Jersey Shootout Tournament Review

Trying to catch up on my tournament reviews. Next up was the Jersey Shootout in Metuchen. This was my first time at this tournament.

The Jersey Shootout is definitely a mixed bag. It probably was my least favorite tournament of the year. That probably says more about the quality of the other tournaments than this one, nevertheless it's hard to give this tournament a lot of props.

The tournament was at St. Joseph's High School and the facility causes a lot of problems. Usually, a facility that is hard to get to has a lot of parking or a facility that is easy to might have a paring shortage. This facility is both: (a) hard to get to; and (b) very short on parking. Even coming from relatively short distance and leaving plenty of time we sat in quite a bit of traffic and then had to walk quite a distance through a couple neighborhoods to get to the fields. Fortunately, once we got there, the fields were flat and in pretty good shape.

The format was twenty-five minute halves in pools and then an extra game against the corresponding place team in another pool. This is where I noticed a real problem. I recognize that there is a certain amount of guesswork involved in seeding teams, but we ended up with wildly diverging team quality. One pool was pretty much stacked with good teams; the other pool had one very strong team and three weak ones. Of course the good teams beat up on each other and a dark horse team snuck through to the final on a tie-breaker. That team got destroyed in the final and the rest of the strong bracket did a number on the rest of the weaker pool. You hope by the end of the day to get a pretty even game but that wasn't happeing this time.

No grills allowed at this venue. We brought in pizza for our team and skipped the concessions.

I'll give the tournament a B- and frankly hope to skip it next year.