Tag Archives: Soccer tournaments

TourneyCentral serves up sweet deal with the ‘Ace of Cakes’

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20080125_cakeBALTIMORE – Pass by the TourneyCentral booth at the 2008 National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) convention and you would most likely do a double take at the huge soccer ball cake on display.

“The conference was in Baltimore this year,” says Gerard McLean, president of Rivershark, Inc., the parent company of TourneyCentral.com. “We’re such huge fans of the show ‘Ace of Cakes’ that is was a no-brainer to get a cake.” The cake was made by the ‘Ace’ bakers of Charm City Cakes, based in Baltimore, Md. Duff Goldman and his crew are the stars of the Food Network’s popular show, ‘The Ace of Cakes.’

McLean added that he usually tries to bring local flavor to his booth by supporting local businesses at the NSCAA. In addition to purchasing a cake from Charm City Cakes, McLean raffled off the cake, with the hope that the winner would donate the cake. The winner of the cake, Mark Serdjenian, the head coach of the men’s soccer program at Colby College in Maine, did not disappoint. The cake was donated in Serdjenian’s name to the Ronald McDonald House of Baltimore.

“The Ronald McDonald House children thoroughly enjoyed the delicious cake,” said Joshua Harden, manager of volunteer services at the house.

In addition, two local soccer tournaments, the Mead Cup and the Warrior Classic also exhibited at the NSCAA. For more information about the NSCAA show, including a photo gallery of the soccer cake, visit www.tourneycentral.com/nscaa.

PHOTO (contributed) A Ronald McDonald resident savors the cake with a plate ready for his slice.

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Local Dayton organizations a hit at the NSCAA in Baltimore

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20080119warriorDAYTON – Two local tournaments are a hit at this year’s National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) Conference in Baltimore this weekend. The adidas Warrior Soccer Classic and the Mead Cup soccer tournament were both represented at the exhibition.

“The NSCAA represents some of the finest soccer at all levels,” says Carol Maas, co-director of the Warrior Classic. “Having the privilege of recently serving on the Montgomery County Sports Authority Task Force Committee, I have an increased awareness of the benefits of bringing sporting events to Dayton and the enhancement of the events we already host.”

Both tournaments are looking to attract competitive soccer teams from the East Coast, a large part of this year’s attendees according to the NSCAA.

In addition to the local tournament exhibiting, TourneyCentral – a local soccer tournament management company based in Englewood – presented a workshop yesterday on hyper-localism media and the soccer community. TourneyCentral provides the web-based management tools for both tournament events, as well as twenty-four additional soccer tournaments around the Dayton metro area.

Other local organizations represented at the exhibition are the Dayton Marriott (Dayton) and One Call Now (Troy).

For more information about the Warrior Classic and the Mead Cup, visit the tournament calendar at www.daytondailynews.com/soccer.

Donna Michael (left) with the Dayton Montgomery County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, discusses the Warrior Classic hotel system with Hank Maas. Maas schedules over 450 teams, playing at four venues for the Warrior Classic held on Memorial Day weekend in Dayton.

Teen volunteer works Mead Cup booth at the 2008 NSCAA

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20080118cusaDAYTON – For years, Laura Shields, 19, has watched her parents, Rick and Nancy Shields dash off to work the Mead Cup exhibit booth at the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) while she sat at home. This year, because of some unplanned manpower shortage for the booth, she had a chance to volunteer for the booth, meeting and greeting fellow soccer colleagues. And she jumped at it.

“I’ve always wanted to come and volunteer to work the booth,” Shields says. “It seemed like just a lot of fun.”

A student at Capital University in Columbus, Shields has not been disappointed as she connects with old friends and meets new one. The NSCAA Convention runs from Wed. Jan. 6 through Sat. Jan 19 in Baltimore, Md. and host over 7,000 soccer coaches, administrators and enthusiasts.

For more information on the annual Mead Cup soccer tournament, held each Labor Day weekend in Dayton and Beavercreek, log onto the Web site at www.meadcupsoccer.com.

PHOTO: Laura (right) and Nancy Shields talk soccer with Patrick Ferguson, head coach of the women’s soccer program at Wright State University.

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Soccer tournament directors from southwest Ohio gather for annual meeting

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20080105martellaDAYTON – This past Saturday, almost fifty soccer tournament directors from the Ohio South Youth Soccer Association (OSYSA) gathered for their annual meeting at the Dayton Marriott. Carol Maas, the OSYSA tournament registrar, led a feature-packed meeting that included presentations by Ray Marcano with Cox Ohio Publishing, Zachary Blaine with Athletes in Action and Dante Washington and Mark Santel with Major League Soccer.

“We have quality tournaments by design,” claims Jim Martella, executive director for the OSYSA. “Meetings like this where we get the tournament directors together to share ideas is one of the segments of that goal.” Martella is also the Chairman of the US Youth Soccer National Champion Committee.

