The weather has been hot days, but really cool nights for the past week in Dayton, Ohio. So, instead of running the central air, I have been opening the windows at night and running fans to circulate the cool air.

The past several years, you may have noticed that appliance makers have been putting shorter and shorter cords on things, presumably to save costs. I’m sure if you did the math, you might discover that a manufacturer could save million — maybe even billions — just shaving an inch off the cord. Who would notice! The problem with this kind of thinking is the next quality team that comes in trying to save a buck a year later would shave another inch off the cord, save more millions until finally the consumer is left with a cord that is exactly 33 inches long and just barely reaches the wall plug.

I guess the next step is to make the assumption that all consumers have extension cards and they can supply their own cord from the fan motor to the wall. After all, I only paid $19.99 for the fan!

I tell you this so the following makes sense. I hit my personal quality nexus this morning, the point where cheap cost and quality meet. I was attempting to redirect the fan with a fresh cup of coffee in my hand. When I went to turn the fan, the cord did not follow and pulled the fan, dumping the hot coffee all over me. If the cord had been a foot longer, this would not have happened and the fan would have moved easily.

Our advice: When looking to increase profitability for your tournament, be careful what you cut into. Make sure that you don’t start shaving off the core things that make your customers attracted to your event. If it is critical to the operation of your tournament (like a cord is to an electric fan) leave it alone.. or better yet, figure out how to provide more functionality with the same or fewer resources. Don’t just cut inches off your cords; they are the lifelines to your success.

I was reading a set of rules for an event that is happening soon, just to make sure the tie-breakers were consistent with the rules. Instead of the fairly standard points, head-to-head, goal differential, goals against, goals for, penalty kicks I was accosted by this complicated set of bonus points based on the GD being a particular spread and then the GD would be applied bonus points….

Arrgghh!! Stop the insanity on these arbitrary and creative tie-breakers. We all understand that the purpose of these complicated tie-breaking rules is to avoid the dreaded shoot-outs at the end of pool play, but this creative math that is different at almost every tournament is making it more difficult for software to support your rules.

Our advice: Simplify and standardize. Take a look around at other tournaments in your target market and try to standardize your tie-breakers so that they will be less confusing for the coaches AND PARENTS. Coaches can do the math easily, but parents don’t — and won’t — do the math. They just want to know who’s first, second, etc. And, there are a lot more parents than there are tournament directors at the event! You may also find that by simplify and standardizing, there will be fewer challenges to your math ability outside your HQ. You may also want to take more time in attracting and seeding teams to ensure ties (draws for the soccer purists) don’t happen.

STATE ASSOCIATIONS and US SOCCER: Mandate a standardized tie-breaking formula. Tournaments will become more and more of your members activities in the next several years and it is in your best interest to standardize NOW when the number of events in manageable. And, while you are at it, you may also want to take a look at standardizing the rules as well.

Yesterday, I received an email from YATL (Yet Another Tournament Listing) web site called The Scoreboard News at www.scoreboardnews.com. In their invitation, in big red letters, they said: [Please do not … refer us to any other web site for additional information]

I found that mildly entertaining, but also a glaring indicator of just how bad most tournament web sites are. How many times have you been told: Just go to our web site for information on that.. and when you get there, you’re left staring at the site, wondering how you would get to that bit of information about the scores or tryouts or a news item on the club, etc, etc.

The Scoreboard News, whose entire existence depends on information about tournaments, camps and leagues is begging its posters to please not send them a reference to their web site. Just fill out the online form they provide for you.

Our Advice: Giving people the Just go to our web site.. is the same thing as saying just down the road, can’t miss it. It hardly ever is just down the road and 90% of the time, you will miss it. Unless you have a TourneyCentral.com site.

In the web industry, we have what is known as the bounce rate. That is the number of folks who come to your front page and don’t go deeper into your web site. I think it is poorly named.

