Running a kids' tournament: 6 things organisers forget

Most first-time youth tournament organisers focus on the wrong things. They worry about whether the format is right, whether they have enough referees, whether the venue will be available. Those are the easy bits — they're solvable in advance with a checklist.

What goes wrong on tournament day is almost always one of six things, and almost no first-time organiser sees them coming.

1. The first match is always 15 minutes late

The schedule says 'Match 1: 10:00am'. The match actually starts at 10:14am. This is universal. Two parents are stuck in traffic, one team's GK gloves are still in someone's car, the referee needs to walk the pitch first.

The fix: schedule the first match for 9:30am if you want it to start at 10:00am. Build the 15-minute buffer in. Tell teams to arrive at 9:15am for the 9:30am 'kickoff'. The schedule that runs to time on day one is the schedule that lied about the start time.

Bonus tip: the first match is also where the warm-up timing chaos happens — use it to introduce the kids to the venue, the referee, and the kit. By Match 2, the squad knows where everything is and the gap shrinks.

2. The breaks between matches are too short

Schedule says 5-minute changeover between matches. Reality: water bottles, dropped kit, parents asking the coach what's happening, ref signing the scorecard. 5-minute changeovers are a fantasy.

The fix: schedule 8-10 minute changeovers, not 5. If you finish faster than that, brilliant — Match 3 starts early. If you finish on time, the schedule still works. Five-minute schedules don't.

3. No one tracked the fairness of GK rotation

By Match 3, one parent realises their kid hasn't been in goal yet. By Match 4, a different parent realises their kid is in goal AGAIN. The GK rotation goes off the rails because no one wrote it down.

The fix: write the GK rotation in advance. Each team's coach should have a sheet that says 'Match 1: GK is Mason. Match 2: Lucy. Match 3: Sammie.' Hand the sheet to the coach with the team list. If a kid doesn't want to go in goal, you swap with another kid on the SAME sheet — but the sheet is the source of truth, not the parent's memory.

If you're running a tournament for an existing squad, the U9 Tournament Prep session on SimpleDrills covers the squad-level prep — including a 'first-keeper experience' walkthrough that makes GK rotation more comfortable for the kids.

4. The bad refereeing decision will happen, and you didn't warn the kids

At some point in the tournament, a referee will make a call that one team thinks is wrong. This is guaranteed. Volunteer refs, kids' tournaments, no VAR — bad calls are part of the package.

If the kids haven't been prepared for this, the team that disagrees with the call will sulk, argue, or quit emotionally for the rest of the match. The tournament loses its tone.

The fix: brief the kids before the tournament starts. 'Refs are volunteers. They're learning. Sometimes they'll get a call wrong. We don't argue, we don't sulk — we play on. Got it?' Have the conversation in training the week before, not on tournament day. The U9 Tournament Prep session has this conversation built in as a deliberate exercise.

5. The food situation

Kids playing 4-5 matches over 90 minutes get hungry. Parents bring random snacks at random times. By Match 4, three kids have eaten chocolate cake and one has an empty stomach. Performance and behaviour both crater.

The fix: standardise the food. Either:

• Tournament provides snacks — bananas, raisins, water. Hand out at scheduled times (after Match 2). Parents are told not to bring extras.
• Parents bring kit-bag snacks — but each parent gets a 'no chocolate, no fizzy drinks before matches' note in the team WhatsApp the week before.

The version that DOESN'T work is 'parents bring whatever, kids eat whatever, when they want'. That version is what most tournaments default to, and it's why the second half always feels worse than the first.

6. The medal/trophy moment

The end of the tournament is supposed to be the big moment. In practice, it's often a damp squib — coaches forgot to bring medals, the trophy presentation is rushed because parents are leaving for lunch, the photos are bad because the lighting is wrong.

The fix: plan the medal moment with the same effort as the matches. Specifically:

• Pre-buy medals BEFORE the tournament (one per kid, win or lose — participation medals matter more than people think). The tournament equipment guide covers what to buy.
• Have a designated 'photo spot' — a wall, a banner, a piece of fence where every team gets a photo. Plan it at venue setup, not on the day.
• Schedule the ceremony as a real block on the schedule. 15 minutes minimum. Don't squeeze it into 'after the final'.
• Hand out medals to every kid by name. Yes, even the kids on the losing team. Especially the kids on the losing team.

The takeaway

Format and fixtures are the part of tournament organising that's easy to think about — they're abstract, they're searchable, they have right answers. The six things above are the part that's harder to think about because they require imagining the human behaviour on the day. They're also the things that make the difference between a tournament kids remember fondly and one they remember as 'when Coach got stressed and the medals were rubbish'.

If you're running a youth football tournament specifically, the U9 Tournament Prep session on SimpleDrills covers the week-before squad preparation. Use it. The kids who've done it handle tournaments meaningfully better than the kids who haven't.