The OSYSA hosts soccer tournaments in the Dayton, Cincinnati and Columbus areas, servicing over an estimated 200,000 soccer players and their families each year, according to statistics provided by TourneyCentral. About thirty percent of all players in the tournaments travel in from other states.

“This is a great way for the directors to get together and start off the soccer season on a positive note,” says Maas. Maas is no stranger to the soccer tournament market as she is also the co-director of the adidas Warrior Soccer Classic, held over Memorial Day weekend.

For more information on OSYSA, visit the web site at www.osysa.com.

PHOTO: Jim Martella addresses the OSYSA tournament directors at the annual soccer tournament directors’ meeting held at the Dayton Marriott, Sat., Jan 5, 2008.

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TourneyCentral and Dayton Daily News to present a hyper-localism workshop at the 2008 NSCAA

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TourneyCentral and www.daytondailynews.com to present a workshop on hyper-localism at the 2008 NSCAA

TourneyCentral announced today that it has arranged to present a workshop, in collaboration with the Dayton Daily News (www.daytondailynews.com) on soccer organizations and hyper-localism.

Hyper-localism is the practice of reporting news stories that happening in your own neighborhoods and backyards. Club soccer is hyper-local for most newspapers and the soccer public demands coverage. Yet reporters are spread thin covering other hyper-local stories so soccer typically gets ignored.

“This workshop is the examination of a year-long hyper-local experiment whereby TourneyCentral provides www.DaytonDailyNews.com and other local Cox Ohio newspaper sites with rich human interest stories related to the tournaments it hosts in southwest Ohio,” says Gerard McLean, Principle at TourneyCentral. “We hope the the participants will walk away with a game-plan on working with your local newspapers to get the media coverage their soccer organization needs and deserves.”

The content appears on all Cox Ohio newspaper web sites, but most prominently at www.daytondailynews.com/soccer

The workshop will be held on Friday, January 18 at 10:30am and presented jointly by Ray Marcano, Internet General Manager with Cox Ohio and Gerard McLean.

About TourneyCentral
TourneyCentral.com provides comprehensive, event-focused, web-based solutions for youth soccer tournaments and is wholly owned by Rivershark, Inc. an Ohio Corporation. Since 1999, TourneyCentral has been producing web sites that provide youth soccer tournaments with end-to-end integrated experience management for guest teams, from marketing through scoring. In addition, the advertising tools provide the tournaments with an increased opportunity for advertising and sponsorship revenue as a result of significantly increased traffic to the web site. For more information, visit www.tourneycentral.com.

Companion and marketing partner properties consist of: The Soccer Tournament Review, a blog and iTunes podcast for tournament directors, MyTournamentSpace, a photo-sharing site linked directly into the tournament game schedule and www.ticoscore.com, a single-source database and ranking system for soccer tournaments.

Visit us at the 2009 NSCAA in St. Louis, MO.

TourneyCentral facilitates tournament partnership at the 2008 NSCAA Convention

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Four tournaments, the Novi Jaquar Invitational, the adidas Warrior Soccer Classic, the Pikes Peak Invitational and the Veterans Invitational will be showing at the 2008 NSCAA Convention January 17-19, 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Four tournaments, the Novi Jaquar Invitational, the adidas Warrior Soccer Classic, the Pikes Peak Invitational and the Veterans Invitational will be showing at the 2008 NSCAA Convention January 17-19, 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland.

The collaborative effort was an initiative by TourneyCentral to expand the tournament presence within the trade.

“Tournaments of this caliber NEED to establish a presence at the NSCAA,” says Gerard McLean, Principle at TourneyCentral. “A booth at the largest soccer trade show in the US tells the marketplace that you are serious and have reached a certain level of sophistication.”

The tournaments have been placed in booth 2724 which is a corner booth.

“Great placement,” adds McLean. “They will do well and the goal is to expand out the tournament presence. Long-term, I hope every tournament we do eventually shows at the NSCAA. We’ll help them get here.”

TourneyCentral will be showing at the NSCAA in their own expanded booth, 2813, which is an endcap placement on a cross-roads aisle. Mead Cup, another TourneyCentral tournament will also be showing in their own booth, 2803 and have been at the NSCAA for the past 4 years.

About TourneyCentral
TourneyCentral.com provides comprehensive, event-focused, web-based solutions for youth soccer tournaments and is wholly owned by Rivershark, Inc. an Ohio Corporation. Since 1999, TourneyCentral has been producing web sites that provide youth soccer tournaments with end-to-end integrated experience management for guest teams, from marketing through scoring. In addition, the advertising tools provide the tournaments with an increased opportunity for advertising and sponsorship revenue as a result of significantly increased traffic to the web site. For more information, visit www.tourneycentral.com.

Companion and marketing partner properties consist of: The Soccer Tournament Review, a blog and iTunes podcast for tournament directors, MyTournamentSpace, a photo-sharing site linked directly into the tournament game schedule and www.ticoscore.com, a single-source database and ranking system for soccer tournaments.

Visit us at the 2009 NSCAA in St. Louis, MO.

