Soccer Tournament Review

 I was going through my bills today. As usual, I threw away more marketing stuffed-in crap than the actual invoice. As I was tossing the Verizon Wireless stuff, an insert caught my eye. It was titled A guide to understanding your bill. It was printed in 4-color, double-sided, 8.5×14 on glossy paper. Somebody put a lot of work into this instructional piece. A quick snap-shot of one of the sections is posted to the left of this article. 

I started reading it and the more I read, the less I understood about my cell phone bill. Yes, everything was there and there were these neat little red arrows pointing to the various pieces I should probably understand, but it was confusing. Here is what I know about my relationship with Verizon Wireless:

• I have a cell phone that will allow me to make and receive calls.
• For the service above, I expect to get a bill in the neighborhood of what I agreed to pay when I signed the contract, give or take a few dollars for 411 calls or extra text messages, etc.
• On my bill, I want to know what I owe and when/where to pay.

That’s is. “Understanding” my bill does not make me a more loyal customer. In fact, making it so difficult to understand my bill that I need a detailed guide to understanding my bill makes me think that Verizon Wireless is trying to “hide” stuff from me in my bill and makes me even more nervous about doing business with them. (Your experience may vary.)

Our advice: When you have created systems like applications, standings tie-breakers, registration forms, etc. that are so complicated that you need to publish guides just to ensure that teams understand what to do and/or how to read them or complete the forms, your tournament is way too complicated. Every form, every system should be immediately intuitive.

At TourneyCentral, we start and finish each feature on our sites by asking ourselves one critical question, “Can my 67-year-old mother complete this task without help?” If the answer is “yes”, we’ve done our job well. If the answer is “no,” we stay at the drawing board until we get a “yes.” 

A couple weeks ago, my hi-tech coffee maker broke. All the electronic stuff on it worked just fine, but it failed in the most basic way; the mechanism to bring the hot water from the reservoir through the grounds and into the carafe no longer moved the water. So, I went out to the local Kroger and bought a Melitta coffee cone and carafe for 12.00. I heat my water and pour it through the grounds. My coffee-making experience is now simple and will never break.

What does coffee have to do with a soccer tournament? Well, for one, it fuels a lot of tournament directors, volunteers and soccer moms/dads for early-morning games, but the real correlation here is the lesson to keep things simple and down to its most basic requirements.

It might seem odd that a technology company would advocate for simple gravity instead of a hi-tech coffee-maker, but that doesn’t really seem odd to us. Even when we’re developing soccer tournament web sites and software, we always ask the question, “What is the simplest way to do this?” Based on the over-loaded technology web site of the average soccer site, keeping things simple is some advice a lot of them could use.

Our advice: Keep it simple, make it work. Nobody cares that you employ the latest AJAX, Java, whatever scoring system on your soccer tournament web site if they can’t find the scores and when they do, they can’t view them on their Blackberry. Apply this to everything, from your sponsorship packages to your web site to the game schedule to your standings and tiebreakers. People understand and accept simple. Like my coffee maker, it can have all the best time-keeping, auto-coffee-making, coffee-to-water-ratio-measuring technology in the world, but if it can’t pour water through coffee grounds, it is a piece of junk. Do the basics well. Keep the rest simple.