Allen Week 7: The Stresses of Competitive Soccer

I am going into my first major tournament this weekend, so I thought it appropriate to talk a bit about my history with the beautiful game. For those of you who don’t know, I play soccer. I was on the high school varsity team, but more important (and more relevant to my blog), I play starting center back for the ENCO College Showcase team. “College Showcase” sounds very prestigious, but all it really means is that we get the most attention from college coaches. This means we play against the best teams and get invited to some of the biggest tournaments in the country. My ENCO team is currently 7th in the state, so we stir up a lot of interest when colleges find out we are playing.

Our tournament this weekend is the Steel United Turf Showcase and we are going to go straight into the biggest game of the tournament where we will play the number 6 team in the state. This is a fight for 6th place because we are only slightly behind this team in rankings. If we lost this game, we would likely be overtaken by the team in 8th place, so our goal for this tournament is to take home the win and push ourselves into striking distance of the top five.

Now I know a lot of you are probably confused by how the rankings work, so I will do my best to explain them. The rankings are all run through a website called GotSoccer. They are in charge of ranking teams in the US and Canada. Now every team is ranked in order based on how many points they have. You don’t lose any points if you lose a game, you get 10 points for a draw and 30 points for a win. If you beat a team who are 200 points higher than you then you get 10% of their points on top of the 30 points for winning the game. Each tournament has a prize pool that goes to the winner. The weird thing about GotSoccer is that after a year, the points go away. So if I had played in a tournament today of last year, those points would disappear tomorrow. This just means that there is extra pressure and you have to work harder to win every game.

My Team