There’s a moment before the beginning of a new season where a league administrator needs to be able to evaluate their current processes to see where they can build on success or make improvements.
With the fall sports season approaching, now is as good a time as any to review certain areas of improvement.
A good place you can start is by adopting a method that is often used in the business world called, “Stop, Start, Continue,” which gives leaders and team members an opportunity to identify issues that need to be addressed.
It’s straightforward and easy enough to transfer over to a sports league, and you can review past successes and areas of improvement as a league administrator. So, think about your past season, and then in regards to effectively running your league, ask yourself, your coaches or boosters these questions.
- What hasn’t worked and needs to stop?
- What is new that we need to start doing?
- What is working now that we need to keep doing?
This is a simple method that can give quick answers to help you plan for the next season. Then once you can identify these things, you can take those responses and build on them.
So, as an administrator, the responsibility now falls on you to take these responses and continue to press forward. Here’s how you do that:
- Identify mistakes: Take what you’ve learned from what hasn’t worked. For example, if you struggled to get players to pay league dues by the start of last season, now is the time to think through the process, set early deadlines, incentivize registering and paying early, and come up with a plan to communicate with teams, athletes and parents before it becomes an issue. This is your time to look hard at your mistakes and figure out how to avoid making them again.
- Celebrate successes: It can be easy sometimes to only call out what doesn’t work, but you also need to find time to celebrate the good things that happened last season. Take what you’ve learned from your success and see how to apply that in other areas where your league has struggled.
- Make a plan to apply your lessons learned: The information you gain from the survey answers you collect helps you create a plan for the next season. By having a plan in place, you know what you need to do in order to execute, and it makes execution a lot easier.
- Move on: Take everything—the good and the bad—and use it as a point of growth for the next season. It can be easy to linger on past mistakes, but now is your time to take a deep breath, embrace the changes and move forward to having the best season yet.
We have the best solution to help you manage your team, league or club’s registration and payments for the start of the season, and we’ve added a ton of new features to help you optimize your league. If you are not a current Pickle Juice user, we’d love to set you up with a demo today.