We finish our 2021-2022 soccer year by playing in the NTH Adidas Select Cup tournament. The Select Cup takes place the weekend of May 21-22.
The tournament will be our final event of the spring season. (Tryouts take place starting May 23, 2022, but they are considered the start of the upcoming 2022-2023 soccer year.)
This page has general information about tournaments. For specific details about the NTH Adidas Select Cup, follow our 2022 NTH Adidas Select Cup tournament link.
Tournament play:
Tournaments differ from our typical Junior Academy game days as follows:
Schedules:
- Each team plays 3-4 games during the tournament, typically two games on Saturday, and one or two on Sunday. (A Sunday AM game is likely.) There’s no pre-set schedule formula; we’ve had games as early as 7:45 AM and as late as 8:00 PM, but in recent years, the latest games have been mid-afternoon to avoid potential late-afternoon thunderstorms.
- Tournaments follow a different set of schedule standards than our regular Junior Academy game days. Tournaments typically include numerous (often well over 100) teams in multiple age groups spread across multiple venues. Our Junior Academy Girls teams are just a few tiny pieces of a very large jigsaw puzzle. In tournaments, we have no control over our schedules or venues.
- Schedules are usually posted 7-10 days before the tournament.
Entry fees:
- Regular Junior Academy game days are included in the fees you pay to NTH. Tournaments have separate entry fees, typically $80-$100 per player per tournament. Our treasurer will collect tournament entry fees the week before the tournament.
Paperwork:
- The tournament requires parents to sign two release forms (a general medical release form, plus a COVID release form). We’ll collect signatures during weekday practices. If you’re available to work the clipboard and collect parent signatures during a practice, please e-mail Ward.
Rosters:
- We typically have bigger team rosters than we do during normal game days. Main reasons:
- Multiple games per day is more physically challenging for the players, which means we need more subs.
- Tournament rules require rosters to stay fixed, so we can’t borrow a player from one of our other Junior Academy Girls teams in case of illness, injury, traffic (or parking) delay, etc.
- We can’t move players between teams to work around schedule conflicts. If your daughter has a conflict with a game, she will still be eligible to play in her team’s other games.
Game results:
- Game results are recorded, and teams have a chance to win their division’s championship.
Likely challenges:
Tournament experiences are affected by the number and quality of teams in our brackets. The U8 Junior Academy age group doesn’t tend to attract a lot of teams (U7 even less so), and we try to avoid “us vs. us” tournament games if possible. This creates some challenges:
- We may enter a U8 team (2014 birth year) in a lower level U9 Academy division.
- There’s a chance we’ll have to recruit a guest coach or coaches to help cover our games. (Each team plays 3-4 games over the weekend, so there’s a chance of schedule conflicts for our usual coaches.)
Tournament availability poll:
Please open our Survey Monkey link to complete a tournament availability poll: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/BY33DG6. The poll only takes 2-3 minutes to complete. Deadline: Wednesday night, April 27th.