Stormwatch912

It was exciting news when Tormenta announced they were signing midfielder Gabriel Cabral for the 2025 season. The Brazilian midfielder played with Tormenta 2 in 2021 before playing a key role in their 2022 title-winning squad. His steal of a Greenville pass in the semifinals set up the Kazaiah Sterling's goal late in the first half and propelled South Georgia to the title game.  After that season, Cabral moved on to Miami FC where he spent the previous two seasons and this offseason before the once and future Tormenta legend decided to come back to Statesboro.  Visa issues, however, delayed his return to Statesboro until Friday, when he arrived at halftime of Tormenta's preseason matchup with Atlanta Athletico having come straight from the airport, where team owner Darin Van Tassell had gone to pick him up.  I took the opportunity to sit next to him in the stands, after he'd changed into his official Tormenta gear, and ask him a few questions, which I'm quite sure is no...

 I don't know why I named this Goal Kicks. We're not focusing on goal kicks. In fact, they're probably not going to be mentioned again after I finish this introduction. But it seemed like a good title for a post that is basically a mishmash of different things that I haven't been able to write up a proper blog post about. I do have a story coming out Thursday in the Statesboro Herald  about Tormenta's offseason rebuild. It's not super in depth (if you're reading this, you won't find anything you didn't already know), but I do like to plug my paid work since the more people who read it, the more likely it is they'll keep paying me do it. Let's hit some scheduling first. Tormenta's season opener against Richmond has been moved to Friday night, March 7th at 7 p.m. at Tormenta Stadium, making it the only independent professional soccer match played that night. If you want your soccer fix, you'll need to tune in, or really just log in to ...

Welcome back friends. When I first started this blog a little over a year ago, I wasn't sure what form it was going to take. I had some ideas of what I wanted it to be (and no real idea of the time commitment I was making for myself), but I knew I wanted it to be a fun little thing that I enjoyed and, hopefully, some others might enjoy as well. My first couple posts were, understandably, sparsely read, as I was just linking to them on Twitter maybe once or twice and then going about my day. I didn't (and still don't) have any grand ambitions for what this might be. I just wanted a place to write and hopefully be amusing and even a little informative. So a few weeks into writing this blog, I decided it would be a good time to steal an idea from baseball writer Craig Calcaterra, who for years ranked the handsomeness of Major League Baseball managers. Why not rank the USL League One Managers? It'll be a fun little thing that, if nothing else, will help me get a little more...

Action from Saturday's Open Tryout Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, Statesboro got roughly four inches of snow. Those of you more accustomed to wintery weather are probably scoffing that this is worth mentioning. Those of you who rarely, if ever, see snow are probably jealous.  And it was the most snow seen here in at least 40 years as my parents couldn’t remember any snow event more than that. Heck, it was the first snow of any kind since 2018, so four inches was kind of a big deal. As you might expect, Statesboro isn’t exactly prepared to handle that. We don’t have snow plows or anything of that sort to make things run smoothly. We’ve got the sun and just kind of wait for it to melt. The town kind of shuts down. Georgia Southern went remote Tuesday-Thursday and opened at 10 a.m. on Friday to give time for the ice on the roads to melt. The schools in the county were closed Wednesday through the rest of the week (including hurricanes, kids here have missed 14 days of school so...

It's a soccer post, I promise.  The dude killed a minotaur. We should talk about that and nothing else. He straight up killed a minotaur and yet, somehow, that's not the thing we talk about when we talk about him.  And guess what? That's not the part that I'm going to talk about either. But I wanted to state, up front, before we go any further, that the dude slayed a minotaur and that fact should not go unremarked upon. It has now been remarked upon, so we can continue. But seriously. Do you know what it takes to kill a minotaur? Add in the fact the minotaur was kept in a labyrinth prison so that even if you do kill it, you may not be able to get back out without dying yourself. Some say he used a sword to defeat the minotaur. Others say he used brute force after he lost his sword in battle and defeated it with his bare hands. Either way, he did it. Ok, ok, yes, Theseus defeated the beast on the island of Crete with the help of King Minos' daughter Ariadne (who  had...

Is 2025 the year Tormenta makes it to The Good Place?  (Warning: This post contains spoilers for "The Good Place", but that show debuted in 2016 so I don't feel too bad about spoiling the end of Season One. However, if it's on your offseason watch list and you've never seen it, you should probably stop reading now.) In the TV show "The Good Place," when the experiment with the afterlife goes wrong, Michael, a Demon from the Bad Place intent on finding new way to torture humans, simply reboots the experiment and wipes the memories of the four humans who figured out they were actually in the Bad Place. Everything that happened is erased and they just start over in their efforts to get the people to torture each other. While not exactly the same thing, that's kind of the vibe I got when Tormenta announced they were only bringing back five players from the 2024 squad. South Georgia choosing to do almost a complete reboot of the experiment to see if thing...