Soccer Tournament Review

Nationwide Youth Soccer Month Jersey Tour begins September 1
150 college events scheduled
Contests and promotions centered on celebration
Several states have officially proclaimed Youth Soccer Month

Visit www.YouthSoccerMonth.org for more

US Youth Soccer, the nation’s largest youth sports association, today announced the sixth annual Youth Soccer Month – Celebrating Soccer in America this September and several events highlighting the celebration.

“We [US Youth Soccer] take great pride in spearheading the Youth Soccer Month initiative to further promote the benefits of fun, family, friendship and fitness associated in playing this wonderful sport,” said Larry Monaco, president of US Youth Soccer. “Soccer continues to grow with more children in the United States participating in organized soccer than any other sport. This celebration furthers US Youth Soccer’s mission to foster the physical, mental and emotional growth and development of America’s youth through the sport of soccer at all levels of age and competition.”

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.

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 )

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!)

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.

I enjoy reading email that coaches, parents and team reps send soccer tournaments. It’s a great insight into our target market and keeps us on our toes about what the soccer public needs and expects from tournaments and the web site that supports it.

My favorite emails are the ones that write paragraph after paragraph of needs and concerns and then they say something like “Oh, great web site, btw!”

By the way??? BY THE WAY? Do they not know how hard we work on making the web site easy to use, reliable and real-time accurate? Do they not know how many weekends we have given up to make it possible for them to even notice that the web site is great? But, perhaps that is the point; at least they noticed something great when they saw it, even if it was a footnote.

Our Advice: Nobody will appreciate the blood, sweat and tears you pour into your soccer tournament than you. But, don’t expect them to. If they are not complaining about the basics like field lines, lack of port-a-potties, no water at the field, games always starting late, no referees…. you’re doing something right! Chances are they will notice that things went fine without a hitch.

Think about the last time you complained because there was no food at the grocery store. Or the last time you didn’t have a place to sleep. Yet, when was the last time you complained because the waitress was a little bit late bringing the coffee refill at a restaurant. Exactly. When the basic needs are taken care, it is only then that we find the time to complain about the minutiae.

So, the next time someone complains about having to pay for parking or a 10 minute overlap in their multiple-coach team schedule or an 8:00am game, just smile. You know you’ve taken care of the big things.

BTW, mostly nobody notices the way a TourneyCentral web site is always up and running, is accurate and is easy to use. I guess that is a good thing.

Today, I was reading Seth Godin’s blog and read a story that made a perfect argument for a TICO Score for ranking soccer tournaments.

It was hidden as a marketing post on “green marketing” but there, plain as day, made the perfect argument for a service like TICO Score. A simple number that assigns the health of your soccer tournament that tells everyone at a glance if you are good, bad or average.

Our advice: Send your participants to www.ticoscore.com to evaluate your tournament. Also, read www.challengedividend.com.