Our TourneyCentral.com sites have a sightly higher than average high bounce rate. But, that is good because when you go to one of our tournament web sites, you can immediately see the Who, What, Where, When, How Much at a glance. We don’t leave your visitors staring at the screen, wondering which link will get them where they need to go.

If you miss what you are looking for on our sites, it probably only means that you have become conditioned to ignore the useless front page most sites put up and start clicking without reading. But, that is ok too, because our About, FAQ, Application, etc. pages all have the Who, What, Where, When, How Much info on them as well.

Today is Friday and with it comes the flood of email to tournaments going on tomorrow from coaches who suddenly can’t make registration night for their teams. My favorites are emails that say: I can’t make it to registration tonight. We’ll see you on Saturday. and then leave it at that.

Wow! How arrogant and self-centered. For tournaments that host more than one team (oh, you all do?) that presents a challenge. Do you stand firm, take a hard stance or allow this team to register on Saturday morning? If you take a hard stand, they may not show up. If you cave, other teams are going to find out and do the same.

Our advice: Don’t cave. But have an option. This is a negotiating tactic and should be treated as one. First, the coach sending this email on a Friday morning assumes that you will be away from your computer and on the fields setting up. Don’t be. Assign someone to pick up email and response immediately back with your pre-determined response. Secondly, have a pre-determined response. One of my favorite no responses would be to offer to check the team in on Saturday morning, between 4-6am, for an additional $100.00 cash per team. Oh, and offer them a free cup of coffee while they wait. If it truly is an emergency, they will be there early in the morning, with cash in hand. If not, greet them warmly on Friday night! (But if you guess wrong and they actually do pull out of your tournament over this issue, never, never, never refund their money. But thank them for their donation.)

As an afterthought, it amazes me as a soccer parent that the first thing the coach does is read us all the riot act about being on time for practice, games etc., yet these same coaches assume the rules of a tournament do not apply to them.

I’m cheating when I look up scores for the TourneyCentral tournaments that are running in the current weekend. I set up some scripts that pull and refresh the scores continuously every 10 seconds. When I am away from my desk, I get them non-stop on my Treo. This is the way I keep track of how the tournaments are doing with posting scores, etc.

While I don’t play favorites with our tournaments (they are all great!), the two tournaments going on Mother’s Day weekend, Sidney Mayfest Classic and the Novi Jaguar Invitational were OUTSTANDING in reporting scores in almost real-time. It was almost like being there (and, with several parents taking and upload photos, it was even more real.)

Our Advice: Report your scores as close to real-time as possible. If you have a TourneyCentral System, you already have the tools to report quickly, even if you don’t have Internet at the fields. Several tournaments call the scores in to someone hanging out in their living room, entering scores from their laptop in front of a large screen TV! Because it is Internet, the scoring input is always available, anywhere in the world. And, you just never know who is watching your tournament… could even be someone blogging and bragging about you!

Invariably, when you publish a game schedule, some teams get early morning games. The loudest teams to complain are those that are only an hour away, they gamble that they won’t get early games and they lose. When they are wrong, it is your fault that they have to get up extra early.

But, what is really sad and frustrating is when they use the now my kids have to wake up an hour earlier and you are putting my team at a disadvantage and my all-time favorite I’ll never go to your tournament again.

Please. From a soccer parent who has had more than fifteen years of early-morning tournament games, I can tell you with 100% certainty that no matter how early the kid needs to wake up to drag his or her sleepy butt to the car, they are not going to be missing one minute of sleep on the drive to the tournament, regardless of how far away it is. And, if the parent is sleepy, then that is why Target, Wal-Mart and Amazon.com make soccer chairs.

Our Advice: Someone has to get the early morning games. Some teams don’t like it, but if you had your last year’s schedule published, it did not come as a surprise to the teams. They applied in full knowledge that they ran just as much a risk of getting early games as did every other team. The fact that they did not book hotel rooms for Friday (or the day previous) is not your fault. You should tell them as much.

