I received an email from one of our soccer tournaments yesterday, asking if we would put one of those soccer news feeds every other soccer Web site has in the sidebar or on the front page. The logic, he said, was that visitors would stay on the page longer reading the news and that is a good thing for sponsors.

Despite the conventional wisdom of these news feeds making pages sticky, they only really serve to “fill up space” for web sites that have a hard time coming up with fresh material. TourneyCentral soccer tournament sites don’t have that problem as there is always something going on.

Keep this in mind; Teams at a soccer tournament care about their games and their scores. The best way to serve your advertisers is to put them in the DEALS area and plug them. Even then, you’re only going to get major traffic at your deadline, when you accept teams, publish the schedule, directly before the tournament and during for scores. (and to the rules page when teams start losing on tiebreakers but that is a whole other article 😉 )

You are a DESTINATION site. Visitors go to your site for one reason only, to participate in your soccer tournament, i.e., apply, get scores, standings, deals, etc.

All this other stuff is just a distraction, clutter and more stuff to maintain that adds absolutely no value whatsoever. It is the same with online games, “engagement tools” like a spirit center, even photo uploads. If it did add value and it would help you monetize, we would already be doing it. It is in our best interest to generate page views as well.

Our Advice: You are better off writing news about YOUR tournament. Publish that on the front page and publish often. Engage with your teams by email when a significant event happens. (significant to them, not you.) And always be thinking when writing your news items, “What’s in it for my guests?” If you can’t come up with an answer that you would believe yourself, pass.

Soccer teams are out there foraging for soccer tournament deals. They are using the down economy to leverage acceptance of their lessor teams into more elite tournaments. Some of using the promise of attendance to get hotel comp deals for their coaches, special scheduling considerations and lots of other perks. Do you do it?

Whether or not you cave in depends on how strong your brand is and why you are holding your soccer tournament. If you have consistently provided an elite experience for teams, delivering on your promise of great competitions and college coach exposure, you are probably not hurting for teams. In fact, you may be doing better than most years as teams are trimming tournaments in favor the higher quality ones. For the teams looking to leverage a “deal” with you, that is more or less a delusion on their part.

If you are holding a tournament to raise money, you will probably take the teams with the hope of filling your bracket and not falling apart before the economy gets better.

Our advice: Always plan for down years. That means holding back some cash for years where you may not attract as many teams due to the economy. Caving in to team demands when they have the upper hand in a recession is almost never a good idea because:

• you then set the true value of your soccer tournament and
• there will be no reciprocal loyalty. Teams that are always looking for a good deal on price almost never care about your brand and will not do anything for you long-term to help build your event.

While it may be painful in the short term to decline team enticements for them to come to your event, learn from this and begin applying some solid brand-building principles for the next time a recession comes around. Only then will you ensure your place on their list of “must attend” soccer tournaments.

And, if you feel you must work with teams, make sure there is a win-win arrangement coming in or you will find yourself on the losing end of any deal you cut.

I am at the 2009 NSCAA in St. Louis and the hotel bathroom is almost entirely unusable. To be sure, it is has nice shower head, the glass shelf and pedestal sink is really nice, but it all falls apart quickly with the lack of water pressure, only one plug outlet and little bottles of shampoo don’t fit on the shower shelves or the sink. In addition, there is no venting of the steam after you take a shower, a shower longer than usual because there is no water pressure.

Ironically enough, when I had a corporate job and a travel secretary, she used to book me on TWA through St. Louis. She did this because it was cheap to fly and the flight schedule showed you could get anywhere from St. Louis. Only you couldn’t. TWA was going through bankruptcy and they wanted to fill their planes as much as possible. What they never told anyone — including my secretary — was that they would get you to St. Louis and then you would sit. If the plane going from St. Louis to where you wanted to go was not full enough, they would delay it or cancel the flight. What worked on paper just did not work in real life.

She did not understand my frustration with her and it was hard to justify a flight 100% more expensive to MY boss. Then, she had an opportunity to travel to a training workshop a day ahead of me. She booked her own fight the same way she booked mine. We ended up seeing each other in St. Louis the next day as her flight was delayed. She then understood.

As with travel, hotel people should be forced to live in what they design for a week. They would design rooms a bit differently.

Our Advice: Sometimes, especially in the dormant season, a soccer tournament system works well on paper. In your mind, without benefit of frantic teams calling every hour, advertising, hotel booking systems, registration systems, etc work out well. On paper, there is always time to finish the task and move sequentially through the to do list. But when you have several hundred teams all wanting to do something at the same time, they can quickly overwhelm you, your staff and your systems.

Nothing is more especially true for a web site that has real-time scoring. If your tournament is in September, your traffic is almost non-existent in January. Some teams are checking you out, making plans, etc. but for the most part, your web site runs well. But, how will it hold up when you have parents, players and fans of 200 or more teams all wanting to know the scores during a two hour window on Saturday night?

When coming up with systems for your guest teams, make sure they are also ones that you can live with. Build your soccer tournament to expectations that you have of other people. And make sure things are usable when and where your guest teams need and want to use them.