Last weekend my U11 Boys and U14 Girls teams traveled to Stafford to play in SASA’s St. Patrick’s Day Tournament. For coaches or parents interested in the tournament, here is a small review.

Fields
No complains from my side. The two complexes I played at, Colonial Forge HS and Dixon Park, were in superb conditions. The grass was short, no bumps anywhere. That definitely helped in a preseason tournament, when some of the touches are not that defined yet. I heard from other coaches though, that some fields at other locations were in very bad conditions (Willowmere Park and Pratt Park).

Referees
Again, no complains. The referees were what referees are at the youth level. Some were very good, some not so good. Some experienced and talkative to the young players, some very young and insecure about making any call. My favorite referee moment was our last U14 game, when the linesman on our side announced every sub with a loud “The white team would like a substitution, please!” to the referee. He said that roundabout 20 times in the game. I thought it was nice. Some of my girls thought it was annoying

Scheduling
This is a very important topic to me. Going with two teams to a tournament is always difficult regarding scheduling conflicts. I help creating the Kickers Youth Tournaments schedules and know how hard it is to make it work out, so that everybody is pleased. I let the tournament director know way in advance about my situation. However, my teams ended up playing at different locations (25 minutes away from each other) and at not favorable time slots. They were scheduled back to back on Saturday morning, which made me miss 20 minutes of my girls game because of the travel. On Saturday afternoon, they were scheduled at the exact same time, so I had to miss my boys game completely. On Sunday morning then they were scheduled back to back again, which made me miss the first 20 minutes of my girls game. I know its hard to do a schedule, but also feel that some of those scheduling conflicts could have been avoided. Only with the help of some very nice parents (Thanks Dan and Paul) I was able to manage those conflicts.

Overall, the proximity and the great fields are a big plus for me and I will definitely consider going there again. However, the scheduling was not done in favor of multi team coaches and I will this time probably take only one team.

Tags: Youth tournament

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Coach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.