Teams should plan to compete at the first possible game and should plan to go all the way to the finals. If that means getting extra rooms for the entire weekend, then that is what it means to compete at the travel soccer level. If the only reason they don’t come back to your tournament next year is they had to play an early game, that is ok… there is always a coach out there getting up even earlier; staying healthier, wealthier and wiser than his competition.

I was in Oxford, Ohio on the Miami University campus this past Saturday. Right before I pulled into town, I heard the commencement ceremony was scheduled for later that afternoon. Since my son was not graduating this semester, I thought little about it except that the traffic on High Street would be horrible (it wasn’t).

As I pulled into town, my glance caught the front of the Uptown Cafe (if you have not yet been there, go. Best pancakes anywhere!) What really stunned me was the line of moms and dads waiting to get in. The place was jam-packed with people. And this was bad.

This was bad because the Uptown is one of those little local places where you go to experience breakfast or a casual lunch. This is one of those places where they don’t mind if you bring your dog and hang out on the sidewalk tables, nursing a cup of coffee, grazing on a burger and fries for an hour (burgers are good, too.) I am certain that the moms, dads and almost newly-minted graduates had not stopped into the Uptown just for food, but to have one last cafe experience with their child-now-an-adult. And, because all the other parents were looking for that same experience, they were robbing each other of that one moment of convergence that would have become a memory. Instead, that moment will be forever as a rushed and crowded hassle. And it is sad.

Our Advice: Figure out what your tournament soul is and fight like hell to preserve it. The Uptown could have spent a few moments every morning throughout the year taking names and numbers of graduating seniors who eat frequently at the Uptown with the intent to auction a place on commencement morning. They could have opened at 3:00 am only for graduating seniors and their families whose parents wanted to slow down the day just a little bit before losing their child forever to employment, their own family, the outside world. (I would have gotten up early!!) For a student who has made the Uptown Cafe a part of their college experience for four-plus years — and shared breakfast there with their mom or dad when they were in town — the 30 minutes or so spent on graduation day would have been the most precious graduation gift the Uptown Cafe could have given.

If your soul is your registration night party for the coaches, make it special. I know of several tournaments that do a dang good job of using the registration for reacquainting with old friends. If your soul is allowing the teams to have fun, don’t invite or accept teams that will use win at all costs tactics (you know who they are.. so does everyone else.) You get the idea.

A soul is a terrible thing to sell. Once it is put on the market, it can never be bought back. Treasure it, grow it and above all, protect and preserve it.

I went to the local high school to drop off a book my daughter forgot for one of her classes. As I pulled into the parking lot, I swung in next to the Hummer that the local US Army recruiter drives.

This is one organization that understands its brand and its market. A Hummer screams power, domination, muscle.. What high school kid would not be seduced by a US Army branded Hummer?

Our Advice: If your tournament is a muscle event, be a Hummer! If it is a fun tournament, be a VW Bug. You get the idea. And, while we are at it, why not approach your local car dealership (one that sells what you are) and ask if you can borrow a brand wrapped vehicle for a couple weeks and drive it around town. Your tournament brand will be everywhere with very little effort.

This morning, I read an email from a coach attending a tournament that attracts very competitive teams. His team had been scheduled around a group of four teams that were coached by one coach. As it turned out, he got a schedule that has him playing one early morning game and then then not again until very late in the afternoon on the first day. And then, again very early in the morning on the second day.

He was quite upset, and with good reason. He paid the same price to get in the tournament. He has the same expectations of good competition and should be given the same opportunity for a trophy as the four teams coached by the same coach. I doubt, however, the tournament can do little to even out the play. And this coach will probably not be back.

Our advice: As more and more clubs adopt the multiple-team-one-coach policy as a way to save money, consolidate skill, etc, etc, dealing with these teams is having effects on your tournament schedule in ways that had not been anticipated. NOW is the time to craft a policy, publish it and stick to it consistently!

