Safety is the part of tournament planning you cannot improvise. How to build an emergency action plan and a site plan your volunteers will actually use.
A grassroots tournament can mean a hundred matches, several hundred children, and a car park that fills before the first whistle. Most of a tournament you can improvise on the day. Safety is the part you cannot.
Two documents do most of the work: a written emergency action plan that says what happens when something goes wrong, and a site plan that shows where everything is. Get those two right, brief your volunteers on them, and nearly every other safety decision on the day becomes easier. This guide covers both, along with the practical checks worth running before and during your event.
Start with a written emergency action plan
An emergency action plan answers one question: when something goes wrong, who does what? It needs to be written down before the day rather than improvised on it. Under pressure people fall back on whatever is written and close to hand, so make sure something is.
Keep it short enough that a volunteer can read it in two minutes. A plan nobody reads is not a plan.
What your plan should cover
- Roles. Name the person in overall charge on the day, and who takes over if they are refereeing or off-site.
- Raising the alarm. How a marshal on the furthest pitch reaches the first aider and the event lead. Phone numbers, radios, or a runner if the signal is poor.
- Emergency vehicle access. The route an ambulance takes from the public road to each pitch, and who clears or unlocks it.
- The location. Full site address and postcode, plus a what3words or grid reference. On a large open site a postcode can drop a crew at the wrong entrance entirely.
- Evacuation. Where people go, how you tell several hundred of them at once, and who confirms the site is clear.
- Missing child procedure. Who is told, who searches where, at what point police are called, and where a found child is taken.
- Severe weather. What triggers suspending play, and who makes that call.
- First aid. Where cover is based and how to reach it from any point on site.
Print it. Give a copy to every marshal, to the first aid team, and to whoever is on the gate.
Draw a site plan people can actually read
A site plan is a single annotated image of your venue. It does two jobs at once: it helps hundreds of people who have never been there before find their way around, and it forces you to look at your own site the way an emergency crew will.
What to mark on it
- Pitch numbers, laid out as they actually sit on the ground
- Vehicle entrance, pedestrian entrance, and the emergency access route
- Car parking, including any overflow area
- First aid point
- Toilets and baby changing
- Refreshments
- Event control, or wherever the organiser can be found
- The assembly point for an evacuation
- Anything hazardous: ditches, ponds, steep banks, farm gates, overhead cables
Number your pitches on the plan, then mark those same numbers on the ground. When a marshal radios “injury on pitch seven”, everyone needs to mean the same pitch.
Confirm your first aid cover in writing
Match the level of cover to the size and profile of your event, and agree it in writing with whoever provides it. The details that get missed are usually about time rather than headcount.
- Where cover is based, and whether it is static or roaming
- How many qualified people, and the hours they are on site
- What happens during the lunch gap, and at the end of the day while teams are still packing up
- Who records injuries, and on what
Put the first aid point on the site plan, make it visible from a distance, and keep it reachable by vehicle.
Keep vehicles away from people
Most grassroots venues have a car park beside a pitch and a footpath running through the middle of it. On a normal Sunday morning that is fine. With a few hundred extra cars and a lot of small children moving between pitches, it is the biggest avoidable risk on your site.
- Separate the vehicle entrance from the pedestrian route wherever the site allows it
- Marshal the car park through the first hour and the last hour, the busiest and most distracted parts of the day
- Keep the emergency access route clear, and enforce it. A blocked access route is the most common way a good plan fails
- Set a walking-pace speed limit and put someone at the entrance to say so
Plan for the weather before you need to
Heat, cold and lightning all end tournaments early. Deciding your thresholds in advance means you are making a judgement call rather than an argument in front of forty parents.
- Say in advance whether drinking water is available on site or teams should bring their own
- Agree a threshold for suspending play in thunder and lightning, and stick to it
- In cold and wet weather, give young players somewhere to warm up between matches
- Decide beforehand who can shorten matches or abandon the day, and how that decision reaches every pitch
Make safeguarding visible
Know who is on your site and in what capacity, and make it easy for anyone to raise a concern with the right person.
- Nominate a welfare contact for the day and publish their name to every team
- Make officials and volunteers identifiable, whether by bibs, lanyards or tabards
- Agree your photography position in advance and tell teams what it is before they arrive
- Check your affiliation, and any requirements your county FA sets for an event of your size
Brief the people running the day
Everything above is worth very little if it only exists in the organiser's head. Run a fifteen minute briefing before the gates open. Walk the emergency route. Point at the first aid point. Say out loud what happens if a child goes missing. Hand out the plan rather than describing it.
The test is simple: pick a marshal at random an hour into the day and ask them where the ambulance comes in. If they can answer, your briefing worked.
Write down what actually happened
Keep an incident log at event control, and record near misses as well as injuries. The car that reversed toward the pedestrian gate without hitting anyone is the single most useful entry you will make, because it tells you exactly what to change next year.
Put the plans where people will look
A plan in a folder in the organiser's car is not accessible. It needs to be somewhere a coach standing on pitch eleven can reach in seconds, on the device already in their hand.
When you plan an event with Grassroots Tournaments, you can upload both your emergency action plan and your site plan as part of event setup. Both are then shown to every participant through the Event Day app, so the people who need them already have them. No printouts, and no hunting for whoever has the folder.
A pre-tournament safety checklist
- Emergency action plan written, and shared with marshals and first aiders
- Site plan drawn, with pitch numbers matching the markings on the ground
- Emergency vehicle route walked, and confirmed clear
- First aid cover confirmed in writing, covering the full length of the day
- Full address, postcode and a precise location reference in the plan
- Welfare contact named, published and identifiable on site
- Parking marshals briefed for both arrival and departure
- Severe weather thresholds agreed, and the decision maker named
- Incident log and pens at event control
- Both plans uploaded so participants can see them on the day
The point of all of it
None of this is paperwork for its own sake. A written plan and a clear site map are what let you hand a problem to someone else and trust it will be handled, which is the difference between an organiser who spends the day running the tournament and one who spends it firefighting.
Plan the safety properly and you get the day you actually wanted: one people remember for the football.