Out-of-town youth soccer tournaments are a great end-of-season treat for many youth soccer teams. Pop Warner, AYF and other organizations have regional and national title programs that are the goal of many youth soccer coaches in those leagues.
When I was playing youth soccer, our team would travel to Las Vegas, Kansas City, Nashville, and Atlanta to play tournaments. It was a great way to see how we positioned ourselves to compete outside of Nebraska. I can still recall those memories, losing just one of those games in overtime in Las Vegas to an all-star team from California.
What are these tournaments like and as a youth soccer coach should my teams play in one? Coaching youth soccer means having a lot of influence on the decision to take these games or not.
There are more independent youth soccer organizations than Pop Warner and the AFL combined and the independents play in various youth soccer tournaments across the United States. Tournaments vary in size and quality like everything in life. That is one of the great advantages of the Pop Warner National Tournament, you know that the weekend will be a quality event and the rules will be followed.
Most of these tournaments are held during the Thanksgiving holiday and your team plays 2-3 games. Your soccer team is placed in a bracket based on preset age and sometimes weight restrictions. Most of the tournaments have gone to unlimited weight with runners’ weights, and some still have some restricted all-weight divisions. Teams are then placed in brackets by the host of the tournament based on record, perceived strength, historical league strength, coach preference, average age, and sometimes average weight is also considered. Most tournaments have very strict restrictions on birth certificate and roster verification (no all-star teams) and most are weighed on game day.
In my time, we lived in a different society and lived under different rules. We were playing youth soccer teams from all over the country right here in Omaha at the end of the season. Opposing players would stay in our homes during their stay. Our family made lifelong friends through this process. I will never forget flying to Las Vegas in 1973, this being the first exciting plane ride for about 90% of our players.
Staying with the families gave us a chance to bond with the other players and experience how they lived. In 1972, my teammate Joe Dukich and I stayed with a black family in Kansas City and made great friends. Of course, in today’s world, staying with families to get this kind of experience and save money on hotel costs would be out of the question.
Since then my personal youth soccer teams have played in tournaments in Iowa, Kansas, Omaha and Kearney Nebraska and Florida. Where we played had a lot to do with how much money we had available, as traveling costs a lot of money. Before, when he played, we would sell raffles and go out in groups on Friday and Saturday nights to local bars and bowling alleys to sell tickets. Each player had a share to sell and the coaches also got sponsors, again a different era, different rules. But of course there were no room and board expenses back then due to players staying with host families, so we didn’t have to raise as much money.
My personal teams have not been able to play in the big Florida Thanksgiving Day tournaments due to several factors, one of them being money. The other is that daylight saving time comes the first week of November and that means it will be dark at 5:30. We have never had a driving range with lights and we often see very cold temperatures and even snow at that time of year. The only time we could practice would be on the weekends or at gyms. Gyms are not the best places to practice soccer and it is also the time when most basketball teams start to prepare. We haven’t been able to secure gym time at any of the public schools in the area and even if we did, you can’t run your football games in a gym.
Based on these factors, we have limited ourselves to pre-Thanksgiving youth soccer tournaments such as Omaha, Council Bluffs Iowa, Kansas City Kansas (Johnston County) and the Snapper Bowl in Panama City Florida. The Omaha tournament is organized by a very smart person, “John”, from the Omaha Nebraska Midget Football League. It is very well run and organized and runs for a weekend. This youth soccer league invites teams from your league and others from the Midwest to participate. We are often the only local non-league team invited to participate. We have won the “A” Division title of that tournament several times. Monte O’Hara hosts a very enjoyable tournament with outstanding sportsmanship, officiating and pageantry, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, with some games played at the University of Nebraska Stadium in Omaha on artificial turf and under the lights. We’ve always done very well there, too, and are often the only team from Nebraska invited to play. The Lil Vikes tournament in Omaha is one that we won multiple times and had great experiences 3 of the 4 years we played and were the only team from Omaha outside of their league invited multiple times. The tournament in Kearney, Nebraska, was a great experience, with the opposing team taking our children for a ride on a haystack and even taking up a collection for us at the church services we share. We won that one in the slush and the pictures of our kids and theirs arm in arm after the game, all the sleet covered smiles is one for the ages.
