Using AI in youth soccer tournaments

Since ChatGPT was released, I have been throwing scheduling queries at it in order to determine how best to incorporate AI into TourneyCentral. With every query, though, I have become more convinced that scheduling a youth soccer tournament is still a human skill. Humans can do it faster and more reliably because they don’t need ALL the data stated in explicit terms in detailed prompts to generate a schedule. YOU know things intuitively about the teams, the playing fields, the ebb and flow of your event better than an AI could imagine. Or, more correctly, the time and treasure investment of incorporating an AI would just get in your way.

At TourneyCentral, we believe in a software-human hybrid model. Let software do what it does best, let human beings do what they do best and don’t let software get in the way. For anyone who has fought with software that doesn’t allow an exception override at 3:00am when the schedule is due out at daylight, you get that. It’s not fun.

A tournament director said this thing to me years ago and I have never forgotten it (Gordan, wherever you are, thanks!) He said, “Software is not like moving furniture.” What we both understood is that software is either on/off, 1/0. Being half a bit is not an option in software, but it is in moving furniture. Human beings take for granted that you can always move things over “a tiny scooch” whereas software will fight and snap to a whole scooch. Partial scooches do not exist in software.

This is not to say that there is no place for AI in youth soccer tournaments! That would be like saying, “No soccer tournament needs a website because teams won’t apply online and scores are impossible to record real-time.” If we had listened to that advice we were given back in 1998, well, TourneyCentral wouldn’t be arond today. What we did hear, however, was that the world was moving towards a digital model but we needed to keep the physical systems in place while it caught up. Many of the things we do today are still rooted in that philosophy and we automate when the soccer tournament world is ready.

So, we think AI will eventually be a major part of youth soccer tournaments, but only after it has been trained on the really smart humans doing the highly skilled work of creating soccer schedules, seeding teams, etc. Ironic, but it eventually will happen as the AI bots crawls through more and more sites like TourneyCentral.

Which leaves us asking ourselves, “how do we incorporate AI into the tournaments today?”

Both ChatGPT and Claude now crawl through websites for data in real time. When they were first introduced, they didn’t. So this morning, I threw a prompt at them each, like this:

“Crawl through all the popular youth tournament websites (TourneyCentral, GotSport, TeamSnap, SportsEngine, LeagueApps, etc) and find me the 2024 and 2025 playing record for a club.” (I used Butler United Soccer Club (BUSC) in Ohio as an example. Try it and see what results you get!) It was shockingly good, with links to verify what it had found. But here is where it failed:

• It did not know that Butler, BU, BUSC, Butler United was the same club. So it starts becoming more important that teams standardize their team names, clubs and coach names across all channels to get the credit they deserve for their hard work on the pitch. Coaches and team reps need to become more aware of this as they apply to events. Consistent team name, club name, coach name, colors, location, state affiliations — it all matters… or will very soon.
• Points don’t matter if AI bots can now get results without the team having to register with a specific platform to get credit. Just like how advertising on websites is going to become irrelevant in a couple years, so too are platform-specific points.
• Because the points-gatekeeping will implode due to AI, the ONLY things that will matter to tournament events is how easy is the software to use and how responsive is the support team. If your club is tolerating abysmal service because you are hanging onto the “value” of points for ranking teams, you may want to start thinking about how Ai is going to disrupt that very soon.

There are a few more takeaways from my experimenting with AI and I’m sure they will change as AI changes, but now would be a good time to start asking, “How will I use AI in my youth soccer tournament?” Sometimes, the “obvious” answer — Automate my schedule — may not be the answer it appears.

No AI was used in writing this post. It all came out of my own very human brain. Well, with the exception of that silly AI bot scheduling teams. I wonder if Team D will show and if Team B is going to know where to play?