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.

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.

Very few people like complexity and fewer still like unnecessary complexity. In an article in the Washington Post examining why Apple is successful, the author states:

Apple’s success doesn’t come from those cute Hi, I’m a Mac ads. It’s a product of a consistent focus on simplicity and elegance…

The emphasis is mine.

Our Advice: Keep your systems SIMPLE and make sure they work. Teams only want a few things from your tournament: 1) To register easily, 2) to find deals and hotels quickly and effortlessly and 3) to find scores, standings and photos with more ease and effort than finding a hotel.

That’s it! There is nothing else to deliver to your guest teams at a soccer tournament. Anything beyond that is a complication the teams won’t accept, regardless of how important you or your sponsors feel it is. So, given that, the challenge is to work within those needs. Serve up ads within the context of scores or email messages. Don’t allow advertising to complicate the system. Don’t force viewers to register to view the scores or photos. Don’t make teams register first to see the available hotels. Don’t make every field on your application required. Get out of their way so they can get to you faster.

Also, keep your systems simple for your staff and volunteers. Entering scores should be a one-click and done action, not a click-click-wait-click-verify-click… you get the idea. A TourneyCentral system keeps everything simple, uncomplicated and just plain works.

Ironically, the simpler the software is to use for the guest teams and your staff, the more time and effort goes into writing it. But, that is where TourneyCentral shines and will continue to do so in an ongoing effort to un-complicate processes as the soccer tournament industry develops.

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.

I watched Gracie yesterday with my daughter. The movie, like most soccer games, moved incredibly slow, there were no climaxes, anti-climaxes and slam dunk plot points like there were in Will Ferrell’s Kicking and Screaming It was almost painful to watch, but I pushed through the dip.

Despite my initial reaction to the movie, the paragraph above is actually a compliment to the actors, directors and the producers who probably had to be convinced that soccer people would get the film. The plot moved like a soccer game does, sometimes moving forward, sometimes dropping back with the score only being a few points ahead or behind at any given moment. It was actually brilliantly written and directed without tending to over-arching social statements and absurd hyperbole for comic or dramatic effect.

What does all this have to do with running a tournament? Like Gracie and any good soccer game, a soccer tournament is not won or lost by anything huge that you do, but by doing all the really small things really well. And, knowing when to drop back and knowing when to push through and make a run. And, of course, not giving up… and NOT listening to the critics who tell you that dropping back is giving up. Dropping back is just another strategy for ultimately moving the ball forward.

The only bad thing about the Gracie is that it is a soccer film. That is a shame, because it is more about the Universal Idea (or Human Condition for us older English Literature folks). A lot of people who could use a good view would not ever watch it because it is soccer. (The same about The Devil Wears Prada.. not about fashion…)

Our Advice: First, watch the three films mentioned above. Will Ferrell for how NOT to look at life, and the other two on a deeper understanding of the Universal Idea. Second, soccer and soccer tournaments are all about playing smart, honing your craft and being tenacious, not about being the biggest and strongest. In the end, the game always falls to the clever and agile.

I received this email from a coach/team rep for a tournament coming up:

Do you expect any more changes to the schedules? …. I just want to make sure this new schedule is safe to distribute.

Wow. Team reps and coaches printing off tournament schedules for parents instead of sending them to the tournament web site is a bit like getting a telegram and then gathering everyone in the town to read it to them in the town square using a megaphone.

Our Advice: At every opportunity, encourage the coaches and team reps to send their parents to your tournament web site. When there are changes (almost always are!) the coach/rep just needs to tell them there is a change via the phone tree or email and not print off the schedule, make more copies, distribute them, make sure all old copies are destroyed… you get the idea.

At TourneyCentral, we will be installing some tools that allow parents to be notified when a change occurs in the schedule, hoping to save your coaches and team reps some additional work and stress. Stay tuned.

Do you pay attention to the email address domains that coaches and team reps use when they apply to your soccer tournament? Maybe you should. While the vast majority of applications come in with yahoo.com, msn.com, gmail.com, aol.com, etc. addresses, a sizable percentage come in from corporate email.

Here is the thought: If your guest team had a good time at the soccer tournament over the weekend, who do they tell? Practically anyone in their office who will also not want to get to work right away on a Monday morning (or Tuesday morning after a holiday Monday). This is hidden marketing as these folks are your champions. If they had a miserable time, keep in mind they will most likely tell seven times more as many people, even those people who don’t want to listen, including posts to Internet blogs and chat boards.

