Congrats to G14 Academy Team Arsenal

TOURNAMENTS

April 20, 2024

Turnaments play an important role in the rythym of play of our teams.  Ideally, it gives a team a chance to play teams outside of its league division.  While all of us like to win, league games are more than winning, they are an opportunity to put into play the skills practiced the past weeks of training.  Tournament, because of their short duration, are often approached more like letting the race horse sprint to the finish with more focus on winning.  That’s not the case for all teams, but it’s not uncommon.

We are deliberate about the tournaments we send teams to.  We pick ones that are well-run (and have good parking) with a good reputation of creating fair brackets of teams with similar skills.  Ideally, giving each team an opportunity to win.  Our goal is to put teams in divisions of the tournament where they will be competitive.  My view is that it’s better to win 2 and lose 1 than have 3 teams that are easy to beat.  Unfortunately, some teams or clubs see tournament as an easy chance to collect a trophy by applying to lower division than they should be in.  The result of pretty lobsided scores.  We’ve seen 20-1 and 12-0 scoresl out teams on the losing end.  Our teams didn’t have any fun playing retreive the ball from the goal and the other team certainly didn’t get anything useful out of the game.