One Ohio soccer tournament made a bit of national news lately with a neighboring city setting up speed cameras and issuing over 900 tickets. The soccer tournament pled a good case, citing good will and economic impact for the city. The police from the neighboring city had not been in contact with them regarding this enforcement effort, even as the host city police were helping out directing traffic in and out of the park. That alone probably helped plead the case for “forgiving” the tickets.

Contrary to what most people think, the police don’t just ticket people for easy money. The first priority for the police is road safety and preventing accidents. When they see a car racing by at 40-50 mph on a road that is posted at 25 mph, they are going to do something about it. If they see many, many cars doing the same thing, they are going to sit there and pick you off, soccer tournament or not.

What the police know about soccer parents
I have driven to more away soccer tournaments with my kids than I care to recall. Here is what typically happens. We have an 8:00am game, but the coach says we should be at the field at 7:30. No problem. We live an hour away, so we leave at 6:15 am. Plenty of time. Everyone wakes up at 5:50, shower, pack, someone can’t find the left shinguard, oops.. it is now 6:25. No problem, we’ll make up time.

We get on the road, but swing into the Tim Horton’s for coffee. It is now 6:43 and we’re still an hour away. We “make up” a bit of time on the freeway and get to the city the tournament is in at 7:28. But there is a very, very long line of cars waiting to get into the park. It is a one-way turn onto a gravel road. A panicky thirteen year-old is screaming at me that she will be late and the coach will make her run if I don’t get moving. And she has to pee.

I am not paying attention to the road, to the cars around me or anything else except my phone buzzing with text messages from the OneCallNow service, reminding me to have my kid who is screaming at me from the back seat, on the field eight minutes ago. I am a ball of stress who has no business behind the wheel of this much moving steel.

We get to the field, but I narrowly miss a gang of parents and their kids ambling across the parking lot with a popup tent, three coolers and a portable grill.

“It was only fair,” I console myself. “They weren’t paying attention as well.”

After the game, we fast-walk back to the car so we can drive into town and get some breakfast. There is only one road out of the park and twenty-two other teams who also had 8:00am games all have the same idea. We pull out of the parking spot, drive 20 feet and wait. And wait. And wait. By the time we get to the road out, we gun the engine and race to the main road. I know the speed limit was posted at something less than what I was doing, but I was too pissed off to be paying attention to the road. I wanted OUT.

Our advice: I suspect that the police will set up the cameras again next year, but this time post very large signs letting parents know that they will be ticketed if they speed. The speed limit is posted for a reason that has nothing to do with your soccer tournament being held at the park once a year. So, you have to work with that.

Talk to neighboring cities Make sure the police department is on the same page as you are with your event. Approach them with the attitude that you want all of your teams to arrive and leave safely. They will respond to your concern. They do not want to deal with fender-benders or worse, accidents that involve injuries, especially when kids are involved.

Talk to your teams Make sure they are aware of all posted speed limits and that — while the police are there to keep them safe — they will get a ticket for speeding. Most parents will be extra cautious if they know of “speed traps” ahead of time. Use your website, email and social media networks. Post large signs at the park exits, especially if the exit is a long straightaway road that is a temptation to speed.

Direct traffic Have some volunteers direct traffic out of the park to keep the “you go, I go” rule fair. Make sure they wear really bring shirts and reflective gear.

The police and cities want your teams back, but they don’t want to clean up traffic messes. And parents also want to arrive and leave safely. A little bit of prep work, a lot of communication and mutual respect go a long way toward making sure everyone feels welcome and secure.

And then if an impatient parent chooses to speed, I guarantee that the rest of the team parents won’t have much empathy for that decision.

Twitter is a service that you can use to fire out quick updates or messages to your followers. This makes it a great tool for youth soccer tournaments and tournament directors because they can immediately announce game scores, special promotions or upcoming events on their smart phones, computers or via text messaging.

Here’s how to set up your Twitter soccer tournament account:

1. Go to twitter.com and push the “Sign Up” Button

2. Set up a Twitter user name using 20 characters max that reflects your tournament name. Don’t select these under an individual’s name. You will also have to select a password. You will need an email account that has not been used for another Twitter account, so if you have your own personal Twitter account, you may want to sign up for a Gmail account first.

3. Select other twitter accounts that you would like to follow. These could be other soccer or tournament related accounts. By following others, others will follow you.

4. With your first tweet, tell the world about your event in 140 characters or less.

5. Set up your profile. Here you will upload your tournament logo in a 200px x200px jpg format. You will also provide a name, location, website and a brief bio.

6. In the design step, you can customize the way Twitter looks for you and how your profile looks to others. Start with a pre-designed theme — and then, optionally, customize it with your own color scheme and background image.

