2024 NTH Adidas Cup tournament preview

By | April 26, 2024
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Potential tournaments:  Adidas Select Cup:

About tournament play:

Tournaments differ from our typical Junior Academy game days as follows:

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 1-2 weeks before the tournament.

Paperwork:

  • Tournaments may require parents to sign one or 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.

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.

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:

  • In most cases, 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 (2016  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:

https://www.nasaacademygirls.org/schedule/2024-nth-adidas-cup-tournament-preview/. Deadline:  7 PM Monday, April 29th.