It was a year in the making: A five-day tournament that brought together 120 teams from 11 states in Morgan Hill.
The Region IV Presidents Cup tournament required the Morgan Hill Soccer Complex to change how it configured its field, how it watered the field, how it organized hospitality, field marshals and drinking water.
“When you do a tournament for two days or even three, you don’t quite appreciate what a tournament for five days means,” said Jeff Dixon, president of the Morgan Hill Youth Sports Alliance that runs the sports complex.
Teams began play on June 11, with boys and girls ages 12 up to 17 hitting the pitch for the initial round robin play leading to the weekend’s elimination rounds.
They were all competing for the right to represent Region IV—comprised of the Western United States—in the Presidents Cup finals in Greenville, SC.
Dixon said the competition lived up to the stakes. He said some kids kicked up the intensity, leading to a few injuries and at least one ambulance needing to respond.
But the biggest takeaway Dixon saw was how an alliance of Morgan Hill associations came together to conduct outreach for the city.
The Morgan Hill Tourism Alliance—an ad hoc committee of members of the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Association, the Gilroy Welcome Center and the City—formed a campaign dubbed Meet Morgan Hill.
The goal was to point the out of town guests in the direction of restaurants and other attractions to give them something to do and a possible reason to return.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work over the last year to increase the communication and coordination on the part of local organizations,” said John Horner, president and CEO of the Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce. “Jane Howard at the Gilroy Welcome Center was very involved. We had great regional involvement.”
The Meet Morgan Hill campaign passed out 150 information bags to the teams and officials at the tournament to help point out where they could go eat and relax.
Dixon said a quick survey of area restaurants revealed they had many large groups coming in to eat.
Dixon said the next step—apart from gearing up for several lacrosse tournaments later this month and next and a world dog agility competition in October—is to work with members of the Tourism Alliance to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
“I think there were some excellent lessons learned in terms of hospitality in support of such a high profile event,” Dixon said. “We’ll be sharing them with the Tourism Alliance and the Gilroy Welcome Center in the coming months.
Horner said the biggest takeaway is the need to get plans together sooner.
“The main lesson we learned is to do things sooner. We tried to do things last minute and we kept saying to ourselves, ‘If we had started working on this a few weeks sooner, we could have done more,’” Horner said.