TourneyCentral soccer tournament sites are 100% compatible with iPhone

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TourneyCentral.com announces that the family of youth soccer tournaments are 100% compatible with iPhone, making iPhone the perfect on-venue mobile device for updating scores and news.

TourneyCentral.com announced today that the web sites that deliver real-time information about youth soccer tournaments are 100% compatible with iPhone. The mobile devices ship with MacOS X’s Safari web browser and allows the user to view the full web site instead of a specially formatted one as used by other popular so-called smart phones such as Blackberry and Treo.

“We have always developed on the the MacOS platform,” says Gerard McLean, president and CEO of Rivershark, Inc., TourneyCentral’s parent company. “The Safari web browser is a standards-compliant platform and it makes sense to make sure our web-based application reaches as many people as possible without requiring they use any particular web browser.” McLean adds that the display is adjusted to make sure the software also works on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Since it began development in 1998, TourneyCentral has used Mac-based software to design the web-based interface of its web site as well as organize, correct and catalog photos quickly for the tournament web sites using AppleScript, an Apple software product designed to automate repetitive tasks. With the release of MacOS X and the UNIX underpinnings, development was accelerated even more as programmers were able to test in a UNIX/MySQL environment locally on an Xserve, Apple’s server platform, before moving the software to the production-ready servers.

“What this really means for tournament directors,” McLean adds, “is that they will be able to manage their web site in real-time at the venues or en route without worrying about whether or not they have an Internet connection.” Since TourneyCentral sites have web-based scoring and news modules, including email broadcast, a tournament director is now always in touch with the guest teams.

For more information about Apple’s iPhone, visit Apple.com

About TourneyCentral
TourneyCentral.com provides comprehensive, event-focused, web-based solutions for youth soccer tournaments and is wholly owned by Rivershark, Inc. an Ohio Corporation. Since 1999, TourneyCentral has been producing web sites that provide youth soccer tournaments with end-to-end integrated experience management for guest teams, from marketing through scoring. In addition, the advertising tools provide the tournaments with an increased opportunity for advertising and sponsorship revenue as a result of significantly increased traffic to the web site. For more information, visit www.tourneycentral.com.

Companion and marketing partner properties consist of: The Soccer Tournament Review, a blog and iTunes podcast for tournament directors, MyTournamentSpace, a photo-sharing site linked directly into the tournament game schedule and www.ticoscore.com, a single-source database and ranking system for soccer tournaments.

Visit us at the 2009 NSCAA in St. Louis, MO.

TourneyCentral and Cox Ohio Newspaper team up

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TourneyCentral and the Cox Ohio Newspaper websites have teamed up, bringing you information about your local tournaments, teams and players … and they make it very easy to boot!

At all your local Cox Ohio Newspaper websites, navigating to soccer from under the Sports category, the information is proudly displayed free of charge to anyone who is interested in their local soccer world. Information being displayed such as upcoming tournaments to local soccer news to blurbs on local teams, all included with photos to allow you to see some of the action. Worldwide soccer information is also posted to the site which allows you to stay on top of everything, from your backyard to places around the world.

Gerard McLean, President of Rivershark Inc. the parent company of TourneyCentral.com says,”We’re excited about the� possibilities for market exposure we can give our tournament events. Every event has dozens of stories of an intense human nature that never make the Metro Edition of the newspaper. A web-based tool on the Cox Ohio Newspaper sites enables each tournament to put a ‘human face’ on their event. We can’t wait to start telling these stories.”

The exciting part to this is the simplicity to stay connected. Individual stories at every soccer tournament can be found here. Stories of teams, players, families and their unique history can be shared online and up-to-date. It truly is a great blend of media types. A system like this is the next best thing for those who couldn’t make the games or the tournaments. Those family members back home, or parents on business trips, or overseas with our military.

This partnership of TourneyCentral and Cox Ohio Newspaper will allow these people to follow their tournament, club, team(s) or player(s) over the internet in a game by game fashion. Through the newspaper sites, they can navigate to the desired tournament site, and see scores, up coming games, photos, and even will be able to send messages to a player or team from home or around the world, allowing those who are away, to be as close as possible.

Previous stories of local events can be found at
www.tourneycentral.com/ddnnews.html

About TourneyCentral
TourneyCentral.com provides comprehensive, event-focused, web-based solutions for youth soccer tournaments and is wholly owned by Rivershark, Inc. an Ohio Corporation. Since 1999, TourneyCentral has been producing web sites that provide youth soccer tournaments with end-to-end integrated experience management for guest teams, from marketing through scoring. In addition, the advertising tools provide the tournaments with an increased opportunity for advertising and sponsorship revenue as a result of significantly increased traffic to the web site. For more information, visit www.tourneycentral.com.

Companion and marketing partner properties consist of: The Soccer Tournament Review, a blog and iTunes podcast for tournament directors, MyTournamentSpace, a photo-sharing site linked directly into the tournament game schedule and www.ticoscore.com, a single-source database and ranking system for soccer tournaments.

Visit us at the 2009 NSCAA in St. Louis, MO.