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Some assembly required. Here’s your bag of parts!

At some point in time during the past couple of years, vendors quit selling “solutions” and are now selling bags of parts. They have an app to do this part and a web site to do this. Their Windows-PC software manages this part on your desktop, doesn’t do Macs, iPads or iPhones. And your website? Well, they don’t know how to do that, but they are pretty sure it’s easy.

“Do you want to talk to our tech people?” the sales person asks.

And you talk to their tech people but the tech people only know how to screw in this part to that other part. They don’t know (or care) how the whole thing works. Their job is only to get you to understand how their parts works.

And you hang up, frustrated that nobody quite knows how all the parts fit together so you can just get on with the business of putting on your soccer tournament!

Our Advice: Quit buying parts from junk dealers, expecting to find the best deal on website hosting, scheduling, referee assigning or hotel rooming. Instead, focus your energy on providing the best overall experience to your guest teams using an integrated, comprehensive solution.

At TourneyCentral, all our modules — from team applications through scheduling and scoring to referee assignments — all work together. They were built by people who were tasked to create soccer tournaments, not just fill up hotel rooms or tweet out stuff. We’ve all been there and we continue to be there.

At the end of the weekend, you want your guest teams talking about how tight your tournament was, not how irritating it was to book a room or find a score. You want to deliver a fully-assembled tournament, not just a bag of parts.

The dangers of a single-interest at a soccer tournament

There is an old joke about five blind men describing an elephant. The one who feels the tusks insist that an elephant is made up of hard stone, shaped to a pointy end. The man feeling the ears swears an elephant is a huge tarp. And so on, each forming his own opinion on what an elephant is based on his own personal experience. Of course, any seeing person would recognize the elephant is the sum total of all of these observations, even though each’s observations are entirely accurate.

This is what a soccer tournament is like sometimes. The referee assignor may be entirely focused on getting referees assigned that he forgets the game scheduler has coaches with special scheduling needs. The game scheduler may forget that the field coordinator has to work with restrictions on field use imposed by the parks department. The ad sales person may forget that the tournament director has profit considerations and can’t pay for the extra three field banners, and so on.

Gone are the days when a few coaches could get some teams together and play some games over the weekend and call it a tournament. The modern soccer tournament is less about soccer and more about building an event around soccer. It must be efficient, comprehensive, competitive and collaborative, both with the soccer community and the community at large.

Here at TourneyCentral, we think that is a very good thing. It shows that soccer is evolving into the mainstream of American culture.

Our Advice: A successful soccer tournament is a complicated organization with a lot of moving parts, many of which appear to be in conflict with each other. It needs a general manager (tournament director) who has the skills to motivate each “department” to excellence, but also keep the overall goal in mind and on track.

When the referee assignor, the college coach coordinator or the game scheduler is enabled to drive the mission of the tournament, s/he will most likely do so to the detriment of the other departments. We have seen tournaments go bust in the span of a year simply because the focus shifted to accommodate one person’s myopic vision.

Don’t be that kind of event. The teams come to your tournament with an overall expectation of excellence in ALL areas, from a website that is easy and quick to use to frictionless hotel accommodations to great scheduling and easy access to the fields. Your community expects your soccer tournament to reflect positively on it and produce guest teams that have a good experience visiting, win or lose.

In the end, your teams should never see the individual “departments” that make up your tournament.

Setting clear expectations for scheduling conflicts

I was tooling around on one of our tournament web sites, prepping up for the weekend and making sure everything was ready to go when I ran across this frequently-asked question. I thought the answer was brilliant in that it set clear expectations for scheduling conflicts, far in advance and in plain view of the public.

What is the policy on schedule requests?