If your policy is designed to attract teams that are coached by on coach and your marketing push is a schedule that suits them, be prepared to reject teams that have their own coach. Long term, we believe a multiple-team coach system is bad business for tournaments. It takes control of the schedule and brand away from the tournament and hands it over to the teams. While scheduling multiple-team coaches for no conflicts may look like customer service from the onset, it is usually the first step in the demise of the event. The next step is price breaks for multiple teams, comp rooms for the coach, etc, etc. If all you attract are mutiple-team coaches, you don’t need an MBA to see where that ultimately leads.

Never forget: The coaches are primarily interested in what gives them the best deal, not what is best for the tournament event.

Recently, I was at a business conference that had nothing to do with soccer… but everything to do with customer service. We stayed at the J.W. Marriott in Tucson, AZ (which I recommend if you are planning a vacation soon!)

The entire conference was good. On the morning we were leaving to the airport, we got a car, but had a fifteen minute wait. No problem, the valet said, If you want to grab a cup of coffee at the Starbucks in our lobby, we’ll come and get you when the car is ready. Ok, so we did.

I ordered a grande, decaf, the clerk smiled and said all the right things. But when she gave me back my change, she just plopped it down in my hand with a bit of attitude, the whole time smiling and wishing me a good day.

Our advice: Words speak softly, but body language SCREAMS!! Make sure your committee, volunteers.. anyone who has any interaction with your guest teams, vendors, suppliers and sponsors understand that it is their role to manage the entire experience, not just to do a particular function efficiently.

Unfair as it is, my take-away from the otherwise good 4-day conference will be forever marked by the feel of change being slapped into my hand by the Starbucks clerk with a bad attitude.

Whenever a tournament cuts teams from its applications, we see the inevitable grumbling, angry emails, etc, but the one thing that seems to be fairly common is something that goes like this:

I can’t believe you didn’t accept our team. Out (team, club, etc) has been supporting your (tournament, club) for many years and we encourage all our teams to apply and support your (fund-raising) efforts by going to your tournament, etc, etc…. usually followed by the recent record of accomplishments over the teams that did get accepted.

Good teams get cut for many reasons, the most common is they didn’t fill in their accomplishments on the application. But that is not my issue. The issue is one of saying things like we support you.

Our Advice: While your tournament may be a fund-raiser, your primary function is one of entertainment. You have a product/service that you are providing that either meets the needs of the guest teams or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t meet their needs, they really should quit supporting you and go somewhere else.

Look at the premium soccer tournaments. They attract teams that meet CRITERIA that has nothing to do with how much a team/club supports them and has everything to do with does the applying team meet our acceptance criteria. If you are relying on the support of another team/club for your tournament’s success, you don’t have a marketable product. Do things well, apply consistent standards and your tournament will thrive.

Recently, a tournament made a simple request to the teams that have been accepted. The message wasn’t quite as clear as it could be and created some questions. So, the responsible tournament director sent out another email, attempting to clarify the first email. Naturally, that did not clear it up; it only produced about three times more questions than did the original email.

Our Advice: Before sending out an email, read it out loud. Does it make sense? If it requires someone to do something, make sure the steps are clear by using bullet points and then attempting to do it yourself (or better, on someone removed from the process) using ONLY the directions you provided. Did you skip a step? Did you make an assumption? Chance are, you did.

And, as always, if your email contains a web address, email or phone number, copy/paste the web address into your browser to make sure it goes there. Send the email to make sure it is correct and call the number to make sure the right person/company answers. Every time.

I was reading an ad for Cingular Wireless in the New York Times this morning. You may know this campaign: The fewest dropped calls of any national network. This has always bothered me and now I know why.

Cingular is telling it’s customers that dropped calls are a fact of cell phone use. Can’t do anything about it except minimize the number of times it happens. The subtext is they aren’t even going to TRY to eliminate the dropped calls.

