Thunderbolt Tournament Review

We did the Thunderbolt Tournament, hosted by Lightning Lacrosse, this past weekend. This was my first time at the tournament and I would say on balance they do a good job.

We had game schedules well in advance. For some reason lacrosse tournaments can be very casual about telling people when they are going to play and frankly it drives me nuts. Wasn't a problem this time.

The facility is pretty good. The fields were in good shape, all grass that was once sod. The fields are a little spread out as there are two groups of fields that you have to walk between but that wasn't too rough. Maybe 8 minutes to walk from the edge of one set of fields to the other. There was enough parking although not necessarily a lot of parking exactly where you would want it.

The fields were shortened and narrowed a bit. The fields were maybe ten yards shorter and ten yards narrower. I like that because it's a little easier on the players when they're playing four games in a day and the spectators can get a little closer to the action.

The play format was 20-minute running-time halves, four guaranteed games. I thought the format was fine. Any shorter and there is a chance of a team just getting a lucky goal or two and winning. Any longer and the good teams have too much time to kill in the blowouts. They used the air horns to make the tournament run on time.

The tournament format was a couple of pools and then the winner of each pool plays the winner of the other pool, second place plays second place, etc. This worked out pretty well but there were some potential issues. First, it's hard to get the pools roughly even. At some grade levels, the pools were quite uneven; those last games should be pretty close but there definitely were some blowouts. Second, if you have a six-team pool and are playing three games, you have to schedule carefully so that teams get enough games either against each other or common opponents to make the results reflect the different abilities.

A real complaint: Goal differential was one of the tie-breakers. Please don't do this! If a good team faces a weak team in the first or second round, the good team has to try to win that game by as much as possible. It makes for bad sportsmanship. Either limit the total goal differential factor to something like 7-8 per game or use goals allowed as the tiebreaker. OK, the backup goalie on the good teams don't like the goals allowed tiebreaker because it means less playing time for them. But better to have a handful of bitter goalies than a whole team of kids feeling bad because they lost a game by 20 goals.

For whatever it's worth, I wouldn't say that the level of play was too terribly high. I think the Jersey Jam gets a slightly more competitive set of teams.

I did not eat at the concessions since we brought food but they seemed fine.

There was a nice little awards ceremony for the top three teams in each age bracket. Each player got a gold, silver or bronze medal and then the photographer arranged a commemorative picture for each team.

Anyway, I'll give this one a B+.