7. Fill in your Twitter account in your Web Maintenance>Site Variables set up on your TourneyCentral website. Your Twitter badge will then display on the left rail so teams and their fans can follow you easily.

Our Advice: Use Twitter to Tweet updates before, during and after your event. Any time you post new content on your website, send a quick Tweet out along with a link back to your website.

Your TourneyCentral website is integrated with Twitter. When you update scores, you can send that update notice to your Twitter account. You can also fill in a Twitter account for your advertisers so that a Twitter button appears in their DEALS listing.

Send updates to Twitter during the event, such as sponsor coupons, reminders of lunch specials at concessions, lost and found, etc. Here is an example of what a soccer tournament Twitter account can look like.

This is the third in a five-part series on Social Media for Soccer Tournaments. Next up: Setting up YouTube and Flickr accounts.

Facebook is becoming the de facto place to organize event information and share content within a circle of friends. While it will never rival the specialization of a soccer tournament website like TourneyCentral for registration, scheduling and scores, it makes sense that your soccer tournament is available on Facebook for your teams and their fans to find and connect up with you there if that is more convenient for them. It is an additional marketing channel you should not ignore.

However, you should always make sure the hub of your event is your tournament website. You publish content to your Facebook page in order to draw fans to your tournament site to support your sponsors, advertisers and centralize your communications to the teams to avoid confusion.

This post will walk you step-by-step through setting up a Facebook Fan Page to reach soccer coaches and teams to get them interested and keep them engaged in your youth soccer tournament.

Here’s how to set up your Facebook Fan Page:

1. Go to www.facebook.com. If you are already on Facebook, log into your personal profile. Under the Account tab, Use the Help Center on Facebook and enter “Create a Page”. If you are not on Facebook and do not wish to have a personal profile, locate the green Sign Up button. Underneath that, there is a link called “Create a Page for a celebrity, band or business.” Click on that to start.

2. Choose Local Business of Place/Sports Venue. Enter your tournament name and the club address or the street address of the main venue.

3. Upload your tournament logo in a 200px x200px jpg format.

4. Write a short description of your tournament in 140 characters or less in the info section.

5. Update your page regularly with the news items that appear on the front page of your soccer tournament web site or photos. Photos are particularly good because they drive page views. Do not post the entire news item, but rather post an excerpt or key words and link back to your site for the entire news item or story. Use the 140 character rule.

6. Start building your fan base by copying the Facebook URL from your page that appears at the top (it will look something like http://www.facebook.com/pages/your-tournament-event/1362877625525) and put that in your Website Maintenance Module>Variables>Go! (if this option is not available or you need help, drop us a support email or call us.) You will then see a Facebook badge in the left rail of your TourneyCentral website.

Our Advice: At this point, you will want to consistently update the page with content, interesting photos or videos and always link back to your website. TourneyCentral.com offers soccer tournament directors integration with social media channels. Your Facebook promotion appears on your website throughout just by turning it on in your variables. Here’s an example of a soccer tournament Facebook page.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are also integrated into the Advertising Module. You can offer your DEALS advertisers additional reach by entering their Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as embed a YouTube video into their listing.

(This is the second in a five-part series on Social Media for Soccer Tournaments. Next up: Setting up a Twitter Account.)

Soccer tournament directors are aware of the ways that tournaments reward teams who place in their event. This is a story of one recent tournament where one small detail really damaged the reputation of an otherwise fine event.

A team of U13 boys played very well in a third-place game and beat a team they had lost to quite soundly the week before. The tournament was giving out water bottles as a third-place trophy.

It was not long after the presentation that one of the boys walked up to his coach and said, “Hey coach, look at this.” On the water bottle, the words, “BELIEVE, ACHEIVE,” appeared wrapped around the tournament logo.

Only the the word “ACHIEVE” is spelled incorrectly.

While the coach was proud that his players had paid attention to their spelling lessons in school, he was amazed and embarrassed for the tournament organizers. It was all anybody could talk about.

A few weeks later, the tournament sent t-shirts to the boys as a replacement.

Our Advice: Work with a trusted vendor. Somewhere along the line, a busy tournament volunteer rubber-stamped the artwork for the water bottle without taking a real look at it. Bad enough, but a true vendor partner would have questioned the artwork regardless of the approval signature. The mistake was more costly than just the price of the water bottle and the replacement t-shirts. It became the stamp of the tournament.

The vendor should have picked up the phone.

The vendor should have picked up the phone.

The photograph above was taken at the Hershey Soccer Club meeting on Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

This donation was a result of the 2010 Hershey Invitational Charity Soccer Tournament played on June 19-20, 2010. The tournament raised $16,000 for the Special Olympics Area M and also $16,000 for the Hole in the Wall Gang Camps. The Hershey Invitational is organized and run by Kicks 4 Kids Charity Soccer Tournaments. To date, Kicks 4 Kids has raised $177,618 for organizations that serve disadvantaged youth.

