Grow Your Nascar Pool

This is the third part of the Nascar Pool Help series.   Part 1   Part 2

Now that you’ve decided the set-up and scoring method your pool will use, your next task is formalizing some rules, and inviting people to participate in your pool.  This is probably the first time you’ll need to put something on paper (or the internet).

You’ll want to describe in detail how your pool will be run.  The rules regarding how drivers (or cars) are selected and how scoring is calculated are the most important.  The rest isn’t important unless people understand what they’re getting into.  Also add payment amounts, deadlines, and methods, and the general payout structure, or at least a date when it will be announced.  Make sure you have someone else examine it for mistakes, or things you may have overlooked.  Add a second page to the rules which will have your groups, or your selection information, and can be used as the entry form, if you’re accepting teams offline.  Include a spot for team name and whatever contact information is necessary.  If you plan on only having people make their selections online, you wont need the entry sheet, but giving people the information to make their selections is a good idea.  If you plan to use some pre-made pool set-up like Yahoo!, you can pretty much just skip rules altogether as they have an extensive list on their site.  You can just add the payment info on the invitation emails.

Once you’ve decided on rules and prepared some sort of document (I generally like to convert them to PDF format, since the reader software is freely available), you’ll need to round up some participants.  Make a list of friends, co-workers or associates that you know are Nascar fans.  Then make a list of those people that you know are generally up for pretty much any type of fantasy sports.  Give each one of them the info about your pool, and invite them to participate, either by email, a phone call or even better, in person.  Encourage them to invite their Nascar fan friends.  The larger your pool is, and the bigger the payout gets, the more casual the fan you’ll get to participate, as they’re more interested in the prize than the actual pool.

Growing your pool wont happen overnight, but if you make your rules easy to follow, make your results easy to access and most importantly keep everything transparent, you should have no problem experiencing growth through several seasons.  Even the largest pools had modest beginnings.  I’m in a pool for another sport that has close to 500 teams, only a few years removed from having less than 50.  Make your pool both affordable and fun, and people will want to share it with others.