Marketing your Wrestling Tournament
Marketing your Wrestling Tournament
You must have a marketing strategy for your wrestling tournament. First you must decide when it is your coaches or wrestling teams decide what tournament they are going to attend. In Illinois, for youth tournaments, many of the tournaments fill up quickly so coaches must decide early which tournaments they are going to attend. So it is in your best interest to get your information to the coaches prior to the start of the tournament season, but not so early that the flier gets put in a pile or folder and never looked at again.
After you decide when, you need to decide what you are going to offer at your tournament. Not many people run varsity tournaments, I suspect the reason is they do not earn as much for the club as regular tournaments do, but require about the same amount of work. However, there is great prestige in running a first class tournament and if that is your number one goal you should pursue this goal.
Another type of tournament you can run is a rookie tournament. These always seem to fill up in Illinois. I think this is a great tournament to run, because it helps first and second year wrestlers have a good experience with the sport. There is no fun in getting beat week in and week out.
Another type is a regular tournament with no skill level designated. These are the most popular in Illinois, because they reach the broadest audience and all of your wrestlers can actually wrestle in the tournament. Parent help is critical to running a smooth tournament, and I suspect it may be difficult for you to convince all your experienced parents to work all day at a tournament that their wrestlers will not be experiencing.
Another important activity is to learn what other successful tournaments do to market their tournament. This can be done by talking with coaches at tournaments or calling up friends to see what they do to market their tournament. After the first couple of years in running a successful tournament, it will market itself and you will have strong word of mouth and a long line of returning teams each year.
For example, after interviewing coaches casually at tournaments, I found that they use the state's website to find out the dates of tournaments that are close to them. Also, I found other tournaments mailed fliers to all of the state's contacts. You never know if a team has an opening in their schedule and is willing to travel 45 to 90 minutes to get in another tournament (or if they are looking to get some competition in a different part of the state). Each year I did this, I found teams asking to come that I would have never even thought to invite. The last 100 kids are where you make most of your money. At that point, all of your fixed costs are paid for, refs, gym space, table help, etc so the last 100 kids are mostly profit.
Even more important then the information mentioned above, you don't want to pick a date where there is another tournament close by that will compete with you, particularly if you are a new tournament. Why not pick a different weekend? This way you can both attend each other's tournament and help out your sectional by offering another tournament that is close by on another weekend. The only exception to this rule is if it is a varsity tournament. If that is the case, you can run a JV tournament, because most teams (at least in Illinois) will not send first and second year kids to a strong varsity tournament. We used this strategy on a weekend of a very popular varsity tournament. No one really offered an option in our area for this weekend; we did and had lots of kids attend.
Benchmark the best tournaments marketing fliers. Why reinvent the wheel, chances are if it is the tenth annual tournament, they have figured out what information is required on a tournament flier. Each year we tried to improve the flier based on questions we received. One frequent question was a request for directions, so we put this on next years flier. Another was what awards were going to be given out. All of this information was on the tenth annual tournament, that we did not include the first year we ran a tournament. Avoid our mistakes and others that have been made, by looking at several different fliers and use the best parts of each flier.
Pick your awards carefully, it is important in your marketing of your tournament. We always awarded First through Fifth medals at the least. When we saw other tournaments were awarding trophies, we offered trophies for first and even stepped it up the following year with t-shirts. The kids love the awards they received and talked about them. Although no coaches will probably decide which tournament to bring their wrestlers to based on the awards, parents may decide to skip a tournament that has notoriously bad awards. There is not a tremendous amount of cost difference in providing nice awards as compared to cheap awards.
Next month look for keys to running the tournament smoothly, a discussion on the day of the tournament operations.
Good Luck with your tournament...Jeff Pape
