When I was young and thought I knew everything, I had a job as Leadership/Sales Training Manager at Huffy. One year, we flew all the field managers into Breckenridge, CO for a leadership seminar. It was a great time and everything was themed to health, fitness and balance.

Lunch was healthy, breakfast was healthy and after about 4 days of health food, we had a near riot on our hands. The managers wanted sausage and eggs for breakfast and meat and potatoes — followed by fattening desserts — for dinner. For them, it was all about getting away, being entertained, networking. The leadership workshop and healthy habits workshops was all just a way to justify the indulgence into entertainment.

The lesson I learned from that experience was this: The quality of the workshop/conference/etc will always be rated by the quality of the food and entertainment. The best keynote speakers in the world will not save you from a skinless, baked rubber chicken lunch.

Our advice: A soccer tournament is a lot like a leadership conference. Intellectually, you can justify the trip as a great soccer experience, good competition, etc, etc, but the reality is it is almost always about entertainment value. Great hotels, great food, great friends and the tournament is a good experience, win or lose. If the hotel stinks, the food is lousy, the parking is horrid; even winning teams will not have a good experience.

It seems this year that hotel complaints are up. Way up. Hoteliers are not returning requests for rooms, they are not booking teams into rooms until they have been formally accepted and just overall, treating teams with disregard. As a tournament director, you can’t ignore this and must take action. Make sure you have a good relationship with hotels, but always remember that without your tournament, they are not booking rooms.

A soccer tournament is about 20% soccer and 80% entertainment. The hotel is a major part of the entertainment formula. When you forget this by ignoring hotel concerns, not staffing the concessions area, running out of tshirts early — even if your competition is outstanding — teams will not have a good time and will start looking for any other tournament experience but yours.

This weekend, snowstorms ripped through Ohio and left anywhere from 13 inches to over 2 feet of snow everywhere. It is melting and will probably be gone in a few days, but for the early season soccer tournaments, it has caused all sorts of rumors about tournaments being cancelled.

Teams that travel from outside the area only hear the sensational stories the news puts out about the bad weather because it makes news. Flooding, tornado devastation, huge snow accumulation numbers, etc. may not accurately describe the ground conditions that is happening in and around your tournament. Yet your guest teams don’t know that unless you tell them.

Our Advice: Control your event. Always. Don’t let rumors take control of your message or you will be spending unnecessary time and energy responding to rumors and assumptions people make simply because they don’t know what is going on.

Be proactive about the status of your tournament and post up news on your front page, in your FAQs, in the Quick News and if necessary, send out an email to the coaches. Even if you don’t know yet what action you will take, you may want to tell them that. But, always with a promise you will update them via your Web site when you have made a decision.

You can’t control the weather, but you can control how you communicate about how it affects your tournament.

You stress over your soccer tournament shirt design every year and every year, it is the same question; Will it sell? Am I going to be stuck with excess inventory? Getting to Yes, it will sell and No, you won’t have excess inventory is surprisingly easy.

American Eagle, Hollister, Abercrombie, Aeropostale and Old Navy are doing your market research for you right now! If you hop on their web sites (or, even better, go shopping in their stores) you will find what kids in your target market are buying. Simply adapt your logo and soccer tournament design to match the trendy looks and you’ve got yourself a winning shirt design.

Don’t just copy a design you find hanging, however and be sure that you work with an artist that can take the style and adapt it to make it uniquely yours. After all, soccer players are still coming to your event and the shirt should reflect your brand.

Our advice: Pay attention to trends outside the soccer world. It may hurt to watch a little MTV or pay attention to the story line on The Hills, but a little research time in front of the tv and in the shopping malls may just be what keeps your shirt design fresh and selling quickly. And, please hire a talented, forward-thinking designer for your shirt (and pay market rates!)… this little bit of investment will go a long way toward beefing up your bottom line.

A tournament recently sent out emails to teams that had applied, but not yet paid their application fees. The emails that were the most direct were sent to the teams that had applied several months ago, had made several promises to pay (check is in the mail, our club treasurer pays, etc, etc)

The email sent reminded the team that:

All fairly benign, but necessary points to make when trying to collect from a team.

