You run a competitive tournament and a group of teams from the same club has applied as a block. Most of the teams are high-caliber and they are able to compete at the level you have set for your tournament. But, there are some B and C level teams in the group that just will not be able to compete.

You accept teams, but you cut the B and C level teams. Immediately, you get a letter from the DOC, club president, etc, threatening to pull the entire club from your tournament if you do not include the less competitive teams. What do you do? If you don’t accept the less-competitive teams, the club may go elsewhere. If you do accept the teams, then your brand of being a competitive tournament suffers.

Our advice: As more and more clubs are making multiple team and DOC-led coaching the norm, accepting individual teams on their merit alone, without regard for the club needs is becoming a challenge. Here is a what we think.

Ultimately, the DOC or the multiple team coach has made a decision to coach the teams, splitting up their time among the teams. They applied to your tournament, knowing full well what your selection criteria is. The parents of the players made the decision to put their kid in the team coached by the multiple-team coach, DOC, etc, knowing that they may eventually have to make these hard decisions. It is ultimately the coach who is responsible for putting his/her team in this situation. Keep this point in mind at all times.

If the DOC pulls all the teams and tries to find another tournament to accept them as a block, they are going to run into the same problem you have with the other tournament. If they put their teams into a less competitive tournament, the parents of the elite-level teams are not going to be happy with the competition and eventually, will leave this DOC for someone else who shares their vision. You know this, the DOC knows this. Keep your leverage.

Make sure you communicate expectations to DOCs or multiple team coaches that you are evaluating teams individually, based on their ability to compete, not based on whether or not they are part of a club contingent. Be very clear with the DOC and cc the club president, coach, team rep and everyone you can think of. Get a confirmation of the terms and conditions IN WRITING (email) before considering accepting the team into your tournament. Nothing less than your tournament brand is at stake here.

Post the terms and conditions of application on your application form and make sure it is checked off. With TourneyCentral sites, the T&C are placed on the application, are sent to the coach via email, are written into the team Message Center. You can now edit the T&C in your Web Site Maint Module>Variables.

Create another tournament for less-competitive teams that plays along side your competitive tournament. One is the Cup and the other is a Challenge. But, be very clear in your marketing that the Cup does not accept less than elite teams and the Challenge does not allow competitive teams.

The key here is to maintain your brand integrity, but also to manage expectations! DOC and multiple team coaching is here to stay, regardless of how bad an idea it is. The trick is to make sure it does not derail your tournament in the process.

Sometimes I run across something that is just so clueless I have to say something. WePlay.com is that level of cluelessness.

Reported by the New York Times and blogged about, WePlay.com is a site that is a social network for kids who play sports. I would have shrugged this story off except at the 2008 NSCAA and US Youth Soccer shows, there have been entire companies built on creating social networks for soccer. Kids can upload their video, share soccer stories, put in their practice schedule, etc, etc.

And, all doomed to fail. Here is why.

Youth sports in America is something kids DO, not who they are. Segmenting kids’ lives into specific interests is just not going to work because the kids themselves resist the labels. Today, for 90:00 minutes, they are a soccer player, then later this afternoon, they are a music enthusiast and after that, they are a blogger. Tomorrow, they will be a student, then a peer counselor, followed by a fashion consultant. They may become a soccer player again for about 40:00 minutes of the required 90:00

They already have a WePlay.com called MySpace and Facebook. Before WePlay.com launched, the developers and their financial backers should have taken a long hard look at what makes MySpace and Facebook tick. And, segmenting social networks into specific interests is the antithesis of a social network.

In some respects, our calendar of soccer tournaments could be called a social network. But, we’re not and are not delusional about the amount of time and attention players, coaches and family give to the tournament. We are almost relentless about our 90:00 minute attention span rule. Focus on them when they are playing, do not expect they will care about you before or after. But, be grateful if they do!

Our Advice: Do not get caught up in imagining the teams care more about your soccer tournament than it being a great entertainment venue for a weekend. It is and will be nothing more to your guest teams and their families. Instead, focus your time and energy into providing them with a great time while they are your guests. Strive to capture their attention for 91:00 minutes while they are your guests.

For your on-line presence, keep your tournament web site as close to real-time as possible. Also, soccer tournaments should to focus on providing Widgets (Facebook apps) that kids and parents can bring the tournament into their Facebook, MySpace pages. Integrating interests is how kids see themselves. Parents and marketers need to quit seeing kids as the soccer player, the actor, the singer, the bandie, etc. Take a look at a typical soccer-playing kid’s Facebook page and my point here is established. (BTW, every TourneyCentral tournament has a widget teams can grab from their application page and paste into the team, club site that has the schedule, news and DEALS build in real-time.)

Focus on providing a great time; the players and their families will take care of making your soccer tournament part of their networks all by themselves.

During the past few months, email junk (or spam) has become a huge issue and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have begun taking on the problem themselves, in many cases filtering legitimate email. Specifically for soccer tournament news, it is affecting the way we communicate to coaches and referees, such as you sending out from the Team Applications Module or the confirmations coaches receive when they apply.

