Tormenta hosts Open Tryouts

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 far for weather. My kids need to be in school!)

On Thursday, Tormenta co-owner and President Darin Van Tassell was worried. The team was scheduled to have their first open tryouts in a few years on Saturday and there was concern it might have to be cancelled as it’s kind of hard to play soccer in the snow, as my oldest found out Wednesday morning when he tried. 

But this being Statesboro, it warmed up, at least enough for the snow to melt so that by Saturday, unless you looked for it, you wouldn’t have seen any evidence that a record snowfall had occurred, which meant that roughly 70 hopefuls could show off their skills in front of the Tormenta staff in the hopes of finding their way on to a USL League One squad. More than 100 applied to be a part of the tryout but the team capped it based on what their staff could handle evaluating.

After a brief warmup period, the players were split into five different teams and played short matches against each other, with one team getting a break during the games. The top players would then be selected to scrimmage against the professionals for further evaluation.

My oldest and I watched some of the morning session and put our evaluation hats on. We found one guy we thought was pretty good. Or maybe he was just fast. I’m not a talent evaluator so I really couldn’t have told you if he was actually good. But he made the cut and got to play against the League One guys.

“This gives us a nice spot to see young men who are aspiring professionals,” Manager Ian Cameron said during Saturday’s evaluation period. “Some of them we’ll view for now, some of these guys will be tracked over the next couple of years if they go in to different organizations.”

“The other piece is ‘can we grow our fan base here?’ Are there players in here who might not  be signed right now, but like the vibe of our environment, this this area, like our training facility then we’ve got more Tormenta fans, more people aware of what we’re doing here, more people aware of our facilities and try to showcase the best of Tormenta in some shape or form.,” Cameron said. 

I didn’t get a chance to talk to Cameron after the League One guys played (it wasn’t his fault, I had my six-year old with me and he’d had quite enough by that point, though he did talk about getting a high five from Mason Tunbridge so that was a highlight for him). But during the morning session, Cameron said he was pleasantly surprised at the talent level of the guys.

“That’s a testament to the local coaches and to the college coaches and to these boys themselves,” he said. 

Cameron said they were looking for the competency to compete at the professional level as well as if they had the character needed to be a member of Tormenta. While character isn’t necessarily easy to spot in training, he said it was something you could see once 11 v. 11 games started taking place.

 
“You don’t know their full character, but it’s interesting. As soon as you start playing live football, you learn a lot about their character. How do they respond to being tackled? How do they react to teammates? Do they keep a positive attitude? Do they have a propensity to work hard? Those baseline things that everybody needs.”

Tormenta hasn’t announced any preseason matches yet but when I know something I’ll be sure to post it on Bluesky (Come join us there, and convince Tormenta to start posting there as well.)

Quick Programming Note: I’ll have a couple of Tormenta articles in the Statesboro Herald in February (I’ll link to them when they’re posted) and we’ll have more preseason coverage here as well. We’re getting closer to the season starting and that’s always an exciting time.