I brought some work home last night, plugged in my laptop and dug in, when my mouse starting acting crazy. It was on its last legs and I knew it. So, I ran down the the local Office Depot and picked up a replacement mouse. I didn’t think too much about it, a mouse is a mouse, right?

After working for about an hour with this replacement mouse, my wrist hurt, my fingers were sore and I felt like I was draggin a brick around. The manufacturer used cheap tactile keys, a heavy cord and .. well, I got what I paid for. But, it moved the cursor, clicked where I wanted and did everything a mouse is supposed to do. It just didn’t go that extra two feet.

It got me thinking about all sorts of other times that an inattention to detail spoiled other events in my recent past. No awning outside the coffee-place drive up window on a rainy morning. A blast of hot air from the furnace vent over my table at lunch. The on-hold time with Verizon Wireless when I just had a quick question. The single window at the Post Office during the lunch rush. When they stated moving the traffic cones on I70 at 3:00pm instead of 3:00am. Nothing huge, just little things that could keep a pleasant experience from becoming an annoyance.

Our advice: NEVER ignore the details. Are your schedules easy to read? Do your traffic directions read to someone who is from out of town or do they make assumptions that everyone knows where something is? Do you have signs posted visibly? On your tshirt table, are the piles clearly labled by size? Do your teams know your web site address by heart? I’m sure you can think of more.

Teams want to come to your event and have fun. By making sure that the details are buttoned up, they are less likely to have a pleasant experience tainted by small annoyances that can become big issues. To quote Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer, Exactitude in small matters is the very soul of discipline. Make sure your event is disciplined and your ship is tight!

A friend of mine told me about a holiday tradition within their family. Her family is huge! Several aunts, uncles and cousins. Instead of getting eachother the obligatory necktie and perfume each year, they decide to support a different charity during the holiday season. All interested parties make a donation to the cause instead of purchasing a gift. This money is then given to a local charity of the groups choice the week after Christmas. The charity is always relevant to someone in their family. Giving it even more meaning!

Our Advice: Is someone in your soccer community in need? Do you know of a player from a guest team that is in need? Can you support a local charity? These are all ways your event can give back to the community during the Holiday season. This is more meaningful way to share Holiday spirit within your tournament committee. Set up a Holiday Foundation within your tournament committee and share the funds with a deserving group, individual or family. The recipient will be ever grateful, you will feel wonderful and they will be a friend of your event for life. It is a win-win for everyone.

Recently, I had a conversation with a tournament that is having growing pains. They want to leap into the premier quality tournaments and to do that, they need to accept more traveling teams and start rejecting some local teams that do not provide as much competition. As with most events, they can not expand to more fields because there are none. However, they have a local sponsor who is very much against them cutting local teams.

On the one hand, they need to grow to remain viable. On the other, they could lose their main sponsor if they do.

Our Advice: Growth is painful and doubly so if that growth means the loss of a sponsor. For every local sponsor, there are more regional sponsors. The trick is to convince the regional sponsor that you are a hub site that brings a soccer community together for an experience of their brand and then carries it back to their home towns; like bees pollinating flowers.

Geographic location does not matter as much for regional brands. Market saturation does. And if you can help spread their brand recognition be bringing a group together in one place, your tournament will have value for the brand as it helps them saturate more markets for a lot less cost.

A sponsor should never stunt your growth or resentment will eventually set in, your volunteers and staff will lose passion for the tournament and your event will wither into just another tournament.

I was standing in line at the Post Office waiting for my mail when I overheard a conversation a woman was having with the clerk at the counter. Apparently, she was sent a package through DHL, but it had not arrived. As the clerk tried to explain that the complaint was not against the USPS, but DHL, the woman simply did not know or did not care. To her, a package was sent; she did not get it and so it must be the realm of the U S Post Office to sort it all out.

The clerk finally gave up and told her to call DHL. And she didn’t have their number. They are in the phonebook was the reply. I suspect that customer will be telling her friends for several weeks — maybe months — that the Post Office lost her package and didn’t care. Even though that is not entirely the truth.

Our Advice: When dealing with vendors or third-party providers for your tournament, make sure they have the same vision of customer service that you do for your event. For example, if a photographer provides photos for your event, a parent orders some and does not receive them, the parent will most likely complain to you. While you may not have anything to do with the fulfillment of their photos, the parent will most likely not care. For all they know, they attended YOUR tournament and ordered photos from YOU.

When resolving the complaint, make sure you look up the phone number of the photographer for the parent and follow up with a resolution. If not handled properly, all the parent will ever remember and tell their friends is, I went to that tournament and got cheated out of a photo…

I recently installed crown molding in my house. For anyone who has ever done that, it is life’s ultimate lesson in humility. The angles and math needed to accomplish this seemingly simple task is staggering. After sawing through about 10 feet of expensive molding, I decided to seek out some help.

So, I went down to Lowes and bought a book. This book had a web site. It is clean, simple and did only one thing well — sold products and information to install molding and trim. It didn’t assume I wanted to receive CrownMolding Monthly, the e-newsletter on everything new and exciting on crown molding, take a tour of their factory, etc. The goal was to get me to solve my problem. It did that very well.

When I need to install crown molding again in the future, I know the web site will be there and I trust that I will be able to get me through any angle problems, regardless of how complex. This is the perfect relationship that a destination web site should have with its readers.

How does this all relate to soccer tournaments? Your tournament is a destination. Teams come to participate in your event and need to know only a few things: Who, what, where, when and how much. Too often, we come across tournament sites that try to engage visitors with the sponsoring organization, community information to a staggering degree, the total history of the tournament, trivia, polls and surveys, chat boards, and on and on and on. Ultimately, teams want a quality experience at a level which they can compete and get better in an atmosphere of mutual respect and fun. Anything that gets in the way of that on your web site is visual junk.

Our Advice: Stick to the basics. Seek out and destroy any web page on your site that does not contribute to streamlining the application, communication and participation process. Go to your web site link that you publish. Count the number of clicks it takes to get to your application. Is is more than one? If so, why? Can your guest teams find the tournament from the page you publish? Too many tournament events hide their tournament on a club page, forcing a potential guest team to hunt for the front door to the tournament. Each tournament should have its own domain identity. After all, teams are coming to participate in your TOURNAMENT, not watch a couple of your club games. Simple is best; less is more.