UMass Sport Management SoccerFest Blog

With SoccerFest hosting a record number of teams, it has been the Volunteer
Management Department’s challenge to raise enough volunteers to be able to host
the event.  Corey Biechele, Dan Faggella and Anthony Tynan have been hard at
work to recruit and train volunteers to assist each SoccerFest department.
This includes referees, field monitors, staffing the Fun Zone, help with
registration, set-up and tear-down crews, and any other jobs that need to get
done.

Volunteer Management also hosted a party at The Hatch in the Campus Center this
past Monday to get all volunteers excited for SoccerFest.  First, we unveiled
our raffle prize for anyone who visits SoccerFest – Rock Band!  Then, after
raffling off some other prizes, we had pizza, drinks and pool.

With our big day coming tomorrow, Volunteer Management is ready to help Tournament
Operations set up our site and make final adjustments and preparation
to be ready to go Saturday morning.  Feel free to stop by and say hi and don’t
forget to thank the volunteers you see!  We couldn’t put on this event without
a real team effort.  Good luck to all teams and we will see you on Saturday!

-Volunteer Management

We decided to take out our SoccerFest blimp for a ride yesterday. We got a nice shot of where all the action will happen in just a few days!

 Aren’t you all impressed at how much we are blogging lately?

-The SoccerFest Marketing Team

A recent marketing endeavor. A banner in the center of Amherst.

Here are the final additions of sponsors that our sponsorship department has secured. We are proud to have the following companies onboard with us for SoccerFest 2008!

While the registration department tries to go through money like Paris and Nicole, the marketing department remains slightly more grounded in their requests. We are still trying to expand the Fun Zone, and here is our latest proposal. It only costs… well, just watch the video first:

How cool does that look? Sweet, right? Well, it costs atleast $1,500 to rent… Needless to say, our finance manager will not be very pleased to hear about this idea. So if you want the excitement of the Euro Bounce at SoccerFest, feel free to contact Dave. Call him in the middle of the night, facebook stalk him, stop by his house- whatever it takes- and demand the Euro Bounce! (And if not, maybe we have some more flattering pics to put up for him!)

If you are in Amherst this week (would you really rather be anywhere else?), then you should be on the lookout for our sweet posters designed by poster extraordinaire Shawn.

Check it out:

Some of you may be confused as to what “Phase 2″ means. Let me explain. Our marketing department has broken our marketing efforts into two phases to help simplify our lives. Phase 1 was all about recruiting teams for the event. The main objective for our department was to get 120 teams–well we surpassed that with 137 teams! Phase 2 is all about getting spectators and fans to our event. We want this to be THE biggest event on campus this year. The goal of Phase 2 is to draw people who aren’t necessarily playing in our tournament to our exhibition games, our live entertainment and extra activities like the rock wall.
SO if you aren’t signed up for the tournament be sure to stop by the fields on May 10th we have a ton of things going on for you to enjoy.

Since our email box is currently being flooded with postive responses from our previous blog entry we figured..heck why not introduce some of the marketing team. Once again these are proably the most flattering pictures you will ever see.

This is Phil.

Mike probably has the same pose in every picture.

Matt with his buddy Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews Band. Dave likes looking at the camera.

Website master Shawn. If you like our website, http://www.soccerfest.org, he is the one to thank.

Carly. The UMassathletics liason.

Kylie has large feet.

We promise Laurena gets stuff done, she doesn’t always sleep.

Some of the gang heading to a New Britian Rock Cats baseball game to market SoccerFest to the youth of Conneticut.

Like we said before. We promise Laurena doesn’t always sleep. She actually gets stuff done.

Now that you have seen our flattering pictures you must come say hi at SoccerFest.

See you on May 1oth..Oh yeah and we promise the next few entries will be serious in nature..maybe.

After three months of working on SoccerFest you start to notice things. The entire SoccerFest team is starting to realize that the registration department are serial money spenders.

First they ordered a giant soccer ball, and now they have ordered a giant balloon arch. What is next is beyond us. The good news is that with all this spending SoccerFest is sure to be THE best grassroots festival in New England. If you don’t come see us on May 10th..we promise you will be missing out!

The culprits:

Since is the first time we have posted pictures of members of the SoccerFest team we figured we would choose the most flattering ones.

So today our class got our “outfits” from PUMA to be worn on the day of the event. They are pretty sweet. Here is a sneak peak at how your favorite SoccerFest employees will be looking on May 1oth…

Here is the polo, (nicely embroidered by our friends at Silver Screen printing in Greenfield, Mass):

See you all realllll soon!!

Registratrion closed at midnight last night. While most people were sleeping, much of our staff was anxiously watching the registration process and crunching the numbers as entries came in. What an exciting day it was. After months of promotion, all we could do was sit back, watch the teams come in, and hope we hit our goals. At the end of the night, we had exceeded our goal of 120 teams, meaning that this will be the first SoccerFest tournament to run at capacity.

This really is a great group. The sponsorship department brought in the revenue to make this whole thing possible, and our volunteer recruitment has gone very well. Our operations crew now prepares to take the stage as they work out the game schedules and plan out the process of setting this event up.

 The excitement is back in the air here. Get hyped for May 10th!