One team came back at the tournament, lashing out at them for making money more important than the opportunity for kids to play soccer. In their response diatribe, lots of accusations about being mean and not respecting the customer were offered. In short, the team rep was lashing out at the tournament for expecting the team to pay on time and in full, like they had agreed to do when they applied.

Our advice: Never be afraid to ask for money and never be afraid to cut them for not paying on time. The agreement the team makes with you when they apply is that you will provide soccer entertainment and competition in exchange for a team fee. And, that the team fee be paid before they are accepted.

If the shoe were on the other foot and you agreed to start the tournament on Saturday morning, but just didn’t get around to it until Tuesday afternoon, how many teams would forgive you? Yet, paying late is somehow ok for the teams? Not really.

And lastly, the charge of disrespecting your customer for asking for payment is just a deflection. At TourneyCentral, all our customers are important, but the ones who pay on time and in full are our most important, regardless of their volume. The ones who don’t pay on time are one of our competitor’s problems next year.

Last weekend at the 2008 NSCAA Convention in Baltimore, TourneyCentral had a cake on display, made by the awesomely cool artists of Charm City Cakes (Ace of Cakes, The Food Network) It was big, it smelled delicious, it drew a crowd and it was awesome.

The cake artists at Charm City Cakes OWN their market. Duff decided at some point that being a good cake creator was just not going to be enough and that he was going to own awesome. As examples, the piping of the goalie gloves was intricate. The ball was perfectly round. The gloves were to scale with the ball. The cake was a product of years spent honing a craft and a unwavering dedication to awesome. Even a simple sheet cake from Charm City Cakes, I suspect, has elements of awesome baked and decorated in and on it. In spite of their fame, they were just regular people, taking calls, answering emails, fretting over whether I was happy with the cake or not.

Our advice: We’ve all been to just another tournament and it always has that certain nothing special feel. And then we’ve been to AWESOME tournaments when it almost doesn’t matter that our team didn’t place or even win any games. But everyone wants to go back.

Strive to be that tournament that everyone wants to come back to, win or lose. Look at your tournament from the point of view of the teams. What makes these events awesome? It may be the simple things that have nothing to do with the competition on the pitch, like a smile from the volunteers at every turn, a great hotel stay, upbeat energy from the HQ tent (yes, teams can feel tension!).. simple things — like awesomeness — that are hard to describe and harder yet to create as a formula. Yet, you know if when you feel it.

Behind the scenes as an attempt to get into the essence of awesome. When we booked into the NSCAA in Baltimore, I knew I just had to get an Ace of Cakes cake. This was back in September, 2007. I dropped them an email, asking if they would be interested in making a soccer cake for the exhibit booth, how much, etc. I really didn’t expect anything back because these guys are famous and I’m not, but Jessica sent me an email back within a day with a yes, we can and want to and a price (which I thought was way too low for an Ace Cake) We signed an agreement, did the money thing and we had our cake booked. On a phone call later that week, Mary Alice then asked what I wanted the cake to look like, what flavor, etc.

My response was You guys are the artists, so whatever you want within a soccer theme. And pick your favorite flavor for the cake. The phone call immediately turned from an order-taking into a creative session, where the tone of her voice got that bit of excitement edge. We hashed through several design ideas and came up with a soccer ball being caught by a pair of goalie gloves. And, the entire bakery would sign the game ball (which I thought they would charge extra for, but didn’t.) I suspect the creative process kept going all the way through until delivery.

From the emails through the phone calls, through the on time delivery during a Baltimore snow storm, to the excitement Mark (he delivered to the show) felt about the huge soccer show (while we were ooing and ahhhing over the cake; he was ooing and ahhhing over the huge soccer show, which made US feel like WE were the ones who were doing something special!), these guys were about the most awesome folks I have ever bought anything from. Ever.

