Stormwatch912

With the start of the USL League One season approaching, that can mean only one thing. Well, actually, it probably means a lot of things. Spring is coming. You have roughly 20 Saturday nights planned to be at your local soccer stadium. You need to file your taxes. Yes, yes, I get it. It means several things. But it also means your League One media people are running their annual prediction pieces. I don't like predictions and not just because I'm terrible at them. I have no special insight as to what might happen. Your guess is as good as mine.  But friends, the content mines constantly need mining, so we're back with another attempt to forecast the future so that you'll know tomorrow's news today. I have spent the offseason breaking down film ( rewatching 30 Rock) , plugging data into complex, proprietary algorithms, ( filing my taxes) , and scouring the internet for any and all information I could find ( wasting my nights on Bluesky )  to have the most accurate pr...

My oldest wasn't sure he really wanted to go. He'd been to a few USL-W League games with me in the summer of 2023, but was on the fence about going to the games in the early part of the 2024 USL League One season.  Sometime in April at one of the Tormenta games, I saw Jim Robbins, the W-League Head Coach and wandered over to say hi and just kind of check in. I asked about the upcoming season and his expectations after a relatively down year in 2023 following their title-winning 2022 campaign. As we were wrapping up the conversation, Robbins turned to me and said something to the effect of  "And your assistant here is going to come with you, right?"  That pretty much sealed it for my oldest. He was personally invited by the head coach to the games, and he went to every one we could in 2024. We even kept track of the playoff scenarios while on vacation, tracking the games and scores of the other divisions to see if Tormenta would make the playoffs.  Unfortunately for T...

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...