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.

The road to the 2009 NSCAA

Our NCSAA booth is out of the case and ready for the 2009 design

Hey soccer fans, we’re getting ready for the NSCAA in St. Louis and we got our display booth up and ready for our 2009 design.

It doesn’t look like much now, but stay tuned and follow along as we start adding really cool stuff to it!

We’re in booth 1735. I don’t know if that is a good spot of not (I’m told it is) but be sure to put us on your list of folks to see when you are at the convention.

Soccer tournament stickiness

In the Internet world, we have a term called stickiness which means: Something about the Web site compels the reader to stay longer, read more pages, bookmark you, etc. The test of stickiness of a soccer tournament is: do they come back, do they bookmark, do they remember you.

Today, an email came across my desk sent from a coach who played in the 2007 Ohio Cup in July. It read:

Just wanted to let you know that I am down to my last game of regular season. We are currently 8-3-4. Two of our losses went to the same team in some very close games. I just wanted to thank you for your inspiration at the beginning of my season. It has been a wonderful year and I just felt the need to say thank you!!!

Wow! Whatever the Ohio Cup did for that coach we all should aspire to. To be remembered as the tournament that sparked a great season is a goal that we should all look to achieve. To have a coach drop an email three months later is perhaps the ultimate testament to the achievement of that goal.

Our Advice: Be memorable! Whatever your goals are; to be the first of the season, to be the largest, to attract the most State Cup winners, to be.. whatever, first and foremost in that list of goals should to be memorable.

Marketing and growing a niche brand

Cameron Woo, the publisher of The Bark, the New Yorker of Dog Magazines, shares some insight for building a brand within a niche market. Woo started The Bark as a newsletter to increase the amount of dog-friendly park space and expanded to become the premium dog magazine brand fewer than ten years later. The path he carved mirrors a soccer tournament growth plan almost turn for turn. Start with your loyal core group, find some common interests with those who can help you grow but may not be as passionate and.. well, I’ll let him tell it…
Listen now on |

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.

We now Twitter

TourneyCentral now has a Twitter account. If you also have a Twitter account, you can follow our Tweets at http://twitter.com/tourneycentral.

If you really don’t know what Twitter is, watch the video.

Explaining human error

After almost every tournament, a parent sends an email that goes along these lines:

I was just looking at your web site and was looking up scores with my son who plays for the blah-blah team who won the championships at your tournament.

I was very disappointed to see that the team they played in the finals was listed as the winner instead of team blah-blah.

Could you please help me explain this error to my son so he feels good about his and his teammates fine accomplishments.

The obvious explanation is It was a human error and we’ll fix it. As your son has undoubtedly discovered at his tender young age, people make mistakes. We find it incredulous that as a parent, you can’t explain that fact of life to your child. Hope you had a wonderful time at our tournament and your team returns next year!

As soccer tournaments become more real-time and the scores are reported almost instantaneously from the fields, the tolerance for any mistake at all is becoming less and less. The job of keeping track of all these scores is not becoming any easier, however.

Our Advice: Don’t make mistakes! Make sure that everyone along the score-reporting chain, including the referees, the field marshals, the score-keeper checks and double checks the accuracy of the scores. You may even want to include a score-auditor whose sole job at the tournament is to double check the scores on the web site against every game card, especially the finals.

Tournaments & Hotels Working Together for Success

This was posted as a Soccer America blog entry and appears at http://blogs.socceramerica.com/youth_soccer_insider/?p=53

By Tom Berkman

Tournaments and hotels — the proverbial love-hate relationship. Directors of tournaments with many out-of-town teams know they cannot live without the hotels, but many wonder at times exactly whose side the hotels are on. If your tournament is not using a sports housing service to handle the hotel responsibilities, and you are a Tournament Director that has a great relationship with every hotel you use in your city, consider yourself lucky.

However, the norm is that working with hotels can have a litany of issues and challenges that start with the contracting and end with the payment of your rebate. Here are some how-to approaches to make your interaction with the hotel community more successful:

The Hometown Event. Some tournaments move from city to city every year, while others hosted by a local club or organization are in the same location every year. The events that move every year enjoy special treatment from host cities that must often offer perks to win the bid.

The Hometown event or tournament can after a few short years be taken for granted by the hotel community, because the hotels already get the business. Don’t take it personally — the local event is often treated with less respect than it deserves.

If your tournament is in the same city every year, there are ways to regain the leverage.

A more common practice these days is requiring teams to use the hotels you have contracted with as a condition to play in your tournament. The bottom line is that, as expenses increase each year to run a tournament, generating strong rebate revenue from the hotels allows you to keep the application fee down and keep your tournament more competitive with other tournaments.

If you will require this of the teams, it changes the relationship with the hotels, as they must work with you (on your terms) to get the business.

A different form of leverage is available to you if you have the ability to move your tournament to another city (far enough away that different hotels are used), where you award your tournament to the highest bidding city.

Cities get substantial hotel tax from the hotel revenues, so even a tournament filling 500 rooms for two nights could be enough for a city to give you some cash, reduced venue fees, and/or in-kind services to get your tournament to their town.

If you are in the position to move, consider bidding it out for 2-year increments, so instead of being the hometown event, multiple cities in your state are bidding for your business. If you do this, make sure the wish list you give to each Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) covers the additional expenses to make the move and motivates you financially to make the move at all.

