Disappointed in U90C Summer Splash

Tournament is this weekend and they have scheduled a conflict with a league game that we told them about as soon as our league posted the schedule. Kind of hard to play at MoneyGram with a league game in Plano two hours later. We are now going to have to forfeit one of the games. I am no scheduling genius but would think that with them waiting until Tuesday night to post the schedules that this could have been avoided.

Sadly learning more and more that select soccer, the various leagues and tournaments are not at all about the kids, but rather how much money they can make off of the parents. Do you think that the opponent will be happy to only play 2 of the 3 games they paid good money for? Now we have almost no chance of playing the 4th game on Sunday. All because of scheduling.

Oh and we did have both our team manager and coach reach out to the director as we all know that is FORBIDDEN for a parent to even speak to anyone holding a position of authority in these groups. It still fell on deaf ears.

League play takes priority over tournaments. You should not have registered for a tournament during league play.

What's worse is how little you and your team seem to value player safety. If u90c could have avoided the schedule conflict, and your team advanced to the tournament championship game, that would be 5 full-length games (combined tournament and league) in August in Texas in the span of 48 hours.

Actually we have been signed up for this tournament since before league schedule came out so the league also could have avoided the scheduling. Also, the tournament started Friday night so we could have played one Friday night, one Saturday and one Sunday. There is no guarantee about making the finals.
It's really not that hard to fix and really it's a problem that should not have even been a problem.

Leagues (especially Classic League) rarely work around generic tournaments during the league season. Your team knew Classic League would have games this weekend, so your manager and/or coach should not have signed up for a tournament.

There were tournaments prior to league play and over Labor Day weekend (no league play) that would have been better options.

Not Classic League. PPL. Their schedule just was posted late last week. We already played first league game this week but they scheduled two in first week.
Thanks for defending The Man in all of this and not even acknowledging that they are the least flexible youth sports organizations around.

With select soccer leagues the size of PPL, scheduling games in their allotted number of weeks is already a daunting task. Scheduling and rescheduling games for tournaments, other sports, birthday parties, family vacations, etc. makes it more difficult. It is not not fair to the other teams in your division who followed directions and the league calendar.

League play takes priority. Your manager and coach should know that and not register for tournaments during league play. If you have games rained out this season and you register for a tournament for early November, you will have this same issue. PPL will reschedule your rained-out games in direct conflict with tournaments, no matter how early you register for them.

This is the reality of select soccer in NTX. When the league posts their dates for league play, do not register for a tournament during one of those weekends.

Just trying to help. It's going to be a long season and there will be much bigger issues to focus on that are NOT the fault of your manager or coach, including...

- 8pm games on weeknights
- waiting until the last second to cancel games when it was raining for the last 12 hours
- missing/bad referees
- parents sitting on the wrong end of the field
- teams with illegal players
- cricket balls flying onto your field during games, trainer too slow to get to your field for injury
- ant mounds and dog poo on fields

Once again, PPL schedule came out AFTER we registered for this tournament. They asked for coaches conflicts and he notified them the day the PPL schedule came out LAST week. This was not a "oh gee sir we have our team pool party scheduled can you change it," situation. Also, FYI, the field that the game was supposed to be played on had a forfeit the game before. Not a team didn't show up forfeit but a tournament director scheduled a game with a TBD team that guess what, never existed. And they put that TBD team in the gold bracket. The opponent even knew not to show up and referees were there. So common sense would say, "hmm let's move the game up one hour so they can then get to their league game in time. Sadly common sense is not a criteria for directors.

Once again, it doesn't matter when you registered for the tournament. League games take priority over tournaments. Don't register for a tournament scheduled to play on a league play weekend. That is common sense.

Even if PPL was nice enough to accept schedule requests, the day league schedules come out is at least a week too late to notify the league of a conflict.

coachdom wrote:Once again, it doesn't matter when you registered for the tournament. League games take priority over tournaments. Don't register for a tournament scheduled to play on a league play weekend. That is common sense.

