Before you proceed, I am interested to know if you have a ‘top-three’ list of changes your club has made to improve its administration. I would like to profile your responses in an upcoming issue of Down-the-Line! Please send me your list and your club information so that you can be profiled as part of a ‘best practices’ approach to club & league management.

Can you improve on last year?

Many club and league administrators explain their dissatisfaction with the way things went last year.

“Registration turned out to be a lot more work than we expected.”
“Updating the website was a problem; the volunteer web-master took weeks to make the updates I requested.”
“Rescheduling rainouts was a full-time job.”

Every week I spend a considerable amount of time speaking to soccer club and league administrators from around North America. Many of them have been doing their job for a number of years, and they usually explain some aspect of last year’s administration that needs improvement. Despite this frustration, there are very few changes in their operations from year to year.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
-Albert Einstein

In my last article (Issue 5), I explained a strategic approach to improving your organizations. This approach may seem a little progressive for some clubs and leagues; after all, it’s only a game, right?

Just to recap, this approach involved a holistic approach to analyzing your operations and looking at ways to tie all of your process and procedures together…no small project. If your reaction was, “Nice idea, but I don’t have the time for that right now”, then this article should sow the seeds for growing towards that goal.

The time has come for some practical advice on how you can reduce your administrative workload. This advice may alter your current operation, initially causing some resistance; however, keep in mind that change is the only way to cause growth, resulting in improvement.

The challenge is that you are a part of a multi-administrator, membership driven organization. A summary of the administrative tasks of a soccer club can be found in the following table.

Soccer Club Administration Overview

Pre-Season	Regular Season	Post-Season
Online registration	Assigning referees	Evaluating players
Mail-in registration	Editing schedules	Communicating news & events
Traditional registration (Walk-in)	Communicating game changes (rainouts)	Pre-Season planning & communication
Fee collection	Scoring games
Player grouping by age	Calculating standings
Team building & balancing	Communicating standings
Assigning teams to divisions	Organizing tournaments
Scheduling divisions	Tracking guest players, if necessary
Communicating schedules	Tracking individual participation, scoring and discipline, if necessary

Three Ways to Reduce Administrative Workload

1. Improve communication efficiencies. You will notice that many of the tasks above involve communication. In a soccer club, there are countless hours of phone calls, faxing, and photocopying that could be avoided with effective use of the Internet. Look for ways to harness the communication power of the web.
   1. Exploit your website. If members know that comprehensive and current information is available on the club website, they can be educated to check the website before making a call. The key is that there must always be current, relevant information easily available to them.

      That is where a change in operations may be required. Relying on your volunteer web-master does not guarantee timely information. You must create a new process that allows you to make the updates yourself.

   2. Exploit your usage of email. In addition to maximizing your website, instant notifications of game changes and events can be sent out through effective email management. Again, you have to look for a way to make this a simple process. It may require some expertise and effort initially, but it will pay off in the end.

2. Enter Data Once, Use Often. Typically different people, many who are volunteers and who change from year to year, perform all the above tasks. By creating a central database that can be accessed by different members to perform the above task you eliminate the need for double entry. In a typical sport organization the same data is handled by at least 5 different people and as many as 10. The following is a list of the different roles needed to run a typical youth sport organization.

   Registrar	Enter member registration info Player is assigned to a team The registrar approves the registration Registration info is sent to district level
   Team Assigner	Sometimes there is a separate role for assigning players to teams
   Scheduler	Teams and Division given to scheduler
   Field Assignor	Blocks of times are assigned by the owner of facilities (usually the municipality) to the soccer club. Once the schedule is complete, fields must be added.
   Referee Assigner	Schedule given to referee scheduler
   Coach	Roster given to coach Tracks players Communicates with players about game changes, practices etc. Schedules practices
   Parent	Submits registration and payment Requires schedule Plans transportation
   Player	Gets schedule Monitors standings
   Statistician	Schedule given to statistician who tracks game results Sometimes tracks discipline
   Media	Weekly results sent to media
   Insurance Company	Requires player information
   District & State/ Provincial Association	Receives team rosters Used for insurance and eligibility Sometimes approves player transfers
   Web Master	Schedule, Standings and Information are sent to the web master for posting

   So the key is to centralize the data and have the different roles be able to work with the same data.

3. Spread the work to more people. There are ways to save yourself and your members’ time, again with effective use of the Internet. For example, online registration and fee payment allows parents to register for their children at anytime from either home or work. At the same time, they are saving you (the administrator) time because you no longer have to do the data entry or manage the money.

   Another example is online scoring. If referees or coaches (depending on the level of competition) were allowed to report scores through your website and the standings were then automatically calculated, how much time would that save you? It would require about the same amount of effort for the referees and coaches, but would certainly make your life much easier.

   With both of these examples, security is always a concern. Depending on the organization that is providing your technology, the security risk involved with online registration and scoring is quite low. Current industry standards require 128-bit encryption for transactions of this nature, so be sure that this is part of your solution. As a point of reference, this level of security is the same as that used with online banking.

Now that you have read these three ways to reduce your administrative workload, are you ready for the change? In the bigger picture, it will put your club on the road to progressive club/league management. If you don’t like any of these changes, you will face the same challenges as last year.

If you would like more information on how to implement these ideas, please feel free to contact me at groot. ITSportsNet is helping clubs and leagues take their management practices to a professional playing field, using software and the Internet to reduce administration workload while improving the level of service delivered to their membership.