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.

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.

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.

Next up: Pinterest

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.

It’s no secret that we’re pretty rabid Mad Men fans around the TourneyCentral offices. During the first four seasons, Monday mornings usually hosted a lively discussion time as we deconstructed the episode from the previous night. While drinking strong coffee, of course… nothing stronger. Really.

So we’re pretty excited that season five is just a few weeks away on March 25, 2012. Then we found out that Newsweek is publishing its March 19 issue designed like it is 1964 and they are encouraging their advertisers to submit their ads for that issue designed as circa 1964 ads.

And that we could not resist. We’re not advertising in Newsweek but we are running the ad we may have submitted on the front page of our website. Close enough, right?

Unfortunately, soccer in America in the ’60s was almost nonexistent. There were no competitive youth soccer tournaments ads we could look up and model after. But if soccer tournaments advertised in 1964, we think the ad may have looked kinda like this.

We had to keep the dimensions to fit into a website and not a magazine page and language like “click here” would certainly have been odd in 1964, but we think it hits the mark. We hope you agree.

Here is the Mad Men clip that inspired the headline and the copy.

Our Advice: You may not be a Mad Men fan and that’s ok. The show is not for everyone. What we think is important is that you reach out beyond just soccer and connect with the community your event is a part of. For us, it is that cultural world of old-school advertising. For you, it may be your local park district or the arts department at the high school or even a local rock band. When you reach out to the other interests your club teams are involved in, you create good will for your soccer tournament. People see your event as integral to their community.

When you become part of a community, you may find advertisers and sponsors are more likely to support your tournament. Regardless of the financial impact, being part of a larger community is certainly more fun.

And if you are a Mad Men fan, two full hours on March 25th. See you there.

More recently, the service Path was caught uploading your entire phone book from your iPhone or Android smart phone — without telling you — when you installed their app. They have since apologized and claimed to have removed all users’ data from their servers but who really knows.

And of course, everyone’s favorite — Facebook — has a long history of deserving our mistrust with their ever-changing privacy policy and moving the settings around so we can’t find and change them easily.

Our Advice: It has taken a long time for people to trust the Internet. As the ability for services to sell services and goods erodes in the wake of alternative free services, there will always be a temptation to monetize customer data to advertisers and sponsors. In fact, you may have already been approached by sponsors asking for your list of teams, players and coaches.

The trust your teams gives you to keep their data away from marketers is not easily gained and can be lost in moments. Once you release data out, it can never be gotten back. Ever. You will be putting those coaches on mailing lists for years to come as the list get sold over and over and over.

At TourneyCentral, we won’t ever rent, sell, lend, lease or otherwise give out email addresses. In fact, every tournament we host agrees to that privacy policy as part of their use agreement.

Trust us. It’s not just something we say to get your business. It’s how we do business.

A few weeks ago, we signed up for a Square account to test with a small consumer product line we have that is mobile.

Wow, were we impressed.

The sign up process was easy. We simply needed an EIN number, a verifiable bank account and we were set up to accept credit cards (on site only, no phone or Internet sales.) Within a week, Square shipped a credit card swipe reader which gets plugged into an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone. Download the app, log in and you are taking credit cards. You can even take a picture of the customer holding up the product they bought as part of the receipt!

There are no set up fees, no equipment to buy. Square sends the small reader free of charge. The fee is 2.75% per swipe for all cards (higher for manual entry) The funds are transferred into our account later that night and available the next business day.

Our Advice: Sign up with Square and start taking credit cards at the fields for t-shirts and other concessions. Be sure to control the sign up process at the treasurer level and above and make sure the account is set up under the tournament’s brand. Square sends out one free reader as part of the account, but I think they will send out more if needed for multiple locations. We will send them an email and follow up when they reply. Answer is online at this page.

Control the card readers as you would any other financially sensitive equipment. Establish as few points of purchase as possible and only with trusted staff. You may even want to purchase iPads for use by the concessions staff only so your login credentials and accounts are not compromised. Change the passwords immediately after the event or shift change.

You will need an internet connection or smartphone (iPhone, Android) with 3G at the fields.

2012 is the year soccer tournaments will become mobile very quickly. Technology and services like Square will help us get there.

The long, more substantive answer is we’ve never seen early bird or multiple discount pricing actually move the needle on attracting teams to a tournament. Teams who want to come play at your event will come because it is a great experience that fulfills the needs of their team development, not because it is a few bucks cheaper. Everyone SAYS that price determines their participation, but their actual behavior really doesn’t reflect that. For the few teams that it does, you will never be cheap enough anyway…

Generally, though, the teams are all applying later and later to the deadline. I think it is mostly because our culture is moving to a Just In Time mentality where everything is delivered next day, downloadable immediately, etc, etc. Soccer tournaments are just one more thing a coach can apply to today for a tomorrow deadline,.

Our Advice: Instead of giving an early bird pricing break, why not do a guarantee on something teams really value, like custom scheduling? For example, the first three teams to apply in each division guarantee a late Sat start or a multiple-coach schedule with no conflict,.. something like that? Then you have a legit “Sorry, we can’t accommodate your multiple team coach because you applied the day before the deadline” rationale.

The early bird gets the worm. So too should the early bird to apply to your soccer tournament.

We are all set up and ready to go at the 2012 NCSAA Convention in Kansas City, MO. Last night was a great meet and greet opener.

Stop by today (booth 1342) and get your free QR Code sticker and check out why 2012 will be a great year for mobile in soccer tournaments.