The real product they are selling is not really just cake, but awesomeness that focused everything on the customer experience. Never for a moment, did they forget that the real product was an intimate, authentic customer experience. And they were responsible for managing and steering that. And they did it with ease, grace, professionalism, genuine excitement, pleasure and a sense of humor. Simply awesome

I went into the Verizon Wireless store the other day, looking for an extra battery for what my daughter now tells me is a very old Razr. The Voyager caught my eye and I asked the velvet rope bouncer how it compared with an iPhone. It has a touch screen, he beamed. Ok.

One day this past week (I don’t know when and I forgot my password to get into WSJ.com, but that is another post!) they had a columnist write about how the Voyager looked cool, but it took 3-5 times more clicks to get to anything, the interface was different from application to application (phone, web browsing, contact book), etc, etc. As I read, it was clear that the voyager was no iPhone. What Verizon had apparently done was take the most obvious feature of the iPhone and slapped it on an old phone model. They put lipstick on a pig.

I find this being done a lot with soccer tournaments. A coach or a tournament director goes to another soccer tournament and sees something interesting being done, rushes home and immediately adopts this great new idea. Most of the time, it doesn’t work as successfully at home as it did at the other tournament. So, it must be a failure. But not really.The reason the idea worked over there but not here is because the other soccer tournament didn’t start out with a pig. The red, rosy lips were real, not just lipstick covering up a problem. Their pig is their culture, part of who they are. The rosy lips is a manifestation of that culture, not just makeup.

As with the iPhone, the touch screen works because it is an extension of Apple’s culture of the computer working as an extension of the body. For example, their culture includes a vocabulary like files and folders, calendars and drawing tools.. not directories, databases and input devices. The touch screen on the iPhone is the next 2 millimeters of the human fingers, not the clunky push-dial of a computer. Entirely different.

Our advice: The next time you see a great idea being implemented at another tournament you visit — before you become convinced that it is something that you should also implement — examine why it works, not just how. Perhaps the volunteer system works because the club has a large population of Red Cross volunteers, not because they have a great volunteer management software package. Or, perhaps the advertising program works because the there is a large population of brand managers of a CPG company whose kids all play in the same club, not because their printed program looked cool.

And the same goes for tournament management software, like TourneyCentral.com. The stuff works because it is meant to manage soccer tournaments, not just some scheduling software that got draped with some soccer ball clip art. It works because it addresses the needs of the parents and players attending your soccer tournament. It works because the people at TourneyCentral understand the needs of the soccer tournament director, their teams, their parents and their sponsors.

I was going through my bills today. As usual, I threw away more marketing stuffed-in crap than the actual invoice. As I was tossing the Verizon Wireless stuff, an insert caught my eye. It was titled A guide to understanding your bill. It was printed in 4-color, double-sided, 8.5×14 on glossy paper. Somebody put a lot of work into this instructional piece. A quick snap-shot of one of the sections is posted to the left of this article.¬†

I started reading it and the more I read, the less I understood about my cell phone bill. Yes, everything was there and there were these neat little red arrows pointing to the various pieces I should probably understand, but it was confusing. Here is what I know about my relationship with Verizon Wireless:

• I have a cell phone that will allow me to make and receive calls.
• For the service above, I expect to get a bill in the neighborhood of what I agreed to pay when I signed the contract, give or take a few dollars for 411 calls or extra text messages, etc.
• On my bill, I want to know what I owe and when/where to pay.

That’s is. Understanding my bill does not make me a more loyal customer. In fact, making it so difficult to¬†understand¬†my bill that I need a detailed guide to understanding my bill makes me think that Verizon Wireless is trying to hide stuff from me in my bill and makes me even more nervous about doing business with them. (Your experience may vary.)

Our advice: When you have created systems like applications, standings tie-breakers, registration forms, etc. that are so complicated that you need to publish guides just to ensure that teams understand what to do and/or how to read them or complete the forms, your tournament is way too complicated. Every form, every system should be immediately intuitive.

At TourneyCentral, we start and finish each feature on our sites by asking¬†ourselves¬†one critical question, Can my 67-year-old mother complete this task without help? If the answer is yes, we’ve done our job well. If the answer is no, we stay at the drawing board until we get a yes.