How the Dallas Cup Coordinates 3,000 Volunteers Without the Chaos

The Challenge: Managing a Massive Event With a Small Team

Each spring, the Dallas Cup welcomes:

• 180 elite youth soccer teams
• Players from more than 100 countries
• Teams representing 45 U.S. states
• Roughly 160,000 spectators over one week

The tournament runs between Palm Sunday and Easter and relies on nearly 3,000 volunteers to function. From field operations to hospitality, volunteers support almost every part of the event.

With a small staff and dozens of committees, keeping everything organized wasn’t easy.

Before SignUpGenius, volunteer coordination depended on:

• Spreadsheets
• Bulk emails
• Shared online documents

As the tournament grew, those tools couldn’t keep up. Volunteer spots went unfilled, committee chairs had to chase people down, and coordination took weeks of extra work.

The Turning Point: Discovering a Better Way to Organize

A few years ago, one of the Dallas Cup coordinators was introduced to SignUpGenius through volunteer work at a local school and recommended it to the tournament team.

That recommendation changed everything.

The Solution: One Platform for 25 Committees and Thousands of Volunteers

Today, Jolyne uses SignUpGenius to manage volunteer sign ups across 25 different committees, each with its own needs, schedules, and roles.

“With SignUpGenius, I can take my 25 committees, divide everyone up, and fill all of the volunteer time slots,” says Doyle.
“I can put all of the information needed for one committee into a sign up and send a different one for each group.”

With SignUpGenius, the Dallas Cup team can:

• Create separate sign ups for each committee
• Clearly list roles, shifts, and requirements
• See when slots are full in real time
• Keep all volunteer information in one place

Instead of juggling files and inboxes, everything lives in a single dashboard.

The Impact: Less Admin Work, More Filled Slots

The difference was immediate.

“It probably takes away a month’s worth of work for me,” Doyle says.

Since switching to SignUpGenius:

• More volunteer roles are filled
• Committee chairs spend less time coordinating
• Volunteers know exactly where and when they’re needed
• Organizers can focus on running the tournament, not tracking spreadsheets

One committee chair even emailed Doyle to say:

“Just wanted to say I love love love the new SignUpGenius. It’s GENIUS. Looks great and super easy. Whoever found this site is brilliant.”

Built for a Complex, International Event

The Dallas Cup presents unique coordination challenges. Only 20% of teams are local to the Dallas area. The rest travel from across the U.S. and around the world, which means organizers also help coordinate housing, receptions, and logistics for out-of-town participants.

Doyle appreciates that SignUpGenius is easy for volunteers to use, while still offering enough flexibility to handle the tournament’s complexity.

“The site is very user friendly, but it also has a lot of features,” she says. “That allows me to customize each sign up to fit what we need.”

Keeping the Family Feel

Despite its size and international prestige, the Dallas Cup prides itself on its community roots.

“This is the thirty-third year of the tournament,” Doyle says.
“We have volunteers whose kids played in it, and now their grandkids are playing.”

By making volunteer coordination simpler and less time-consuming, SignUpGenius helps organizers preserve that family-first spirit while running an event on a global scale.

When organizers spend less time managing logistics, they have more time to focus on what matters most: the people who make the event possible.

Ready to better organize your next event?