Soccer kicks off

If you have not yet read the first part AND the second part AND the third part AND the fourth part— while I appreciate your enthusiasm — this would probably make more sense if you started at the beginning. But do what you want; I’m not the boss of you.

I had befriended an older marketing artist, Jim, whose career had changed rapidly from bluelines and Xacto knives to Macs, QuarkXPress and digital proofs. You could tell he was struggling with the technology after having had an almost thity-year career in old style advertising layout. He was an extraordinarily kind person and unlike many older newsies, he was open to learning new skills, even as he did not quite understand them. I had a lot of software training skills and helped him where I could with the technical stuff, building his confidence in his skills. With a 30+ year career at the advertising department at the Dayton Daily News, he knew people within the community and those people trusted him.

“What does Rivershark do,” Jim asked me once. I told him mostly what we are doing right now is building these exciting jobbank tools to help find merchandisers for this new trade association called NARMS (Now the World Alliance for Retail Excellence & Standards) This was before Google, before Craig’s List, before LinkedIn or anyone else really doing a job bank that had a high level of specificity. The ONLY jobs that were there were real jobs from NARMS members. We also built a database for retail merchandisers where NARMS member could search by geography and skills. Within a year, we had over 100,000 merchandisers in the database and over half the NARMS members were signed up to search it. It was the de facto place on the internet for find a retail merchandising jobs.

“Could you do the same for soccer tournaments?” he asked. “I guess we could do something like that.”

Later that week he had a meeting with the Warrior Soccer Club to talk about the DDN ad placement for their annual adidas Warrior Soccer Tournament. Unbeknownst to me, he pitched me as a guy who could help them build a cool website for their tournament.

It didn’t go anywhere. They weren’t ready.

The summer came and went and I ended it beginning my daughter’s soccer season with a now defunct pre-season tournament, the Northmont Bolt Cup. We were given paper maps and schedules the day before by our coach. When I got to the soccer tournament with my daughter, I had no idea where she had to play or what time she needed to be there. The maps were all wrong and there was no place to check the schedule. Through dumb luck, I found her team and she didn’t miss her game.

There had to be a better way. I went home after the two games she played, looked at the software that was running the NARMS website and figured I had written enough code to create a system that could register teams, manage the applications and do some marketing. The scheduling and scoring parts would have to be done, but I was confident it could be done. It had to be done.

That Monday morning, I was re-telling my soccer tournament frustrations with Jim over lunch and he reminded me of our conversation several months ago. “If I could put together a pitch deck,” he said, “he could get a meeting with the Warrior folks.”

About a week later, we found ourselves in the lobby of a Max&Erma’s with Me, Jim and my laptop, staring at about ten folks from the Warrior Soccer Club. We all squeezed around a table; Jim introduced me to Carol and Jim P, the co-directors of the Warrior Classic and I was off, pitching the new www.warriorclassic.com. I got about 4–5 slides into it and Carol asked, “How much?” “It was free to the tournament,” I said, “we’ll recoup from the traffic and ads,” which was the internet business model of the day.

“Do it,” Carol said. And like an idiot who forgot to shut up when I got to a ‘yes,’ I said, “But I got more slides to show you!”

And with that, TourneyCentral was born.

This story is being told here is small bits for manufactured drama. Book | Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six