It is Sunday evening after the tournament and your photographer said they would post the photos from the weekend after the tournament. So, where are they? Your teams are asking. It is after the tournament, the teams have all gone home and they were promised photos after the tournament.

When you call the photographers, they are dead tired and think that your request that they stay up all night and get some photos up on their site (or yours) for your teams to look at is an unreasonable request. They hang up on you. But, is your request really all that unreasonable?

In the Soccer Tournament Web 1.0 world, it is. Everyone knows that it takes several days to process the photos that were taken and that waiting a few extra days to se and order photos is just the way things are. But, this is Soccer Tournament Web 2.0. Things are supposed to happen real time. The photos are digital and should be uploaded almost immediately. The teams want to relive the experience right now, not wait until Thursday.

Our advice: When working with a photographer, make sure they understand that your tournament is real-time and that they should make arrangements to have a stream of photos going up all weekend long, with the balance of the photos on the site, ready for ordering no later than Monday morning (or the day after your soccer tournament.) The teams have an attention span of about two days. Anything posted after that is just a lot of effort for nothing as very few teams will visit to find photos after that.

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.