME REMOVED). I’ve been leaving messages for NAME REMOVED for two weeks, and she has never returned my calls. When I called again this AM, she finally answered and said she’s now out of rooms with double beds.

It’s disappointing to incur long distance charges and someone will not return a possible customer’s call, especially when you’re trying to schedule an almost 900 mile (round trip) road trip. I’m not sure if she had enough rooms when I initially called, but lack of communication resulted in wasting two weeks. I will try another hotel at this stage, but this is not a good representation for your tournament.

The hotels in your area are part of your soccer tournament brand. The quality of the tournament will be judged by whether or not the teams have a great hotel stay.

Our Advice: Work with your hotels closely. Call them weekly, perhaps even daily as your deadline approaches. Yes, they will probably be sick of hearing from you and your calls will go to voicemail, but since they are an integral part of your event, they should know that their performance with your guest teams are a top priority.

As team applications come in, mark the ones that are local and follow up with all others as soon as possible. Make sure that two weeks do not go by as the team is trying to book rooms.

Follow up note: The tournament director replied back almost immediately, volunteered to find rooms personally and the team found rooms nearby. One special mention is the team rep sent a note to the tournament director, closing the loop on the issue.

I received an email from one of our soccer tournaments yesterday, asking if we would put one of those soccer news feeds every other soccer Web site has in the sidebar or on the front page. The logic, he said, was that visitors would stay on the page longer reading the news and that is a good thing for sponsors.

Despite the conventional wisdom of these news feeds making pages sticky, they only really serve to “fill up space” for web sites that have a hard time coming up with fresh material. TourneyCentral soccer tournament sites don’t have that problem as there is always something going on.

Keep this in mind; Teams at a soccer tournament care about their games and their scores. The best way to serve your advertisers is to put them in the DEALS area and plug them. Even then, you’re only going to get major traffic at your deadline, when you accept teams, publish the schedule, directly before the tournament and during for scores. (and to the rules page when teams start losing on tiebreakers but that is a whole other article 😉 )

You are a DESTINATION site. Visitors go to your site for one reason only, to participate in your soccer tournament, i.e., apply, get scores, standings, deals, etc.

All this other stuff is just a distraction, clutter and more stuff to maintain that adds absolutely no value whatsoever. It is the same with online games, “engagement tools” like a spirit center, even photo uploads. If it did add value and it would help you monetize, we would already be doing it. It is in our best interest to generate page views as well.

Our Advice: You are better off writing news about YOUR tournament. Publish that on the front page and publish often. Engage with your teams by email when a significant event happens. (significant to them, not you.) And always be thinking when writing your news items, “What’s in it for my guests?” If you can’t come up with an answer that you would believe yourself, pass.

Soccer teams are out there foraging for soccer tournament deals. They are using the down economy to leverage acceptance of their lessor teams into more elite tournaments. Some of using the promise of attendance to get hotel comp deals for their coaches, special scheduling considerations and lots of other perks. Do you do it?

Whether or not you cave in depends on how strong your brand is and why you are holding your soccer tournament. If you have consistently provided an elite experience for teams, delivering on your promise of great competitions and college coach exposure, you are probably not hurting for teams. In fact, you may be doing better than most years as teams are trimming tournaments in favor the higher quality ones. For the teams looking to leverage a “deal” with you, that is more or less a delusion on their part.

If you are holding a tournament to raise money, you will probably take the teams with the hope of filling your bracket and not falling apart before the economy gets better.

Our advice: Always plan for down years. That means holding back some cash for years where you may not attract as many teams due to the economy. Caving in to team demands when they have the upper hand in a recession is almost never a good idea because:

• you then set the true value of your soccer tournament and
• there will be no reciprocal loyalty. Teams that are always looking for a good deal on price almost never care about your brand and will not do anything for you long-term to help build your event.

While it may be painful in the short term to decline team enticements for them to come to your event, learn from this and begin applying some solid brand-building principles for the next time a recession comes around. Only then will you ensure your place on their list of “must attend” soccer tournaments.

And, if you feel you must work with teams, make sure there is a win-win arrangement coming in or you will find yourself on the losing end of any deal you cut.

I am at the 2009 NSCAA in St. Louis and the hotel bathroom is almost entirely unusable. To be sure, it is has nice shower head, the glass shelf and pedestal sink is really nice, but it all falls apart quickly with the lack of water pressure, only one plug outlet and little bottles of shampoo don’t fit on the shower shelves or the sink. In addition, there is no venting of the steam after you take a shower, a shower longer than usual because there is no water pressure.

Ironically enough, when I had a corporate job and a travel secretary, she used to book me on TWA through St. Louis. She did this because it was cheap to fly and the flight schedule showed you could get anywhere from St. Louis. Only you couldn’t. TWA was going through bankruptcy and they wanted to fill their planes as much as possible. What they never told anyone — including my secretary — was that they would get you to St. Louis and then you would sit. If the plane going from St. Louis to where you wanted to go was not full enough, they would delay it or cancel the flight. What worked on paper just did not work in real life.

She did not understand my frustration with her and it was hard to justify a flight 100% more expensive to MY boss. Then, she had an opportunity to travel to a training workshop a day ahead of me. She booked her own fight the same way she booked mine. We ended up seeing each other in St. Louis the next day as her flight was delayed. She then understood.

As with travel, hotel people should be forced to live in what they design for a week. They would design rooms a bit differently.

Our Advice: Sometimes, especially in the dormant season, a soccer tournament system works well on paper. In your mind, without benefit of frantic teams calling every hour, advertising, hotel booking systems, registration systems, etc work out well. On paper, there is always time to finish the task and move sequentially through the to do list. But when you have several hundred teams all wanting to do something at the same time, they can quickly overwhelm you, your staff and your systems.

Nothing is more especially true for a web site that has real-time scoring. If your tournament is in September, your traffic is almost non-existent in January. Some teams are checking you out, making plans, etc. but for the most part, your web site runs well. But, how will it hold up when you have parents, players and fans of 200 or more teams all wanting to know the scores during a two hour window on Saturday night?

When coming up with systems for your guest teams, make sure they are also ones that you can live with. Build your soccer tournament to expectations that you have of other people. And make sure things are usable when and where your guest teams need and want to use them.