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.