We’ll end our soccer year by playing in the NTH Adidas Cup tournament (formerly known as the NASA Friendship Cup). The tournament takes place the weekend of May 19-20, 2018.

This is a big tournament hosting 100+ teams from local and other areas, ages U8 up through U19, with each team playing three or four games. This will be our final event of the spring season. (A pre-tryout camp and tryouts themselves take place later in May, but those events are considered part of the following soccer year.)

Tournament play

Tournaments differ from league play (also called Junior Academy game days) as follows:

Entry fees:

Tournament entry fees are not included in the Junior Academy fees you pay to NTH. Entry fees are typically $60-$80 per player per tournament. Our treasurer will collect entry fees 1-2 weeks before the tournament.

Paperwork:

The tournament requires parents to sign a release form; we collect signatures the week or two prior to the tournament.
We’ll need to present a copy of each player’s birth certificate, along with her medical consent form. We collected this paperwork for some players last summer, but still need forms for other players. We’ll post a list of what we have and what we need on May 6th.

Schedules:

Schedules should be available 7-10 days before the tournament. Each team plays 3-4 games during the weekend, typically two games on Saturday, 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 100+ teams in multiple age groups spread across multiple venues, so we’re just 3 tiny pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle. In tournaments, we have no control over our schedules or venues.

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 delay, etc.
We can’t move players between teams to work around schedule conflicts. If your daughter has a conflict with a scheduled game, she will still be eligible to play in her team’s other games.

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” games. So this creates some challenges:

We may enter a U8 team (2010 birth year) in a lower level U9 Academy bracket.
We may enter a U7 team (2011 birth year) in a U8 recreational 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, and there’s a chance of schedule conflicts.)

Tournament availability poll

Please open this link to complete a tournament availability poll: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/G9FM27P. The poll only takes a minute or two to complete. Deadline: Wednesday night, April 18th.