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.

The Thanksgiving weekend used to be a quiet weekend, where you could relax and reflect, without having to worry about your spring soccer season.

But, things change. Quickly. Over the weekend, almost every single one of our spring tournaments that do not yet have a sanction form posted (state associations, are you listening???) and have not yet opened their dates to 2008 received several emails from coaches, similar to:

What are your 2008 dates?? I am planning my spring season now and need to know to be able to lock down our spring tournaments with my parents before the holidays kick in.

Our Advice: Your soccer tournament is a 365/24/7 event, so treat it like one. The day after your tournament, you should be thinking about next year. If you are a spring tournament, your absolute, drop-dead deadline now is Thanksgiving weekend. If your web site is not open for business by then, you are simply not in business. (We’re not sure what the fall deadline is, but almost guaranteed it is way before June 1st in most markets.)

If your US Youth state association is holding things up by having sanctioning meetings in December or some other end of the year meeting, and your event is in May, SCREAM AT THEM! The market is changing and soccer tournaments are becoming more competitive. They need to adjust their practices to meet YOUR needs. You can always look at US Club Soccer.

Published Aug 27 on Soccer America’s Grassroots Soccer Biz.

Is your soccer tournament better off this year than it was last year? How do you know? Unless you measure against goals and benchmarks, you really have no way of knowing. While you may have more money in the bank, was it because you sold more t-shirts or was it because the teams increased over last year. Or maybe your schedule was tighter. Or maybe your team numbers increased over last year, but you somehow found yourself with less money? How could that be?

Unless you are running your soccer tournament like a business with financial tools such as profit and loss (P&L) statements, budgets, cash flow projections, revenue and expense reports and other measurement tools like rankings and surveys, you really have no way of knowing. Because the goals of each soccer tournament vary from event to event, there are no right and wrong measurements, but here are a few things to measure as you move through the various phases of your soccer tournament.

1. Project and watch cash flow
Starting with day one to day 365, you should have cash flow projections. Day one is defined as the day after this year’s tournament and the start of next year’s tournament cycle. (you didn’t take the day after your tournament off, did you?) You will probably wish to divide up the cash flow projections into months, but project out on the same income and expense cycle as the previous year so that you can compare cycles year to year. As an example, Labor Day may fall in the same month each year, but the number of days preceding it in September may be different year to year. Now, comparing your cash in and out for the previous year, are you operating a more positive cash flow each month? While a more positive cash flow is important, don’t give up asset purchases for short-term cash goals.

2. Track profit performance as a percentage
Always measure profitability as a percentage rather than a dollar figure so you will have an accurate yardstick year to year. Keep in mind that the soccer tournament business has a cycle. You may have a run of three incredibly profitable years and then the next two may dip down a bit, then move up. Once you have a longer history, you will be able to predict profitability and plan inventories (like concessions, shirts, etc) accordingly.

3. Know your demographic metrics
How many times have you had a tournament where one year you have far too many of one age group and then next year, you are struggling to get a division together for that same age group? Did you check the overall birth rates in your local area or from areas you pull from? Or maybe a league installed a new age-based requirement? If you are able to predict the flow of players year to year, you are better prepared to either market to them or prepare a smaller division and focus your attention on the more populous ages. Age is just one metric you can use, but there are many others, including travel costs from certain regions, school schedules, league requirements, state association rules, etc. The point here is to know your target market; don’t just shotgun out your marketing and see what sticks.

4. Measure happiness
Revenue is what happens when people buy things. Profitability is what happens when happy people are eager to buy your soccer tournament experience. MEASURE HAPPINESS. Most of the teams competing in your soccer tournament will not take home trophies, so only a fraction of happiness can be attributed to winning. The majority of teams will judge your soccer tournament on whether or not they had fun.

While measuring fun is a very elusive metric, the three big factors appear to be a) hotel quality, b) food quality and c) respect. Hotels and food are fairly straightforward to measure and control, but measuring and influencing respect is slippery. It all comes down to the attitude of the volunteers, the HQ tent, the flow at registration, the way the coaches were talked to, the way the referees controlled the game and how much of your frugality was exposed during the tournament.

Encourage teams to give you feedback, whether that is directly via email or gathered through ranking and feedback systems such as GotSoccer, TICO Scores or bulletin boards like Back of the Net. Then, when unhappiness trends appear, DO SOMETHING to fix it. Don’t ignore it. If a few are willing to complain, many more are willing to just keep silent and simply not come back.

A soccer tournament is a business. While your goals may be to give the soccer community a fun experience, you need to be able to stay in business to accomplish that goal. These are just some of the measurements you should be using for your soccer tournament, but is by no means a complete list. Knowing more about what makes your event profitable within your niche or target market area is your competitive advantage that you should be honing with each season. But, you can only know how far you have come by knowing where you have already been.

Share your thoughts and what else you measure by commenting!

I received a call from a local soccer coach who was interested in planning his spring soccer tournament season for his team. He initially wanted to confirm that some of the events that had not yet received sanctioning (are you one of these tournaments?) were still on. But then, he shared something interesting and very telling.

Part of his criteria for selecting tournaments is whether or not they are hosted by TourneyCentral. Most of the other soccer tournament web sites are just way too confusing and hard to use, he said. We’re flattered, of course. This year, he added a new criterion I hadn’t thought of.

In the local area, there are several coaches who are known for scouting out tournaments that need one of two teams to round out a bracket. They wait until the last minute, contact the tournament and get in for free or nearly free, maybe paying just the referee fees. This is kinda like flying stand-by, so these teams may not get in, but it is still a good deal if you do. The tournament doesn’t disclose this, but coaches sure do talk. And they are pretty good gossips! So, part of his new criteria is: If he sees teams from these coaches, he passes the tournament on by.

Every local area has coaches who scrounge for tournament deals. And, all the coaches from the local area know who these coaches are, even though your guest teams may not. But, I can see the next step for this coach is to start calling some of the local coaches of an away soccer tournament — perhaps a neighboring club — and ask who these flying standby coaches are. Then, they see if they have played in your event and pass you on by.

Our advice: Don’t discount. Ever. Always have a backup plan for a division you need to round out. Can you play a round robin format? Can you move the seed one team up a division or possibly one of your club teams? What if you dropped a team to even out a division instead of letting one in for free (again, one of your club teams)? Short term, you may take a hit on the fees, but long-term, letting coaches in for free to round out a division ultimately hurts your soccer tournament brand. With lasting damage.