Even if PPL was nice enough to accept schedule requests, the day league schedules come out is at least a week too late to notify the league of a conflict.

Common sense but seems like this is a losing battle for you Dom. He doesn't get it.

I could be wrong but I believe both PPL and CL both have calendar or important dates sections that have been posted for at least a couple of months now and they both show when league games begin.

Going by the important dates information below in the PPL, I would not schedule a tournament from August 15 through November 12th. In fact I might even wait a week or two after November 12th, just in case of reschedules games due to rain outs.

Important Dates for Fall 2017:



June 1: Questionnaire Opens (lets us know where you plan on playing in the fall)

July 1: Home Association Begins

July 14: U11B-U19B deadline to register for the PPIL

*U11B going through Boys Classic has until August 8th

July 28: U12B-U19 Placement Games (it is possible that not all age groups will

have to play, that will be determined after registration ends and we know how

many teams have registered)

August 1: Girls U11-U19 deadline to register for the PPIL

August 8: Boys U11 deadline that tried out but did not qualify for Boys Classic

August 11-13 and 18-20: Boys U11 and Girls U11-U19 Placement Games (it is possible

that not all age groups will have to play, that will be determined after registration

ends and we know how many teams have registered)

August 15: PPIL games will begin for teams that did not have to go through placement

games.

November 12: Season’s over

You know, maybe we should not have played who knows. The point of a team is to play games and tournaments are the best way to get that goal accomplished. My point in bringing this up is that we the clubs are the clients and the tournaments are the business that needs those clients. In my business when a client says they have a need I do everything possible to accommodate them. It is how I keep my clients. Tournament directors could do a better job in working with their clients. The ultimate goal is to give the kids the best experiences for their efforts and for the money being spent.

All anyone has responded is with how we should not have signed up due to the league having games. Well the problem with that is most leagues don't release their "partial" schedule until the week before it starts AND not every team in our league played the first weekend. So we are supposed to sit at home and not play in the tournament because we MIGHT have a league game?
You guys are coaches so you know what I am saying is right.
Teams are starting to feel neglected as I noticed several age groups were light on teams and some even had to play up because the numbers were low. Customer service is important.

I am confident the tournament director gave his best effort considering your division included a non-local team, as well as at least one team whose coach had more than one team in the tournament.

If your team had a coach with multiple teams in a tournament, how mad would you have been at the tournament director if your coach had a schedule conflict in pool play and could not attend one of your games? After all, you are a client of that coach.

There are some terrible tournament directors who seed divisions by putting names in a hat, and could care less if a coach has more than one team in the tournament. The tournament director for this tournament is not one of those.

GoalkeeperDad27 wrote:Well the problem with that is most leagues don't release their "partial" schedule until the week before it starts AND not every team in our league played the first weekend. So we are supposed to sit at home and not play in the tournament because we MIGHT have a league game?

If you ever looked at CL or PPL website during the offseason, they will tell you when games will start. You don't need a schedule to know that games are starting a certain week. You may or may not have a bye that week but they state that you should be prepared to play. They also state they will not work around tournament schedules.

GoalkeeperDad27 wrote:You guys are coaches so you know what I am saying is right.
Teams are starting to feel neglected as I noticed several age groups were light on teams and some even had to play up because the numbers were low. Customer service is important.

You're NOT right. The age groups are not feeling neglected. Those teams realize there are league games going on so they're not signing up. It's pretty simple really. Your coach and team manager screwed up and want somebody else to fix it. Most teams did their tournaments already. Now they will wait until November to do another tournament and possibly one more in February before league play starts back up.

Chalk this up to a lesson learned and move on.

As a manger, I would have known not to play in a tournament that weekend based on the information on the PPL or Classic site. They posted well in advance when the season was set to start. In the case of Classic, they stated games were set the start on Aug 12th. At that point we had to assume we would be playing that day. As a matter of fact, Classic stated we could either play on the 12th or 13th due heat. So we had to plan accordingly.