Tag Archives: Soccer

Soccer tournament legacy – a #letsblogoff post

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What will be your legacy as a soccer tournament? Why are you doing all this? Will players and their fans still talk about your event long after they have left town?

For many soccer tournaments, the immediate goal is to make money for the club or the league. That has to be done for the tournament to continue year after year. But beyond making money, think about how your event is leaving a legacy for each soccer player who participates, each coach who brings their team to play another and each parent who spends the weekend with their kid in the company of other kids and parents. Think about how your tournament shapes your community and contributes to its legacy.

Will your tournament be the subject of a story around the Thanksgiving table that starts out as, “Remember when we went to …” and ends with uncontrollable fits of laughter, followed by knowing glances and wistful sighs?

Our advice: Think about the intangibles about twice as much as you think about the operational parts of your tournament. These things include fair play, good referees, short lines at the concession stand, quality hotels, fun things to do between games, good communication with coaches, friendly field marshals and cheerful volunteers. Update scores as fast as you can. Make sure your maps are clear and correct. Never assume everyone knows what “you are here” means. And perform random acts of kindness, no matter how tired you are or how late it is.

Tell compelling, positive stories about your tournament and the players, coaches and families to anyone who will listen. Share them on your website or blog.

Stay humble and never forget the teams who are playing at your tournament are your guests who chose to come to your event among a large and growing market.

These are the things that create a soccer tournament legacy worth passing on.

This blog post is part of a blog-off series with a group of bloggers from different professions and world views, each exploring a theme from his/her world view. This was about “answering the question, “What is legacy?”” To explore how others handled the theme, check them out below. I will add links as they publish.

Economic Impact of Youth Soccer Tournaments

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Most people would say that bringing hundreds of youth soccer teams and their families to your town for a weekend youth soccer tournament would be good for the local economy.

But how good is it?

Knowing the answer to that question could really make things easier for tournament directors who are trying to schedule fields, get sponsors and generally drum up support from the local business community.

Using an integrated, online solution for marketing, scheduling and managing your soccer tournament could provide some of the answers. One example is the Tournament PulsePoint™ tool standard with every TourneyCentral site.

The tool is available to TourneyCentral tournament directors as one of several administrative modules that take the mystery out of running a tournament. Tournament PulsePoint™ uses numbers from the U.S. Soccer Foundation Economic Impact model, economic impact from the National Association of Sport Commissions and marketing data from the U.S. Census Bureau to provide overall economic impact and other marketing data based on the numbers of teams in your tournament and where they come from.

All of the information can be seen on a dashboard style screen including a map with pin marks on the locations of the teams in your tourney.

Youth soccer tournaments mean business; big business for your organization and for hotels, stores and restaurants in your town. The tools are now available to help you manage and market your soccer tournament like the serious business that it is.

Soccer Tournaments Mean Business on LinkedIn

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Soccer Tournaments Mean Business

Most youth soccer tournaments are run by volunteers who generously dedicate huge chunks of their time, talent and sometimes even their own money because they love the game and love to see kids get a chance to compete on a high level. But a youth soccer tournament represents big business to the clubs that sponsor them and to the business community in host cities.

There is a new resource for directors of these events and all others who want to share their knowledge or perhaps pick up a thing or two. If you have not already done so, join the Soccer Tournaments Mean Business Group on LinkedIn and start to share thoughts and network with other like-minded, dedicated soccer folks.

Social media is picking up momentum as a means of communication for business professionals in all walks of life. LinkedIn is the recognized leader for people who would rather separate their business interests from their other social networking activity on Facebook and Twitter.

Sharing ideas and making contacts with tournament directors from around the world can put your event on the forefront of using the latest and best tools, software and procedures that will make your event more attractive to youth soccer teams and to the sponsors who want their name and business attached to a winner.

The group was started by TourneyCentral, a provider of integrated online solution for youth soccer tournaments, but is open to everyone in the youth soccer tournament world who wants to dial up the professionalism of their event.

Charm City Cakes aces display booth at the NSCAA

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Ace of Cakes TourneyCentral soccer cake at the NSCAA

The 2011 NSCAA Convention is being held in Baltimore. Naturally, we had to get a Charm City Cakes, Ace of Cakes cake. Just had to! But what was it going to look like?

Back in June when we were planning the booth, we had all sorts of ideas. The one that finally emerged was a Maryland blue crab tearing at a soccer ball. The big problem was nobody here at TourneyCentral could draw.

“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just go to a toy store, find a soccer ball and a toy crab, put them together, shoot that and send it over to the cake folks.” Only in Ohio, Maryland blue crabs are hard to find. Any crab was hard to find. I was just about to give up when I tweeted:

Can anyone draw a Maryland blue crab attacking a soccer ball like a monster truck?

A few days later, I got an email with a sketch attached from Nicole Manzo. Nichole is a talented artist who loves being creative but was apprehensive about studying art. Art doesn’t pay the bills; business skills do.

But the world could not lose one more artist to “practical thinking” and her sketch was going to be my cake. I sent it over to Duff’s crew and they pounced on it, confident they could make an awesome cake from that.

And they did. And they not only made an awesome cake, they each signed Nicole’s sketch which we are going to frame and present to her when we get back home to Dayton.

And this is Nicole’s sketch Katherine and Ben used to build her cake. The Charm City Cakes crew is just awesome for doing this for us. We’re fans forever! (My favorite edit is the lipstick on the crab. Awesome!)

And just because Mary Alice’s voice was in my head, saying “It’s cake. Eat the cake.” and I didn’t get a piece the last time we got a Charm City Cake, we sliced into the cake at about 8:00pm and started serving pieces to hungry soccer coaches who stopped by the booth.

There may be some left, so if you are hungry, booth 1527. Remember, cake at 8:00pm is dessert, but at 8:00am, it is pastry. Yellow cake, chocolate butter cream filling. Awesomely delicious crab cake.

UPDATED
The Fairmont High School Newspaper published the story about Nicole. You can read it here.