Thanks for choosing to participate in the 2023 Eau Claire United Tournament.  This fancy page is where I post updates and information that's not all that urgent, but still useful.  I'll still be blasting you with emails for the good stuff, but I'll put information here that you can share with your teams and your club.  Thanks for your support.  

David Donnelly, Registration Flunky,  ECU Soccer

Please add tourneyhelp@ecusoccer.org to your trusted email.  I send bunches of emails from this account, and some spam filters think I'm junk.  Truthfully, the filters might be correct, but you still need the info I'm sending out.  Thanks.  David

We get this question more than any other.  Feel free to share this with anyone who wonders about scheduling a soccer tournament.  We are all soccer parents and understand the need to have a tournament schedule as soon as possible.  Here is how it's done.

Registration for our tournament is open until May 1.  We then beat the bushes for teams that have said that would like to register but "just haven't finished it yet".  After that, we form tentative divisions using all the data collected during registrations.  We look for holes in the divisions and hunt for teams to fill them (shout out to our friends at St Croix Soccer Club).

When that is all finished, we form pools and brackets, calculate games required for each sized field and submit our field request to the City of Eau Claire.

Our super cool Parks and Rec people figure out how to squeeze our field needs into our soccer park and gives us a field layout for the tournament.

We enter the field names and sizes into the magic schedule thing and start the process of scheduling a tournament.  Hours and hours of changes later, a schedule emerges.  Only to be changed again because a coach has a conflict... 

We check to make sure teams don't have a late Saturday and an early Sunday game.  We make sure Friday games are populated by more local teams.  We ensure that there are not back-to-back games.  We eliminate conflicts for coaches who coach more than one team.  We work to honor all reasonable special requests. 

When all that is done, we send the whole thing off to the Referee Assignor to make sure there are enough qualified referees to work the schedule.  After that, we check it one more time and publish the dang thing.  All in about two weeks.  Yuck.

Here's the rules and guidelines we follow when concocting the Tournament Schedule:

1. All teams must have at least 3 hours between the scheduled end of a game and the start of the next.  All games are scheduled accordingly, and we will not move games into time slots that violate this rule.
2. Teams are scheduled for a maximum of two games in one day.  That’s another rule we won’t break.
3. Our divisions are formed to give the best competition to all teams in each individual division and the best tournament experience for everyone involved.  We do not place teams by the team’s registration age alone.  We evaluate the age spread and concentration for multi-age teams.  We look at what league each team plays in and their corresponding record.  We ask teams for an honest characterization of their ability.  We contact teams directly when we see information that doesn’t correlate to our past experiences with other teams from their club. We talk to coaches, coaching directors, and club representatives.  We even reply to every single “our team really isn’t that good this season” email. This is a long way of saying that, while you obviously know more about your team than we do, we know a whole lot about your team and the teams we placed you with.  Unless something is really amiss (like a 10U team registered as a 12U… yes that happened) and we didn’t catch it (we did catch it), we will not be moving teams to a different division.
4. Sometimes the schedule sucks.  We sometimes have divisions with 5 teams.  Great for play in that each team will play 4 games.  Sucky for the schedule because two of those games will happen on Friday.  We can’t play 10 games between Saturday and Sunday without violating the 2 games/day rule (and that’s not happening). We sometimes need the game slots that Friday evening games provide.  We try to populate these Friday night games with the geographically closest teams within the division.  We don’t enjoy scheduling games on Friday, but it’s part of tournament play.

"What's with all these rosters?"  If I had a dollar for every time I hear that, I wouldn't have to register soccer tournaments for a living (I don't really do this for a living, I do it for free.  I'm not smart). 

Here's a little bit of an explainer on how Eau Claire United rolls with rosters. 

All teams must submit a Tournament Roster.  This is simply a list of the players that will be playing in the tournament together.  We use Tourney Machine to collect this information.  Then a super-cool roster elf (me) prints out a copy of the Tournament Roster for each game a team is scheduled to play in.  A game card elf (it used to be Tanya, but now it's me... again, I'm not real smart) prints out a card that's used by the referees to score each game.  We (a whole bunch of elves, not me) staple a Tournament Roster for each team to the game card.  Magic happens, and the Field Marshals have a game card for the referee to use and a Tournament Roster to check in your players before each game. 

The magic means that team managers don't have to carry around player cards, there isn't a Tournament Check in (with its slow-moving line) and everyone is Happy, Happy, Happy.

But (there's always a but) we need to make sure the players on the Tournament Roster are actually who they say they are and on a team at a properly sanctioned club.  That's where the Club Roster comes into play. 

Club Rosters have the players name, birth date (month and year), uniform number and a picture of the player.  We require all Tournament Team Managers to send us a Club Roster for all players.  Most of the time, the team's Club Roster is identical to the Tournament Roster.  Other times, teams will send two or three club rosters to cover all the team members.

We check to make sure all Tournament Roster players are present on a Club Roster and we're good to go.  Then we play a little soccer.  Roster fun for everyone.