Why Travel for Tournament Play?

MN and EA celebrating MN's spectacular, game winning

goal against South Central Premier

This weekend Len's U-12s travelled to Rocky Hill, Connecticut to play in the Connecticut Football club Columbus Day Tournament. The question arises many times from many quarters, why travel two hours to play tournament ball when you can stay in town for the Nashua Columbus Day Tournament or go just down the road for the Seacoast tournament? These are good questions and highlight the tension between keeping costs and family time commitment down as much as possible while assuring high quality and interesting play for the girls. We are always trying to balance these competing interests without compromising our core goal -- high level development.

Developing young players to the highest standard of play that they can achieve (some call it premier club soccer -- although we don't like the term) ain't cheap. It requires lots of training sessions, professional training and coaching, a close to year round commitment to training and play, and play against similarly geared teams and programs. On that last score, there simply are not that many teams in our neck of the woods. There's Seacoast, for sure, the Classics, most of the time, and perhaps a dozen or so clubs in eastern Massachusetts. Between state cup, MAPLE and a couple of area tournaments, you begin to see an awful lot of the local rivals. To keep play fresh and to keep exposing the girls to different styles of play and new challenges, some travel is required.

I'm happy to say, the CFC tournament delivered the freshness and new challenge that this team needed. This past weekend, the girls encountered two sides -- CFC Wolves and South Central Premier -- that played in full out attack mode from the first whistle. Both CFC and South Central committed numbers forward in a way that the girls had not seen all Fall. It clearly stunned the girls a bit in the first few minutes of each game. South Central combined the all out attack with clever quick starts on direct kicks and throw ins and rapid short play on corner kicks. CFC had a handful of athletic girls that were extremely well suited to this style.

After the girls' recovered their footing, they began to learn a valuable lesson about playing teams so committed to attack -- they leave themselves exposed at the back. The girls started counterattacking quite well and great scoring chances fell to the girls. They were not as economical with those chances as we might like but the girls saw that they could absorb the pressure, entice their opponents even further forward by being patient with the ball in the deep midfield area and then springing fast counter thrusts.

The result was two very entertaining games with wide open play and end to end action. It was fun to watch and the girls held their own beating South Central 2-1 and then dropping one to CFC 1-2. More important than the results, we saw some passages of play that suggested to us that the girls really are developing. This development is best demonstrated by the second goal scored against South Central. The girls worked a nice series of link ups which ultimately found KS low and in the right corner. She whipped in a gorgeous cross which found two of the girls attacking the box with force -- EA and MN. EA's run drew the keeper and the defenders and left MN alone steaming toward the far post. She attacked the cross on the bounce with her head and drove it convincingly into the upper left corner. The most beautiful goal of the year for the team. Two months ago neither girl would have been making the runs that enabled the goal to happen. That's development!