What To Ask For. When dealing with the hotels, no matter what city you are in, here is what you should expect from them:

* Free meeting space in exchange for naming the hotel Headquarters Hotel.

* Free or substantially reduced rates for staff/officials for naming the hotel Officials’ Hotel.

* A tournament rate that the hotel will not sell below.

* The promise that the hotel will not accept team bookings outside of your block.

* A reasonable comp ratio — at least of 1/20 paid for limited service hotels and 1/40 paid for full service hotels.

* A rebate built into the rate, non-negotiable, and the same for every hotel.

* The rebate paid no later than 30 days after the tournament

* The assurance that, if the reported numbers at a hotel seem low, you will get credit for the appropriate room-nights if you can prove a team stayed at a hotel.

Terms and Conditions in the Contracts. If your tournament has enough overnight travelers that you sign contracts with the hotels in order to ensure the rooms are set aside for your teams, then here are the contractual terms you should not agree to:

* Attrition — in any form. Not as a penalty (i.e. if you don’t use a minimum percentage of the rooms blocked — often 80 percentage), not as a right of the hotel to raise the rate, and not as a right of the hotel to reduce or eliminate your concessions

* Cancellation — cross out anything more than 30 days before arrival.

* Damage — insist that any damage done to the hotel be borne by each individual guest, not the tournament.

* Indemnification — cross it out, or change it to Mutual.

* Security — cross out any line that suggests that the hotel can require you to hire and pay for security at its discretion.

* Arbitration and/or waiving your right to a trial. Cross it out, or you could watch your rebate be arbitrated away.

What You Should Do for the Hotels. Now that you know how to protect your tournament, remember that working with hotels successfully needs to be win-win for both parties. That starts with communicating the details of your tournament to your hotels. Before you sign the first contract, here are some things they would like know:

* Do teams have to qualify to get into the tournament? Are any teams rejected or does every team that applies get accepted?

* Until what date are teams accepted? (That way, they know how late they may get reservations).

* Is it an elimination tournament (one bad day and they’re gone), or is every team there for the duration?

* Where are the venues? If there are multiple venues, does the tournament specify in advance what age brackets are playing where, thus helping the teams book in the right hotels?

This information may shape the number of rooms the hotels give you and on what nights, won’t be a cause for surprise or disappointment later on.

In terms of advertising the hotels to the teams, provide good information about each hotel, more than just a phone number and contact name.

As teams apply and you see the number of out-of-town teams has increased or declined from previous years, update the hotels with that information.

To help the hotels manage the flow of people coming and going from their hotel, if possible, give the hotels the times the teams will be playing.

Lastly, one of the most important things you can do for a hotel is to recommend and support the use of a code of conduct policy that every room signs at check-in.

If you follow that up with the promise that any team asked to leave a hotel for improper behavior will also be disqualified from playing in the tournament, you will have created an atmosphere that will keep your relationship with the hotels healthy, and coming back for more.

(Tom Berkman is General Manager and Owner of the THS Company , a sports housing service that works with over 140 client tournaments and events nationwide. Tom is a ‘76 graduate of the Hilton School of Hotel & Restaurant Mgt. at the University of Houston, and spent 22 years in hotel and restaurant operations before starting THS in 1998. You can contact him at Tom@thsweb.com )

How a small soccer tournament can compete against the giants

One of the things we hear consistently from smaller, regional soccer tournaments is how to compete against the larger, more well-known, branded tournament events. I am living a case-study this weekend.

My daughter is playing this weekend in a well-established, but non-TourneyCentral event. So far, I have gotten eight text messages and three vent calls from my wife who is in charge this weekend. The fields are badly marked, there are no port-a-johns on the fields, the directions getting there sucked, nobody is posting scores and on and on… (I’m not dismissing her very valid points, but I’ve heard and experienced them all before myself. My solution was to create TourneyCentral. ) This is only the first day and they now just left to play the second day. I’ve got my cell phone fully-charged.

As I was talking to her on the phone and her voice went to the tone of the school teacher in a Charlie Brown TV show and my empathetic remarks digressed to uh-huh, ok, hmm, I began cruising around my favorite blogs. Up pops a post in The Challenge Dividend by Bob Gilbreath that nailed my experience.

In the post, he looks at a recent interaction by Donatos Pizza and American Express. Read the post to get the whole picture, but bottom line is Donatos (a local pizza chain) tries harder because they have more to lose.. and more to gain than the big, already branded, everyone knows who we are American Express (of which I am also a long-term member).

Our Advice: First, have a really good product. Starting off on the TourneyCentral platform is a good way to communicate that out to your potential guest teams. Second, reach out to the teams, put a personal touch on your soccer tournament and make the teams feel special, wanted and respected. Third, follow through with your promises.

If you are a large, well-branded tournament, think and act like you are always in second place. Never forget what you did in the early days, trying to attract teams to your tiny, unknown event. And, never stop trying to break into new markets, while never forgetting the teams and clubs that helped you get big along the way.

And, if you happen to have a Donatos Pizza in your neighborhood, call them up and offer to cut THEM a deal instead of asking them for money. When you have made it, start spreading the wealth a little bit along the way. What you give up in the short-term in money will come back to support you from a community when you may need it most. (Ok, a throw back to one of my all-time favorite movies It’s a Wonderful Life but applies here!)