Before the contract is signed
- Ask who else is in the hotel that weekend. Hotels will tell you if another team, a media group or a large conference is booked. You want to know before you sign, not when you see the lobby.
- Put the coaches on one floor, and control the key list. Ask for a floor with one elevator approach. Ask who at the hotel can cut keys to that floor and keep the list short.
- Book the meeting room yourself, and see it before the team does. A room booked by a third party is a room you know nothing about.
The week of the trip
- Decide what travels. The full playbook does not need to be on every device on the bus. Decide what the staff carries, and what stays home on a drive nobody can reach from a hotel.
- Clean the tablets. Remove old game plans and anything from previous opponents from the team tablets. If a device is lost, you want it to hold one week, not a season.
- Set a phone rule for the meeting room. Phones on the table face down, or phones in a basket at the door. Pick one and enforce it from the first meeting.
- Give the room list to as few people as possible. The coaches' room assignments should not be on a printout that travels with the equipment truck.
On arrival
- Walk the meeting room before the first meeting. Under the tables, inside the podium, behind the AV cart, the ceiling tiles near the front. You are looking for anything that does not belong to the hotel. Take photographs; it makes the next walk-through faster.
- Introduce yourself to the hotel's security manager. Get a direct number. Tell them which floor is yours and that nobody who is not on your list goes up.
- Check the Wi-Fi name. If there are two networks with the hotel's name and one has no password, the staff uses the one with the password or their own hotspot. Game plans do not go over open Wi-Fi.
Game day and after
- Signal protection on the sideline is a plan, not a hope. Two signalers, a dummy, and a rotation that changes by quarter. If the staff does not have one, that is the first thing to fix after the trip.
- Count the devices before the bus leaves. Every tablet, every laptop, every radio. The device that goes missing is found by the hotel three days later, and nobody knows who had it in between.
A program that runs this list on its own has removed most of the exposure that an advance would. The advance is for the trips where the stakes justify a professional doing it, and for teaching the operations staff to run the list without one.