Today is Friday and with it comes the flood of email to tournaments going on tomorrow from coaches who suddenly can’t make registration night for their teams. My favorites are emails that say: I can’t make it to registration tonight. We’ll see you on Saturday. and then leave it at that.
Wow! How arrogant and self-centered. For tournaments that host more than one team (oh, you all do?) that presents a challenge. Do you stand firm, take a hard stance or allow this team to register on Saturday morning? If you take a hard stand, they may not show up. If you cave, other teams are going to find out and do the same.
Our advice: Don’t cave. But have an option. This is a negotiating tactic and should be treated as one. First, the coach sending this email on a Friday morning assumes that you will be away from your computer and on the fields setting up. Don’t be. Assign someone to pick up email and response immediately back with your pre-determined response. Secondly, have a pre-determined response. One of my favorite no responses would be to offer to check the team in on Saturday morning, between 4-6am, for an additional $100.00 cash per team. Oh, and offer them a free cup of coffee while they wait. If it truly is an emergency, they will be there early in the morning, with cash in hand. If not, greet them warmly on Friday night! (But if you guess wrong and they actually do pull out of your tournament over this issue, never, never, never refund their money. But thank them for their donation.)
As an afterthought, it amazes me as a soccer parent that the first thing the coach does is read us all the riot act about being on time for practice, games etc., yet these same coaches assume the rules of a tournament do not apply to them.