Good morning, Baltimore is what we’ll be saying early Thursday morning as we roll into town from Dayton, Ohio! We’re off to the NSCAA Convention.
We’ll be sharing a booth with Annalisa and Alison from Premier Athletic Advertising and Carlo from Traveling Teams in booth 1527.
Stop by and say hi during the Thursday evening event and then come back after 9:00pm for a special treat you can only get in Baltimore.
Watch this spot for photos, videos and stories from the 2011 NSCAA Convention.
They say this feeds fourteen people. We ate it using three.
Television adds ten pounds. It also add a few hundred square feet to a restaurant if featured on the Food Network or the Travel Channel. Case in point.
Last weekend, we were in St. Louis for the NSCAA. Our one goal was to seek out and eat a Pointersaurus pizza at Pointer’s Pizza. For those of you who have not seen the Food Network and Travel Channel segments, it is a 28″ pizza and is as large as a table top.
First, we had to find the place. It was across town, with no parking except for an Office Depot across the street. We stopped in and bought some blank CDs to ease our guilty consciences about parking in their space. The store front looked no larger than a Dominos carry out. Did we have the right place? It looked bigger on TV.
Yes, we did have the right place. We went in and there were two tables. Two. And a waiting couch the size of a dime. The rest of the store was devoted to a counter to take orders and answer phones and two rows of pizza ovens.
That’s it. Answering phones, making pizzas.
Businesses that look small are huge in this economy, as long as they stick to the knitting. Pointer’s Pizza does one thing and does it very well; makes pizza. That’s it, nothing fancy.
I can imagine how the phone call went with The Food Network:
PP: “Pointer’s Pizza. What would you like.”
FN: “We want to come in and film your big pizza you make and put you on TV.”
PP: “Ok, come in, stay clear of the ovens and the phones. You are going to pay for the pizza, aren’t you?”
Long pause…
FN: “But we’re putting your store on television….”
Longer pause…
FN: “Of course we are going to pay for the pizza.”
PP: “See you next Thursday.”
*ring*
PP: “Pointer’s Pizza. What would you like.”
Stay focused, stick to the knitting. Provide a great soccer tournament experience that includes solid marketing, scheduling, referees, team communication and hotels. Everything else is a distraction.
Sticker for Disney Tournaments
Stickers are hot. Stickers with your soccer tournament logo and your web address will get placed almost everywhere and are probably the cheapest way you can advertise.
Kids like stickers. Kids will put stickers on book covers, bags, on their notebook cover, even on their forehead and take a picture of themselves being goofy. Your tournament sticker will end up as part of a family legacy in photo albums.
We are at the NSCAA, giving out stickers to every kid in St. Louis who is walking around with their coach or parent. They are rushing up to our booth, streaming off our smiley-face stickers and wearing them everywhere in the St. Louis Convention Center. We’re loving it.
The best deal around for stickers is our friends at Sticker Giant. Great product, great service.
Just in case you were following along with us, checking off the dates until the big NSCAA soccer conference in St. Louis, here is our booth status. Almost ready!
Our TourneyCentral.com NSCAA booth. A little more nip and tuck, but we're almost there.
Meet us in St. Louis for the NSCAA.
We’re in booth 1735 and we won’t even try to sell you anything, so you can stay and chat as long as you want. Really. And, if you want to make a podcast promoting your soccer tournament, Back of the Net will help you with that. You don’t even need to be a TourneyCentral tournament.
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.
BALTIMORE – Pass by the TourneyCentral booth at the 2008 National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) convention and you would most likely do a double take at the huge soccer ball cake on display.
“The conference was in Baltimore this year,” says Gerard McLean, president of Rivershark, Inc., the parent company of TourneyCentral.com. “We’re such huge fans of the show ‘Ace of Cakes’ that is was a no-brainer to get a cake.” The cake was made by the ‘Ace’ bakers of Charm City Cakes, based in Baltimore, Md. Duff Goldman and his crew are the stars of the Food Network’s popular show, ‘The Ace of Cakes.’
McLean added that he usually tries to bring local flavor to his booth by supporting local businesses at the NSCAA. In addition to purchasing a cake from Charm City Cakes, McLean raffled off the cake, with the hope that the winner would donate the cake. The winner of the cake, Mark Serdjenian, the head coach of the men’s soccer program at Colby College in Maine, did not disappoint. The cake was donated in Serdjenian’s name to the Ronald McDonald House of Baltimore.
“The Ronald McDonald House children thoroughly enjoyed the delicious cake,” said Joshua Harden, manager of volunteer services at the house.
In addition, two local soccer tournaments, the Mead Cup and the Warrior Classic also exhibited at the NSCAA. For more information about the NSCAA show, including a photo gallery of the soccer cake, visit www.tourneycentral.com/nscaa.
PHOTO (contributed) A Ronald McDonald resident savors the cake with a plate ready for his slice.
DAYTON – Two local tournaments are a hit at this year’s National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) Conference in Baltimore this weekend. The adidas Warrior Soccer Classic and the Mead Cup soccer tournament were both represented at the exhibition.
“The NSCAA represents some of the finest soccer at all levels,” says Carol Maas, co-director of the Warrior Classic. “Having the privilege of recently serving on the Montgomery County Sports Authority Task Force Committee, I have an increased awareness of the benefits of bringing sporting events to Dayton and the enhancement of the events we already host.”
Both tournaments are looking to attract competitive soccer teams from the East Coast, a large part of this year’s attendees according to the NSCAA.
In addition to the local tournament exhibiting, TourneyCentral – a local soccer tournament management company based in Englewood – presented a workshop yesterday on hyper-localism media and the soccer community. TourneyCentral provides the web-based management tools for both tournament events, as well as twenty-four additional soccer tournaments around the Dayton metro area.
Other local organizations represented at the exhibition are the Dayton Marriott (Dayton) and One Call Now (Troy).
For more information about the Warrior Classic and the Mead Cup, visit the tournament calendar at www.daytondailynews.com/soccer.
Donna Michael (left) with the Dayton Montgomery County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, discusses the Warrior Classic hotel system with Hank Maas. Maas schedules over 450 teams, playing at four venues for the Warrior Classic held on Memorial Day weekend in Dayton.
DAYTON – For years, Laura Shields, 19, has watched her parents, Rick and Nancy Shields dash off to work the Mead Cup exhibit booth at the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) while she sat at home. This year, because of some unplanned manpower shortage for the booth, she had a chance to volunteer for the booth, meeting and greeting fellow soccer colleagues. And she jumped at it.
“I’ve always wanted to come and volunteer to work the booth,” Shields says. “It seemed like just a lot of fun.”
A student at Capital University in Columbus, Shields has not been disappointed as she connects with old friends and meets new one. The NSCAA Convention runs from Wed. Jan. 6 through Sat. Jan 19 in Baltimore, Md. and host over 7,000 soccer coaches, administrators and enthusiasts.
For more information on the annual Mead Cup soccer tournament, held each Labor Day weekend in Dayton and Beavercreek, log onto the Web site at www.meadcupsoccer.com.
PHOTO: Laura (right) and Nancy Shields talk soccer with Patrick Ferguson, head coach of the women’s soccer program at Wright State University.