Lessons from the Court: Effective Preparation

By: Jen O’Meara, Ph.D

Today I’d like to take you away from the court and into the nerve center of a racquetball tournament: the tournament desk. Almost everything happens at the tournament desk. Players are checked in, courts are assigned, scoresheets are returned, questions are answered, issues are dealt with, and spontaneous fires of all sorts are extinguished. The energy around the tournament desk is exponentially related to the number of courts the tournament is using. A small tournament can run with as few as three or four courts, and even that tournament desk will have moments of surprisingly high activity. The 3WallBall Outdoor Nationals held every Fall in Las Vegas, Nevada, on the other hand, uses seventeen courts. That tournament desk is all chaos, all the time.

As one of the tournament co-directors of 3WallBall, I am in the proverbial hot seat for between seven and ten hours each day of the Vegas tournament. It is my responsibility to ensure that everything runs smoothly, and every problem that pops up is ultimately my problem. As you might imagine, running a busy tournament desk requires solid leadership skills. Running the desk also teaches good leadership lessons too, some of which must ultimately be learned the hard way.

For example, when I first began running the desk in Vegas several years ago, I thought the best way to manage my responsibilities would be to prioritize the tasks — to figure out an overall order of task importance and then simply tend to problems in that order. While that approach seemed to make sense, I quickly found myself in the conundrum experienced by leaders everywhere, asking myself questions like:

• How do you prioritize things that are equally important?
• How do you prioritize anything when everything is important?

There is, of course, no time to ponder these existential questions when there is an ankle injury on Court 3, a referee missing from Court 11, players missing from Court 15, a player’s daughter asking for a band aid, the broadcast team requesting the scorecard for their next matchup, and no toilet paper in 5 of the 10 porta potties.

I have learned over the years that successfully running a tournament desk is — for me, anyway — less about priorities than it is about preparation. Indeed, the most important time that I spend ‘on duty’ is actually the hour I spend prior to taking the reins. During this time, I do three specific things to prepare for my shift behind the desk:

1. Analyze the schedule for player conflicts

This prep task is essential for keeping the tournament on time. As I study the match schedule, I specifically look for players who are scheduled to play back-to-back. Let’s say, for example, that Player A is scheduled to play on Court 2 at 2 pm and again on Court 3 at 3 pm. If the 1 pm match on Court 2 happens to go into a tiebreak, the 2 pm match on that court will probably begin and end late…which in turn means that the start of the 3 pm match on Court 3 will be delayed waiting for Player A to finish on Court 2. Identifying and figuring out how to mitigate these conflicts can ultimately prevent a domino effect that will throw the tournament off schedule.

2. Ask the tournament team currently on duty what is not going well.

This prep task is essential because it may allow me to course-correct — or even better, to solve — individual problems before I become responsible for all of the problems. I deal with issues much more efficiently when I can focus on them. Running the tournament desk requires a continual process of multitasking that simply does not allow for extended periods of focus on one particular thing.

3. Ask the players and spectators how things are going.

This prep task is essential for discovering issues that would eventually be reported to the desk. The pen being used by the referee on Court 4 is running out of ink. The referee on the Pro Court has only one extra ball left. The vending machines are almost out of sports drinks. Dealing with these minor issues now will prevent them from being brought to the desk later as problems, and that saves me a headache or two down the line.

While this tournament prep sequence has worked well for me, it is also highly applicable and adaptable to leaders in business scenarios as well. Taking time to identify and resolve potential time, personnel, or resource conflicts, for example, can prevent unpleasant surprises that could delay a project or critical task. Asking your team members about the difficulties they experience will help you eliminate the obstacles that make their work more difficult or time consuming than it needs to be. Asking clients or vendors how things are going will not only enable you to deal with issues before they turn into complaints, but will also ultimately increase their satisfaction with you, your team, and your company.

In short, the next time you find yourself trying to create an impossible hierarchy of similarly important tasks, consider whether you might be better off preparing rather than prioritizing. You might just be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Jen O’Meara is an Associate Professor of Business Communications and a 3-time US Open national racquetball champion.

READ MORE FROM THIS BLOG SERIES