How many of your guest teams would come to your tournament if your marketing line was: Fewest late starts of any tournament. or Fewest number of club linesmen or even Fewest incorrect champions declared of any tournament. You get the idea.

Our advice: Don’t start off your tournament with the assumption that something can’t be done. Assume that it can be and the only challenge is to figure out how. How can you post scores immediately following the end of the game. How do we start 100% of the games on-time. How do we staff referees at 100%. You may not hit it every time, but you won’t be throwing your hands up in resignation like Cingular did.

One quick plug. if you have not already read the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki, please do. It is not a book about getting rich (though it probably will help) but a book about getting past what people say can’t be done, whether that is buying and selling real estate, inventing a better mousetrap or running a soccer tournament.

Recently, I was sent over a whole bunch of links to add to a tournament web site. The assumption was that a TourneyCentral site was just like any other webmaster arrangement and that the links would go somewhere and that we would also write up the summary for what all these links were, etc, etc. I sent the email back with a polite That is not the product you signed up for email.

That got me thinking.

For a period of about a year, I did some marketing for a company that developed this equine medical device for race horses. Quite a clever device, but the one BIG thing I learned was a bit about human behavior.

The odds of a horse winning a major race, like the Kentucky Derby, are so minimal that an owner may see the winner’s circle once in a lifetime. Many never do. If you are a trainer, the owner’s accountant, the marketing PR person for the horse, your chances of being in the winner’s circle are even less. Here is the part about human nature that is interesting.

Horse people CRAVE being part of the winner’s circle. It is their dream to be photographed with the wreath, the cup, sometimes the horse. When someone wins, they instantly have A LOT of friends! EVERYONE wants to be in that winner’s circle and so they all crowd in tight, sometimes to the point of obliterating part of the owner’s face. (Yeah, it happens)

Our Advice: Don’t make your web site a crowded winner’s circle. Keep in mind that it is there to help your guest teams and the pay out there will be teams that are more prepared to attend your event. Too often, the urge is to cram every last thing the club, the city, the sponsors, the this guy’s deal, the that guy’s deal is promoting that you lose site of what the web site is all about. If the teams don’t IMMEDIATELY know where to go to apply, to look up scores, to find stuff to do, your web site is missing the mark. Keep the hanger’s-on off your web site and keep your tournament event the only thing on your winner’s circle.

We are staying at a Renaissance Grand during the US Youth Soccer Convention. First, let me say that everything in the hotel room is nice. The beds are nice, the furniture in the room is nice, everything is upper scale.

But entirely unusable. Let me explain.

The desk I am writing this from is a nice, dark cherry with carved legs with inlaid wood veneer on the top. The chair I am sitting in is equally ornate and may be upholstered in Corinthian leather. But, here is where this all falls down. The table is too narrow to use a notebook computer. The chair is very heavy and hard to roll and the arms do not tuck neatly under the desk, so I am leaning over, typing on my keyboard. (yes, it is uncomfortable and is affecting the mood of this post)

The bathroom is similarly equipped. But the really nice vanity drains incredibly slowly and, of course, the little soap and shampoo do not fit on the tray. And finally, the coffee maker is in a tray that pulls out, but the switch to turn it on and off is on the front, behind the tray lip. And to make this worse, it shares the same armoire shelf as the TV, so there is no space next to the coffee maker to set down your cup. But, it is a nice coffee maker and makes a great cup of coffee!

Our Advice: When deciding the features and amenities of your tournament, make sure EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER! For example, you may plan a great reception for your registration, but if there is no parking, it will be a bad experience for the coaches. Take the same approach with your web site. Does everything fit together or do you have a registration system that really doesn’t work with the schedule, etc. (While we are on that subject, take a look at the TourneyCentral.com site.)

Look at everything you provide for your guest teams and make sure that they are usable as a cohesive event, not a bunch of room furnishings that looks great but don’t play well together.