Today, I continued with the youth soccer clubs in Montana. The youth soccer clubs have a comprehensive source, mostly websites for outside parties to avail club contacts of various coaches and directors. There is a legitimate website wherein information for all youth soccer clubs from any region/state can be obtained by simply entering the state, age group and sex in the respective drop down menu. The list of teams are in order of their rankings and it makes extracting information very smooth. So, I proceeded with the clubs and got the contact info of the head coaches and directors for boys U18.
I began the assignment with Montana. For the adult soccer clubs in Montana, there were several leagues under which several teams were affiliated to. I also found out that some of the leagues under the Montana State Soccer Association, were on the roster on a registration basis. I can only assume that it is an open league where teams can register to be a part of the season. This, however, made me question the level of these teams in terms of their scale of operations, club size, rankings etc. It was an important consideration since I wanted to only list the teams with credibility from a client’s/investor’s point of view. The information package that I was creating will be one of the sources for potential and existing clients with varying interests. Therefore, it was essential that the teams listed must be of value in some aspect so that our clients can reach out and conduct business. So, I went ahead and compiled the list of the teams in several leagues. Most of the teams didn’t have the contact information but the contact info of the league Director and Administrator was available which I thought was enough to reach out with any queries of the teams in it.
I emailed Gary the updates and also asked for the next assignment. He assigned me my weekly task of gathering contact information for the youth and adult soccer clubs in Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. He explained to me that one of our clients is looking to expand into the Northwest and that we're looking for prospective leads.I had to put them all in one Excel as different sheets for each state. I began my initial research of each state to find out what was available since I was aware that there were youth and adult soccer clubs that didn’t maintain a functional website for outside parties to obtain club information. I wasn’t surprised to find out that there were a bunch of clubs that I couldn’t gather contact information. For the youth clubs, it was more or less easily available in the sense that there were leads to their resources if not on their main website. I figured that it would be a time consuming process when I found out that for the adult soccer clubs, there were several leagues for each state and region and that these teams didn’t have any resourceful outlet for their club. The only form of contact with these clubs or teams in the various leagues was through the league director or administrator whose contact information was available.
Today, I received responses from several youth soccer clubs that I reached out for obtaining the contact details of the head coach and/or people in charge of external affairs and media relations. It was important that I had a full coverage of these information on the clubs that I listed for Gary since these information would be used for dealing with clients looking to expand in any areas. I had sent out fifteen queries to fifteen different youth clubs that didn’t have the information listed on their website and got response from eight of them. I was motivated to see my efforts bear fruit and so I went ahead and updated the spreadsheet for these states that I covered earlier. However, there were still some clubs left that had nothing listed and I was eager to get something out of their management so I sent them a follow up email on my query to expedite the process. Hopefully, I’ll hear from them soon enough!
Continuing my weekly assignment, I started with the remaining states which were KY, IL, MI and IN. Everything was pretty much the same in terms of work approach, teams and the gathering of all the contact information of directors and coaches of clubs in these states. I encountered the same problem as I did earlier with the previous teams and clubs that was not being able to specifically locate the contact information of the coaches and the directors. Some clubs didn’t provide the email nor the number of the Under 18 coaches and directors. There was only a general email to reach the club and the club contact telephone number. It would have sufficed for any other purpose but for the International Soccer Network, it was important that we have the resources to reach these people for any event that we might have. So, I put in the information that was available to me and notified Gary about it. I wanted to know what he had to say and how to go about this since I wanted to maintain professionalism in communicating with these youth soccer clubs and also didn’t have my ISN.com or shalesoccer.com email. I had completed my task and forwarded it to Gary.
After having done a research on the various youth soccer clubs for boys Under 18, I was able to locate a source that generated the list of teams in each state in the desired categories. The states that I worked on were PA, OH, TN, KY, IL, MI and IN. Today, I started out with the list for OH, PA and TN. I saw that the youth soccer association for Ohio was divided into North and South. I compiled the list of the top twenty youth soccer clubs for boys Under 18 in the Ohio north region. Many of these clubs were well established youth soccer clubs that had different teams under its umbrella representing at various levels. Same was with Pennsylvania where there were regional divisions under which a list of youth soccer clubs operated. These clubs maintained a resourceful website that had easy access to contact information of directors, coaching staff and administrators. Some of them didn’t have any contact information of their coaches or directors but instead listed a general email or had a query box for outside parties to reach the club management. I got through most of the work for these three states in gathering the information for the youth soccer clubs. I had the information that I needed for most of the clubs and for the rest, I sent in a query asking for the contact information and also stated my purpose.
Today I continued with the list of schools in Michigan under NCAA and the NAIA. There were many competitive schools in terms of their involvement in various conferences which I thought would be ideal for the International Soccer Network to reach out in order to provide youth and academy players the exposure at a college level. But there were not many schools that offered soccer programs in Michigan besides the big schools in Div I and also in Div II and Div III. My task was to extract the contact information of the head coach and assistant coaches for these schools from the staff directory page. It is usually time consuming but I once I got the hang of it, it was smooth. I completed the list for Michigan and Illinois today and was able to start researching on the youth clubs for all that states that I covered so far.
|
AuthorI am Jason Salam, MBA - Sports Management student at Tiffin University, Ohio. I have a background in business administration, particularly in marketing. Blogger and sports enthusiast! Archives
December 2015
Categories |