Playing on the big soccer field now!

Hey guys, we just made it into Alltop.com! This is a huge deal.

This means that all your soccer tournament news will reach a wider audience than ever before as will the blog entries we write regularly. As TourneyCentral.com continues to reshape the soccer tournament market as the premium event management software, your tournament will also get a lift because you are part of the TourneyCentral family.

So, take being including in the Alltop.com blog magazine rack as a compliment and confirmation that we each kick as… umm, grass

What is Alltop? The easiest way to describe it is to let you watch the video below. Enjoy.

Are you up or down in your applications?

Are you up or down in application for your soccer tournament? How do you know? Are you comparing from last year? Why?

Here is an interesting and perhaps more reasonable way of looking at your numbers. Look up the birth statistics for the areas that you draw from. If you have a TourneyCentral Web site, log into your admin area and click on the Tournament PulsePoint™ tab to see where your teams are coming from.

Birth rates in Ohio

Graph the birth rates by age. That is your potential market. If you see one year dramatically low, why spend more money trying to attract that age group? You may already have a large percentage of the available pool.

Just another way of looking at your marketing dollars.

Consistent design matters

Every so often, a tournament looking to join the TourneyCentral family calls up and says something along the lines of:

We’re a very different tournament and we wany you to design a totally different web site for us. We want to look and act different than everyone else in your calendar.

When pressed, they admit that:

• They have soccer teams apply
• They accept soccer teams to play
• They schedule two soccer teams against each other to play in a match to see who is the winner
• They keep score to see who advances to take a trophy
• They accept advertising and sponsorship
• They are basically running a soccer tournament where they need to get large numbers of players, parents, coaches and fans to a field at a particular date and time.

So, I ask, what sort of “different” did you need? Well, we just want a different LOOK, we want menu choices to be different, we want to do our own thing.

But the irony of the matter is your guest teams don’t want you to do your own thing. They want to know how to read about your soccer tournament, they want to know how to apply easily, they want to know where the schedule is posted, they want to know how to find the scores. In short, they want to know, not guess.

Recently, I ran across this blog post that explains the whole point rather nicely. In short, a hotel decided that they wanted to be different and were going to design their hotel room card keys with the branding DOWN and the swipe strip UP. Anyone who has ever stayed in a hotel knows that the strip goes down, you look for the little arrow and insert the card with the arrow pointing toward the door. Because this has been standardized, if it doesn’t work that way, you would think it is broken, just like the author did. Valuable time and hotel resources were wasted on a customer who didn’t “understand” the hotel difference. I suspect that there was more than one confused customer on every night the hotel entertained guests.

Our Advice: Different is good, but focus different on where it makes the most sense for a soccer tournament; on your competition, your game format, the helpfulness of your staff, a high level of guest service, great pairings, etc. Different with your web site only adds to confusion and increases your tournament costs and, in some instances, drives a team away. If you hide the front door, how do you expect a team to enter?

A system like TourneyCentral has been “battle-tested” and gives teams a level of comfort that they are entering a well-managed soccer tournament. When they see that top graphic, top menu, side bar and look and feel of a “TourneyCentral” site, they know immediately they are in good hands. (a word of caution, we have developed such a solid brand over the past ten years that many events are copying our look and feel… look for the Powered By TourneyCentral.com seal at the bottom)

We continue to change and add new features to make your event stand out, but we do it in subtle ways to keep that high level of comfort and trust your guest teams have with your event.

Be different, but not weird. Different is good; weird just costs your soccer tournament time, money and teams.

Pasta Hut vs Real Pasta

My daughter had a high school tournament to play this weekend on she asked for pasta for Friday night dinner. I remembered the Pizza Hut commercials where they showed these big trays of “3 pounds of pasta.” So, I ordered the Tuscan chicken alfredo, thinking that it would be somewhat delicious. Everyone on the commercial seemed happy enough.

We got the box of pasta, flipped open the lid and were let down almost immediately. The pasta was not a deep dish of cheesy goodness, smothered in rich, creamy alfredo sauce like they showed on TV. Instead, it was a single layer of helpless, lifeless, over-cooked pasta curls with some quasi-grilled chicken barely there on top. It tasted like pizza and had the texture of oatmeal. Rufus enjoyed most of it the day after.

Our advice: Don’t oversell your tournament! Make sure what you deliver at least looks like the product you are advertising. You may be able to get one or two teams to buy a really good sales job, but they won’t be back. And, chance are, they will tell friends.

Rockers exit season with a hat-trick

Rivershark Rockers upset Chatham, Illinois team to win the Fort Wayne Invitational

Kaylin Hunsaker, Melissa McLean, Molly Holliman

With final game score of 4-1, the Rivershark Rockers finished their 2008 season with a medal hat-trick, placing in the adidas Warrior Socer Classic, the West Carrollton Soccer Blast and the Fort Wayne Invitational in the last three weekends of soccer tournament play. The Rockers upset the Five Star SC team from Chatham, Ill. to claim the first-place medal at the Invitational.

“It’s always nice to finsh strong,” said John McVey, head coach for the Rivershark Rockers. “The girls looks forward to the Fort Wayne Invitational every year as their last tournament together before starting their high school or college seasons.”

The Rockers are sponsored by Englewood-based Rivershark, Inc., the parent company of TourneyCentral.com and are part of the Southstars Soccer Club. TourneyCentral hosts the Fort Wayne invtiational and 24 other local Miami Valley soccer tournaments.

For all the scores of the Rivershark Rockers and the other 108 teams competing at the Fort Wayne Invitational, visit the Web site at www.fwinvitational.com.

PHOTO: Kaylin Hunsaker, Melissa McLean, Molly Holliman

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.