It’s September, which means we are in full preparation mode for the upcoming season, and the most time consuming part of preparation is budgeting and scheduling for each team.

Here are factors that can guide a director when preparing a budget and tournament schedule for your teams.

#1 Base Budget and Fixed Cost

Budget and schedule go hand in hand.  It helps to start each year with a “Base” budget for each level of team that you have (Premier, National, Boys, Semi-National, Regional, and Travel Light/Local, etc).  The base budget consists of everything related to practice (court fees, coaches pay), administrative costs (coaches gear, administrator pay, office supplies, insurance, USAV and AAU memberships for coaches), and any other costs that you anticipate for these teams.

If your club pays coaches by the practice hour and then by the tournament day, the “Base” cost only includes the practice portion of coaches pay.  This is the “Fixed” cost.

#2 Individual Team Budgets

Then the fun begins as you begin to look at the tournament schedule and complete the individual team budgets.  This part of the process usually isn’t finished until late September, and even then there are always late changes.

It helps to look at the tournaments your teams competed in the year before and decide which ones you would like to return to and which tournaments need to be replaced.  Have a spreadsheet that you are always updating with every tournament within 8 hours of your club, as well as every National Qualifier, AAU Super Regional, and big JVA tournament that is on the schedule.  From here you can start to build out the schedule.

Create a skeleton schedule with the “definite Yes’s”, and then fill in from there.  If your club competes in a Power League, those events serve as part of the skeleton.

If you as the director have general policies in place for certain teams those will play a factor in your tournament decisions.

  • For example, you prefer for 14 and under teams to not travel by plane.
  • Or you try to support those clubs that support your events
  • Avoid back-to-back weekend tournaments

Feedback from end-of-season parent meetings can reveal a lot about what families want (more travel, less travel), which teams need to be challenged, and which teams need a balanced challenge/success type of schedule, entry cost, travel costs for families, and recruiting needs of players. This is the time to apply the common feedback from the previous season’s meetings and surveys.

#3 Scheduling flights

For tournaments that include flights, you need to may need to make the decision to drop or add a tournament as flight schedules become available. For example, Carolina Union built out its premier team schedules in August but made changes a week ago because the cost of flying to a preferred tournament was over $500 per ticket, while the cost to fly to another high level tournament was $250.

It obviously important to take into account that the cost of travel will be higher when flying, so if cost is prohibitive, it would not make sense to fly to a tournament.

Another factor to consider is if the schedule of flights means an extra missed day of school or another night in a hotel. Depending on which airport you fly out of, there may be certain tournaments that you cannot do because it’s nearly impossible to get back home on the last day of the tournament.

#4 Recruiting Needs

One commonality among competitive clubs is to place the recruiting needs of the athletes in the 15’s through 18’s as a high priority.  You could project, to some degree, what the makeup of a team could be, and then add or remove a tournament or two based on the athletes’ recruiting processes.  A recruiting coordinator can help with this part of creating your teams schedules based on his/her knowledge of college program needs and the relationships built with your athletes.

#5 Variable Cost

The budget for tournaments is what you can consider your “variable” cost.  Each tournament has its own budget and includes travel expenses, coaches pay, hotel costs, food costs, and tournament entry.  Create spreadsheets formatted to update fairly quickly as you add and remove tournaments from the schedule. Here is a Sample Tournament Travel Budget

Be ready to make adjustments to your budget and travel schedules until the Player Parent Meeting at the beginning of season.  After that meeting, paperwork/contracts are signed, and you can anticipate very little changes for the rest of the year so you can finally get down to the best part, training the athletes on the court!

For more information about budgeting and accounting, visit the JVA Member Resources.

About the Author

John Brannon is entering his ninth season as the Club Director of Carolina Union Volleyball Club in North Carolina, a JVA member club since 2011. Under his guidance, CUVC has opened it’s own training facility with a State-of-the-Art Orthopedic Subfloor, established an elite boys program, and has grown to 46 teams.