So, while it is a little complicated to help out the competition, especially because anything I say here will help everybody else who reads it, there are some good places to find help and mentoring. I think you could start by joining the discord channel and you’ll find a place where a lot of managers from all over are willing to dish out help. Another place is to find the help forum and tread through some of the major posts there.
Anyway, despite what I said above here are a couple short and general tips. I think losing a BBM game is mostly fine (we are not out to win this tournament in our first season), and your guards might not be the problem yet. However, you need a medium term plan that involves these three things: (i) a training program (who are the players you are training every week?) (ii) game shape management (how do you make sure that game shape rises after training updates? How do you keep it up?) (3) enthusiasm management (how do you make sure your enthusiasm stays high?).