Tournaments are a key component of club soccer, and next to all of the different leagues, it is one of the most confusing aspects of youth soccer. The only constant that you can rely on is that every tournament is different and you can’t read too much into the brackets, you have to look at the teams in the brackets and read the fine print (if any). The names of the brackets are just labels, nothing more.
Brackets
Not all tournaments are created equal. A “gold” bracket in a local community tournament is unlikely to be anything like a “gold” bracket in a major Las Vegas tournament. The question is why? Why can brackets be the same at all tournaments? The simple answer is that bracketing depends on what teams attend the tournament and marketing efforts of that tournament.
Many individuals think that it is simply a direct correlation between flights and brackets, i.e. Flight 1 plays Gold, Flight 2 plays Silver, Flight 3 plays Bronze, and Flight 4 is Copper. It is just not so simple as there are a lot of leagues out there, but that is the topic for another post. There are many levels above flight 1, and not all leagues slot teams the same, so a Silver team in one league may be the same as a Bronze team in another league. Not all leagues and brackets are created equal, a quick look at SoCal’s G2014 bracket show that some areas have a combined flight 1/2 where others break out flight 1 and 2 completely separately.
By way of example, I serve as the tournament director for the San Clemente Cup. We are a community tournament, but one of the larger sized for community tournaments, and we usually have around 300 teams. This is a very different event as compared to an invitational in say Las Vegas, that may have 1000 teams. All tournaments break down their brackets from top to bottom, or at least try to, but it all starts at the top. As an example, the top bracket at the San Clemente Cup last year for most “gold” brackets was filled with NPL or maybe ECRL level teams, those same teams filled the silver or second bracket at the Las Vegas Cup. So a gold bracket in one tournament may be very different than a gold bracket in a different tournament.
Bracket Labels
To make things even more complicated, some tournaments use different names for their levels, they don’t use Gold, Silver, or Bronze. The SoCal State Cup for example has four levels, with various names such as Super Cup or Premier Cup. Or perhaps they add in a level like “silver elite” to even confuse things more. The bottom line is that as a parent, it is important to based expectations based on the teams in the bracket, not the label on the bracket.
To know where you stand, you have to look at the other teams in the bracket. There is another factor at play as well, coaches may not know the actual level of their team, especially at a young age and they register for the wrong level. Or perhaps they play in a really competitive Silver league and finished at the bottom in season, and decide the players need some confidence so they register for a bronze bracket and just walk through it. There are so many variables at play, that tournament results should not be a measure of success. I always advise to contact the tournament director of the tournament you plan to register for, unless you are a top team or a team that is just looking for the top level of play.
Conclusion
When looking at the above brackets, it is hard to know where your team fits. So manage your expectations and do your due diligence on the teams you are playing and then judge how your players played in the games, not the score/result or the label on the bracket.
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