Here are two examples of what many ISPs consider spam:
1) A coach has four teams she wants to enter into your soccer tournament. She completes the first application and gets a confirmation, no problem. Because the contact information is similar for the 2nd-4th teams, she hits the back button, changes the information and re-submits, generating a second, third and fourth application. While you will get the applications to the database, she may get the email confirmations as she is now receiving four emails that are coming from the same server, that have similar subject lines.. in short, her confirmations now look like spam to her ISP. They delete them without ever asking her if she wants them delivered. Gone.

2) You run a local soccer tournament and most of the teams buy their high speed cable from one provider, say rr.com (monopoly? maybe..). You send out a broadcast email, accepting teams. Since your messages to each team is similar to all the others, with the exception of the recipient, team name, teamID, etc… to the ISP, it looks like a couple hundred emails, all flooding into their users, from the same server, in a short period of time… MUST BE SPAM! They block the email and your coaches never see the emails.

In each case, the emails sent are clearly NOT spam. But, computers are basically very dumb and don’t know that. If you pair that up with frustrated, overworked ISP system administrators who have to deal with consumer expectations of being able to remove all spam (their marketing and sales people told you they could, right?) you have a system that makes email pretty useless.

A recent post by Media Post explains what consumers think happens when they report email as spam. Just for the record, as a responsible email provider, TourneyCentral is obligated to respond to each spam report or risk being black listed by the reporting ISP. Since we can’t risk that happening to your tournament, we are now spending dozens of hours a month replying to tech support departments at Roadrunner, Verizon, Coxnet, etc. .. after being on hold for dozens more hours….

Our Advice: Email as a sole source of communication to your teams is rapidly becoming obsolete. We suggest strongly that you now assume that your email will not get through and search for other ways to make sure your message does.

Do send email, but also post news on the front page, encourage your teams (and referees) to check their Message Center often, urge them to build and install the soccer tournament widget (available through their team application) on their team or club web site, call them after they make an application to confirm you received it (do this in weekly batches). You may even consider a small postcard sent via USPS, confirming the team’s application and TeamID. (Bet you can sell this as sponsorship!) All of this is a bit extra work, but it will result in a tighter connection of your teams to your tournament.

At TourneyCentral, we are looking at ways to work around email. In addition to email, applicants can now elect to have a confirmation of their application, along with their TeamID, sent to their mobile device, the Team Widget, your front page news and referee message now appears on the TourneyCentral Soccer Tournament Calendar and all messages sent from the Team Apps broadcast get written to the team Message Center. We are also close to some technology with OneCall Now to send a text to speech message to your teams.

The business of soccer tournaments never stands still and the ones that survive and thrive are those that continue to evolve as trends, technology and team needs change. TourneyCentral will be here to provide services that enable you to evolve ahead of the pack!

Remember last week when gas prices were $3.45 and up? I got a call from a friend of mine who was in line south of town at a gas station that was selling gas for $3.14 a gallon. The cars were lined up to buy gas that was almost sure to be in short supply soon if they didn’t hurry.

This week, prices went to $3.07 and are probably even going lower as I write this. There are no lines of cars, there is no news story reporting on the local UDF that is selling gas for $3.07/gallon. $3.14 is no longer a bargin.

What changed? Well, nothing except the perception of value! Same gas filling up the same cars by the same people. Same gas stations, yet the same people who thought $3.14 was a BARGAIN last week, couldn’t care less about $3.07 this week. It is all about perception of what is valuable.

Our advice: How much value do teams perceive your soccer tournament to have? What about your market do you know that would create that line of cars down the block of teams begging to get into your tournament? How can you create a buzz about your value? I don’t have the answers, but I do have the questions, which is always a good place to start.

Most of the time, value has nothing to do with the price of something, but how much demand there is for what you have. What kind of demand are you creating for your tournament? Sometimes, it is as easy as being the most fun weekend soccer players will have in their season, not always the most competitive. Take a look around and find that something special that gives your tournament value. Create a perception of demand. Sell it and the teams will line up around the block.

As more parents are pushing their kids into sports for the college scholarship dream, the market is getting tighter. The New York Time is running an article series that is very interesting. The link to the article is below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/sports/10scholarships.html

I don’t want to give away the WHOLE article, but it ends with this:

Ten thousand per kid per year is not an unreasonable estimate, he said. But we never looked at it as a financial transaction. You are misguided if you do it for that reason. You cannot recoup what you put in if you think of it that way. It was their passion — still is — and we wanted to indulge that.

So what if we didn’t take vacations for a few years.

Pat Taylor, who started playing soccer at 4, said it took him about a month to accept that his dream of playing varsity soccer on scholarship in college would not happen. He looks back fondly on his youth career but also wishes he knew at the start what he knows now about the process.

The whole thing really is a crapshoot, but no one ever says that out loud, he said. On every team I played on, every single person there thought for sure that they would play in college. I thought so, too. Just by the numbers, it’s completely unrealistic.

And if I had it to do over, I would have skipped a practice every now and then to go to a concert or a movie with my friends. I missed out on a lot of things for soccer. I wish I could have some of that time back.

Our Advice: Keep in mind that most kids playing in your soccer tournament will never be good enough or lucky enough to play in college. The least you (and their parents!) can give them is weekend of fun.

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.

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!