The Mingo Bay Baseball Classic held in beautiful Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is the second largest high school baseball tournament in America with over 130 teams entering the Spring tournament. This growing event has been partnered with EventConnect since 2017. We sat down with Tournament Director Tim Christy to hear about his experience using our system for his event.
EXPERIENCE
EventConnect: What first attracted you to EC?
Tim Christy: To be truthful, when we started the partnership I wasn’t the director at the time. Because we’re such a large tournament we meet as a group of coaches and our director at the time, Mike Morris, said “we have an opportunity to look at this company for tournament management”. We were a bit skeptical until we had an online demo with me, Mike, and a few other coaches. After the demo we talked and thought that this was a great opportunity for us to move into the 21st century. Because we were a pen & paper company, things would get lost in notebooks and you tend to misplace things when you have a 130 team tournament. A short while later Mike moved away and I was given the chance to direct the tournament. After that, my EventConnect account manager Amber and myself would work together regularly to teach me the in’s & out’s of the system which was very helpful. I’m a physical education teacher, my computer skills are basically email and looking at sportsillustrated.com to see who won the game haha.
Give your teams an amazing tournament experience
Last year was our first year using the system for our tournament and being rookies we didn’t use all the tools you guys have to offer, even with our basic understanding of the system it was still an amazing experience for our teams. Now being more familiar with the platform, oh man it’s awesome. People will email or call me asking if I got their check and instead of pulling out an old notebook I can go into the system and check their team and say ‘yep here’s the check number and when I got it’. Those are the kind of things that really make this system special in particular for a director like me who does these types of things all the time.
I just got into the Custom Questions feature on the system and dang man if I’d have known it was that easy last year I woulda saved myself a lot of time and trouble. It’s been great though man you guys have a really great product.
EC: That’s great to hear Tim, we find a lot of our partners are on the same page. The ease of use of the system and the clarity real-time data provide are a total game-changer for their events.
TC: Oh absolutely.
FEATURES
EC: What are some of your favourite features offered by the EC system?
TC: By far, the teams being able to log on and register for the tournament. That eliminates such a paper trail for me. Instead of me scanning a tournament application then emailing it to a team then them printing it off, filling it out, scanning it again, emailing it back. You know just being able to click a mouse and see who has registered is unbelievable.
I get notifications for everyone when they register and then when they pay, it’s so great for keeping everything tidy and organized. We’re also eliminating so much paper waste from the beautiful Great North West which is fantastic. The truth of the matter is this system has allowed us to maintain an even higher standard for our tournament. It had improved the quality of the tournament experience, and that is HUGE.
EC: What would you say to someone who’s looking at EC?
TC: I should have taped the conversation I had yesterday with another director. I said to him “you’re crazy if you don’t do this!” I told him it’s easy and amazing to use, and it’s free! I remember asking my account manager who do I send the check to and they said ‘coach you don’t gotta pay’ and I was like ‘whaaatt?!’
Like I said to him, it’s just so easy to set up.
You guys are great to work with, so many technology things these days advertise an ease of use and good support team but when something goes wrong you can’t get a hold of anybody. If I need somebody at EventConnect I know all I need to do is pick up the phone. My account manager might not be available but someone else will be for sure, and that’s a beautiful thing. You guys are absolutely killing it! Y’all are good people and that makes the world of a difference.
It’s always great to hear from our partners and learn about their experience using the EventConnect Event Management Suite for their tournaments. We can’t wait to see how the Mingo Bay Baseball Classic performs in the future with our platform.
Want to experience the same growth and success? Book a demo of EventConnect.