We will do what we can to accommodate your requests, however, the following types of conflict requests WILL NOT be considered as a legitimate request:

• Can you schedule a game no earlier than noon because our coach is not available?
• Can you schedule a game in the afternoon because we are arriving from out of state the night before or first morning of the tournament?
• I have 6 teams in the tournament and want to get to all the games in one weekend?
• I have 4 teams in the tournament and want to get to all the games in one weekend?
• I have 3 teams in the tournament and want to get to all the games in one weekend?
• Can you schedule one game the first day, and two on the second?
• Can you schedule two games on the first day, and one on the second?
• Can you reschedule the semi-finals and/or finals to accommodate the 2+ teams I have in the semi-finals and/or finals?
• Can you reschedule Sunday games to accommodate my teams departure flight times?
• Can you schedule games on adjacent fields so I can coach two games at once?

Please note that it takes hours and hours to make the tournament game and referee assignment schedule and every schedule change is a big deal. It is impossible to take in to consideration 3 or more teams playing the same weekend. For coaches taking multiple teams to a tournament we encourage you to have assistant coaches who can coach the team in your absence. At best we can try to accommodate 2 teams playing in the same weekend.

I especially like that the requests are termed “not legitimate.” It is a bit like running out of gas on the freeway. While it may be an emergency to you, it is not a legitimate break down as it was foreseen and highly preventable. You will still get a ticket for stopping on the freeway.

Our Advice: We’ve commented on multiple team coaches, late Saturday starts and game conflicts before and our views are pretty well-known. (Go ahead and read the blog posts if you want.. we’ve been ranting on this since 2006.) It is not enough to merely have a policy about multi-team coaches and conflicts; you have to communicate the expectations and boundaries clearly and make sure your staff is 100% on board.

Coaches will keep chipping away at you, your staff or a club coach to find that soft spot in the armor. Don’t let them. Whatever your policy is, stick with it or you will end up with a lot more stress than one coach’s grousing. It’s always better to have one coach irritated at you for not getting what s/he wanted than all of them mad as heck because you didn’t play fairly by your own rules.

Social Media for Soccer Tournaments

This is part of a series on Social Media for Soccer Tournaments. We encourage you to read all the articles below. As social media changes and evolves, we’ll add more content here to keep you up-to-date.

Next up: Pinterest

Using Google Plus for your soccer tournament

The latest player in the suite of tools known as social media is Google Plus, or more commonly seen as G+ in buttons. While it can’t boast anywhere near the number of users Facebook and Twitter have, it has one advantage the others don’t — Google Search. However, it is growing fast.

Most Internet users start off a web session on google.com, whether or not they know the direct web address of the site they are looking for. Many simply type in keywords like “soccer tournaments in Ohio” or “soccer tournament software.” If these keywords are in your G+ posts, you have a greater chance of being found at or near the top of a search result.

Getting started is easy, but you need a Google Account. If you have a Gmail account, you are already there. Simply go to http://plus.google.com and set a profile for yourself.

Once you have a profile, you can then set up a Page for the soccer tournament. Underneath your name, you will see a page symbol. Click on that to “Manage your pages.” Create your soccer tournament page, upload your logo and start sharing. Be sure to add one more person as an administrator and secure the login/password as part of your tournament assets so that it can be seamlessly transferred to a new tournament director if need be later on.

The instructions for Google+ are sorta “discover as you go” but a good book to read is Google+ for Business by Chris Brogan.

Our Advice: Set up a Google Plus page for your soccer tournament. Repost your front page news, scores, sponsor offers and photos to your page. Don’t worry so much about interacting on your page as a social media channel just yet; that will probably come next year.

Be sure to include keywords in your post and photo captions as these keywords are pushed directly into the Google search engine. The sooner you start, the better head start you will have on all the other soccer tournaments who will discover and set up on Google Plus next year. Be first.

All TourneyCentral events support Google+ In your Admin>Web Site Maintenance Module>Variables you can add your G+ page to the social media sites on the left sidebar along with Twitter and Facebook. (See TheGameOfSoccer.com for a sample)

The TourneyCentral G+ page is here. We post photos, blog posts (including this one) as well as interesting photos fans may share.

This is part of a series on Social Media for Soccer Tournaments. We encourage you to read all the articles below.