Soccer Tournament Review

Here are five easy ways to piss off your volunteers:

1. Never say please or thank you. They owe you their time because you allow them to work on your tournament.
2. Don’t bother matching up their skills with the job you need. Be sure to put someone who works in a major consumer brand marketing department on garbage detail on Sunday night.
3. Don’t acknowledge their contribution as a reason for the success of the tournament. Remember, you could do the whole thing without them if you only had the time.
4. Demand that they be available to you very late at night and on-call during the weekends. After all, you have a schedule to keep and you are very busy coaching your team… in addition to working at your day job.
5. When they are at the tournament giving their time in the middle of the day, in the rain or the hot sun, be sure to bark orders at them within earshot of your guest teams. You are much too busy fool around with civility.

Sound familiar? Even if you are not guilty of any or all of these infractions, chances are you’ve been to tournaments where you have seen this behavior.

Our advice: Be different. Be kind. Commit to creating an atmosphere where parents, grandparents and siblings WANT to volunteer at your tournament. Make it fun, however your volunteers define fun. When your volunteers are stressed out and pissed off, your guest teams feel it and it leaks over to the tournament. Guest teams, sponsors, parents feel the tension and just want to play the games and get out. When you have happy volunteers, you have a fun atmosphere on the fields and players and parents want to stick around and be a part of that for as long as possible.

And then, they can’t wait to do it all again next year.

Today, I saw a comment from a team rep come over that said this:

Our coach, John Smith has reached out to the tournament several times via e-mail in regards to us not receiving a confirmation on our acceptance into the tournament. It was only after checking the status on line that we saw that we’ve been accepted. Due to lack of follow up on your part and lack of confirmation for the tournament we are going to pull out and will be stopping payment on our check.

Got me wondering how many times the tournament sent an email to coach Smith (not his real name, of course) that went to his junk folder or he didn’t bother replying to. So, I looked it up. Four messages were sent to him, without a reply back.

Our advice: If a coach does not answer an email, CALL HIM! And, you may want to advise your teams that you will be sending emails and that if they do not hear from you within a reasonable time, CALL YOU! Email is rapidly becoming an obsolete communication tool as more and more ISPs are deciding for their customer what is and what is not spam.

And, make sure your subject lines are not “spammy.” A subject line like “You’re Accepted!!!” will probably hit the junk folder, whereas a subject line like “Your team has been accepted to the 2008 Major Classic” will make it all the way to it’s destination inbox. Be specific and stay away from punctuation like ? and !!!!

You may also wish to drop postcards in the mail with the team acceptance, just in case emails are not getting through. While it may seem counter-intuitive for a web site to advocate for the USPS, it is the end product, not the tools, that are the important thing.

But, please, the goal is not to point fingers around in a circle about who didn’t answer their emails. The goal is to communicate, whether that is by phone, postcard or email.