Our Advice: Pay attention to the email addresses when accepting, scheduling and other activities that will affect the personal comfort of the team rep or coach. Reach out with a personal thank you note after the tournament. Build that relationship slowly because if done right, it could lead to other contacts within their company that may blossom into sponsorships. At the very least, you’ll have a stronger champion around the water cooler on Monday morning.

With a short post on Back of the Net, Larry Miller let the cat out of the bag on TICO Score. Yes, folks it is coming and it will be insanely great.

In short, Larry’s post was:

For a few months BOTN has been telling you that a superior tournament ranking system to the one currently in place will be coming. BOTN is happy to be able to give you the first look to TICO scores, a system for ranking tournaments without the influence of advertising, or ownership of rankings by tournaments.

Independent, free of politics, honest.

The scoring analogy of TICO scores is your FICO Credit Score. It has a base number and a ceiling number. It can go up or down depending on your credit performance. TICO scores works the same way.

Parents/Player and Coaches will be the people evaluating your tournament. If they have good things to say your score goes up and if not it goes down. No outside influence from sponsors, friends, etc… Just your input from a detailed on-line form.

BOTN is excited to give our community a first look at TICO scores. The links at the the top of the page are hot to help you navigate. Please understand the complete TICO Score website will not be ready for another month or two.

So, just keep watching for the latest TICO Score news.

The really short answer is no. Most teams do not find soccer tournaments by searching on Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com etc. Now, for the really long explanation and supporting documentation.

First an article by Bob Carrigan, president of IDG Communications that appears in the October issue of OMMA Magazine, the sort of beacon for the online marketing world (banners, ads, search engines placement, etc.)

With all the discussion — and anxiety among media companies — about “world domination” by the major search companies, you might think that nearly all activity on the Web begins with search. While the amount of traffic from search engines is clearly on the rise, many of the sites at my company, IDG, are starting to see a trend that a lot of publishers whom I speak with are also seeing: Traffic from organic search is leveling off as a percentage of total traffic, while traffic from direct-navigation visits is increasing.

If you need to take a few minutes to read the whole thing, go ahead; we’ll still be here.

Basically, the search engine traffic we are seeing from the search engines is a search on your tournament name. We are also seeing searches for common locations, like the name of the park you are playing in, the key sponsor, etc. But, all of this traffic is generated because the team knows where they want to play and is searching for YOU, not something like soccer tournaments in Ohio in May.

Our advice: If your soccer tournament does not already have a separate domain that is specific and similar to your tournament name, get one. And make sure it is what your teams know you as. For example, your official tournament name might be The ABC Corporation Kick the Grass Soccer Invitational, but if your guest teams are saying thing like, Are you going to the Kick Grass this year? you probably want to register www.kickgrass.com (don’t search for that name, it is already taken and parked by a cyber-squatter hoping to make a few bucks.)

Do not rely on your soccer club web site to market your soccer tournament. The fastest way to get your soccer tournament to show up in the search engines is to use a domain that specifically describes your soccer tournament to your potential audience. And make sure your web pages use your name frequently and in the title of every page. Or, just sign up with TourneyCentral and we’ll take care of all these details for you.

I ran across this post from another blog and it got me thinking about how close we are to serving up sponsor ads and DEALS to mobile devices.

Make My World Clickable by Steve Smith. It’s a good read.

It is deadline time for one of our tournaments and the person in charge of applications sent out a broadcast email to all the teams that have yet to pay the application fee. The message was essentially; ‘pay your fees or we will not consider your team.’ Since they are overbooked in all divisions, the leverage was easy to apply.

Within minutes, a flood of email responses came in. I just sent the check, My club treasurer is sending it today, Please don’t cut us, the check was sent yesterday, I’ll FedEx you the check, etc, etc. This continued pretty much all day, with a bubble of emails coming in over lunch. I suspect more will come in tonight when people get home.

What amazes me is that this is the same audience, when asked to do something via email, like fax in their rosters or confirm their hotel rooming lists, will claim with absolute certainty that they never got your email and it is your fault they were not able to comply within the deadline.

Our advice: When the referee blows the whistle, you don’t get another five minutes to attempt a goal. Everyone is busy, but don’t take excuses. Teams that are organized and comply by the deadline are a pleasure to have at your tournament. Make your appreciation known. Write the coach of the team manager a personal note, thanking them for their organization and respecting your deadlines. Keep this up year after year and pretty soon, you may never have to deal with those teams that suck the energy away from you and your staff.

On the other side, when you do have teams apply who consistently pay late, who demand special hotel treatment, who never show up prepared to register, who ask for early morning registration… turn them away early. Let them know specifically why you are turning them away.

Don’t let teams rob you of your energy and time. You need every precious drop of both to run a soccer tournament as it is.