The 2011 Hershey Invitational will be played on the weekend of June 18-19, and will benefit the Special Olympics Area M and Ronald McDonald House of Hershey. The tournament is expected to host 230 teams from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia.

The Hershey Invitational website can be found here.

There will be a special place in heaven for youth soccer tournament directors. These largely volunteer people give countless hours of their free time to help raise funds for their club and give kids a chance to play competitive soccer. They have to convince teams to play, armies of volunteers to work and sponsors to participate. There is no doubt that, at least on some level, tournament directors love the game of soccer.

But running a successful tournament needs more than just enthusiasm and “want to”. It requires the ability to remove yourself from the emotions and personalities and make real business decisions. Teams that sign up to play and the fans that follow them are real customers. Sponsors that support your event, even the ones who do it for good will purposes, are real business partners.

Our Advice: It’s time to realize that you are not in the Soccer Business. You are in the Event Management Business that happens to feature a youth soccer tournament. Highly successful events take a good hard look at every aspect of their event and make educated business decisions on what they should do, and what they should not. Those who leave things to chance, well, they leave things to chance. Being a volunteer does not mean you have to be an amateur.

The graphic below shows an example of an unfriendly versus friendly layout.

Web-Unfriendly

Web-Friendly

Most of the time, your maps will come from a parks department or a graphic designer who has designed them to be great for printing in a program, but almost entirely unreadable on a web site. Make sure to specify that you need the maps to work across ALL media — online and in print. If need be, be ready to re-work them with large field numbers however you can if your graphics people can’t. Even if that means white sticky dots and a Sharpie.

Keep your field maps simple and readable. Big field numbers first, secondary information only if there is room. You can always have more detailed maps posted at the fields.

Last night, Charlie decided he was going to take his message directly to the people with a live show streamed onto the Internet. You can watch it if you have an hour to kill. I’ve included a screen shot below to illustrate everything that was wrong with the show.

The lighting was bad. The sound bounced hard all over the room. Nobody was mic-ed. The cameras were positioned too low, Charlie did not get proper cues on which camera was live so he was frequently looking into the wrong one. The background was busy. The titles at the bottom covered the action. There were too many “branding” phrases thrown out. I could go on and on. There were a lot of things wrong with the show technically as well as contextually.

There is a reason there is a long list of people who get credit at the end of TV shows. I’m not taking anything away from Charlie Sheen’s talent and he brings a lot to shows like Two and a Half Men and Spin City. But when celebrities begin to think that they alone are responsible for their own fame and attempt to produce their own content, the public quickly finds out how very wrong they are.

Our Advice: Your tournament is run by a team, not just the tournament director. Your event may very well have a talented, dedicated leader and a team that is willing to give them all the credit. That is a good thing. But once the tournament director starts believing his/her own press, your event is headed for trouble.

You could argue that Charlie’s show was “real” and “genuine” or that your tournament is “fun” and “like family.” You would be wrong. What you see as fun, loose and ‘like being with family,’ your paying teams see as messy, unorganized and apathetic. It takes a lot of work (and acting skill) to appear nonchalant. The character of Charlie Harper (Two and a Half Men) can pull it off. Charlie Sheen? Not so much.

Recognize and appreciate your team and their skills in their specialized area, from your sales team to your scheduling team to your website crew. Never think yourself bigger than the sum of them.

They made you great. Never underestimate their power to unmake you. Or — just like Charlie Sheen is doing before our eyes — you unmaking yourself.

There is no getting around it, running a youth soccer tournament is a lot of work. Even the most organized tournament directors with the best clubs and best software tools take on a huge responsibility. In the end, the hard work is balanced out by the rewards of seeing kids enjoying the game and putting a nice amount of money in the club’s accounts and the local economy. Everybody wants to be considered successful. When it comes to success, an old saying comes to mind, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” A well thought out and executed communication plan, starting at the time of registration and acceptance, can help save headaches later, when you should be concentrating on something else.

Never assume that coaches who are accepted into your soccer tournament automatically know what the next step is. It is as simple as this: tell them what to do and when to do it. Starting with your acceptance letter, include a timeline or checklist of any items that need to be completed prior to the tourney. Be clear about the dates and if there is any further information or payment needed. Make sure that you also comply by sticking to stated dates.

Anticipate questions and make sure that your tournament website includes the answers. Push as much of the information and communication needs onto your website as possible. It is helpful if your soccer tournament website is more than just a static recruiting tool. A complete, end-to-end soccer tournament management system, like those offered by TourneyCentral, is well worth the investment. Cheap and free systems always have limitations which are more costly in the end.

This may seem like a lot of upfront work, but you’ll be thankful as your tournament dates get closer. It brings to mind another old saying, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.”

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.