The Johnston County Kansas Youth Soccer Tournament is held in the Kansas City area and often brings together more than 100 Midwestern teams to play. I have taken my youth soccer teams to play in that tournament for over 15 years and have done very well, we won last season. It’s run well lately, the sportsmanship was good and the organizers did an excellent job. A great place to stay is the Great Wolfe Lodge Indoor Water Park and Hotel, about 30 minutes from the fields. We had an amazing team swim party there after our big win this last season.
In 2003, two Screaming Eagle teams played in the Snapper Bowl in Panama City, Florida, which is 6 hours closer than Daytona. We had an academic contest that year for our 14 teams that involved weekly school accountability reports completed by their teachers. Two hard-working teams won the contest and had the time of their lives on the beach in Destin, Florida. A local “Angel” footed the bill of about $26,000 for two buses, room and board. Since we had no way to practice after daylight saving time, the folks at Snapper Bowl (Harold Creel) arranged for us to play a game in the first week of November outside of the base tournament context. Unfortunately, the two Eagle teams that won the academic contest were our 2 least competitive teams, so one played and lost in overtime and the other was beaten by 4 points. My personal team couldn’t win the academic contest and we were waiting at the time anyway, so it worked out for the best.
If you’re planning an end-of-season trip, now is the time to start planning and fundraising.
Some other suggestions include showing your best behavior and sending a thank you note to the organizers signed by all of your players. We are often invited back and even waive fees due to the open sportsmanship our teams practice while playing in these youth soccer tournaments. Florida’s Mr. Creel was amazed by the open sportsmanship of our players and fans, in his words, we were “too good to be true.” We had a great time and made great friends. If you win big and ugly, you won’t get the red carpet rolled out. Just last year, three moms from the other team in Kansas City came up to me after our game and were just ecstatic that we were the best sports team they had seen in over 15 years of coming to the tournament. That was in a game we could easily have won by 40-plus points against a team twice our size. They always invite us back.
Several teams from our youth soccer league play in the nation’s largest unlimited national tournament in Daytona Beach, Florida. It takes place over Thanksgiving weekend and features teams from all over the country. Here is the website for the Bowl:
http://www.thenationals.net/football.htm. The reason I think this is a stronger bowl than Vegas is that we’ve seen Omaha teams that have been beaten by teams from our Omaha league and win the Vegas tournament. There are several very competitive Omaha teams in our League that have the resources to play in Daytona, they have lighted practice fields, a lot of money and one even has an indoor practice field. There are some benefits to being a suburban team. There are several divisions in the tournament, and Omaha teams typically participate in the “Top Gun” Division, the best of the best. The KWAA Panthers and Omaha Thunder have won that Division four times in the last 10 years in the 13-14 age group and in 2006 the Thunder won another national title in the 13-14 Division.
When you coach youth soccer in tournaments, you have to control the pace of your team as you will be playing 2-3 matches in 2 days. You have to get your backups ready to play early and often and have plenty of players trained at other positions. You’ll see every conceivable offense, defense, and even some great football plays.
The trip will be a blur of activity, managing the team, hotel and activities and then scouting your opponents. In many youth soccer tournaments, the games are spread all over the city, a real nightmare, try to avoid them. In Johnston County and others, all 10 fields are in one place, so you don’t have to worry about directions or scouting, it’s a mecca for youth soccer with 20 teams playing at once.
If you have the opportunity to coach a youth soccer team that travels to out-of-state tournaments, go for it, they can be great. You will help create lifetime memories for your young soccer players.
See how good your team really is and enjoy the experience.