Stormwatch912

Sam Jones making his first professional start Photo Credit: Tormenta FC Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky When everybody loves you, oh son, that's just about as funky as you can be.  (I just realized that song came out in 1993, my freshman year of high school, so for my younger and, at this point, even middle-aged readers who don't get the reference, here you go . The release of that song is closer to the Beatles coming to America as it is to today and I now want to crawl under a rock and hide from the relentless onslaught of time.) Sam Jones became the first player to rise through the ranks of the Tormenta Academy to start a game with the first team Saturday night as he got the nod in goal in South Georgia's Jagermeister Cup match with Greenville.  "Honestly, I tried to play it cool a little bit when Ian (Cameron, Tormenta's Manager) told me," Jones said of his reaction to getting his first start. "I was like 'alright, sounds g...

We wish him well, this Tormentor of Tormenta. Tormenta fans, it's ok. He can't hurt us anymore. He's moved on to a better place and we wish him well.  The "he" here is Lyam MacKinnon, who, if my math is correct, scored 15 goals against Tormenta in their four games last season. (He actually "only" scored seven goals across the regular season and Jagermeister Cup games). He's at Orange County SC now, far, far away from Statesboro. We at Stormwatch912 wish him the best in his future endeavors and the therapy sessions are helping as the nightmares we still suffer from his performances are less frequent.  It's Jagermeister Cup time again as Greenville (without MacKinnon) comes calling in the first of four Cup games before the knockout rounds. As you likely know, things are a little different this year for the Jagermeiser Cup. The USL Championship has joined in the fun this year, as the 24 teams from that league join USL League One, with the teams bein...

Look, sometimes you get tired of looking for a photo  and go with the ESPN graphic. I trust we've all recovered from the Charleston game as Tormenta now turns its focus back to League One action this week. For those of you just joining us, Tormenta topped Portland 2-1 last Saturday in regular season action and fell to Charleston 4-0 in the third round of the US Open Cup on Tuesday. So now we look ahead to Charlotte and the rare (for Tormenta) Sunday afternoon tilt up in North Carolina. Later on in this post we have another generous soul who gave us a look at Charlotte. This blogging thing is easy when other people do the writing.  Manager Ian Cameron returned from his time at Wales working on his coaching license requirements to be on the sidelines for the Charleston match and should be on the sidelines against Charlotte. Wingers Taylor Gray and Jonathan Nyandjo have missed time recently with injuries and while South Georgia put up two goals against Portland, they missed the d...

Sure, Tormenta was trailing, but in that moment, things were looking good.  Down 1-0 to Charleston just before halftime, Niall Reid-Stephen drew a foul inside the Battery box, setting up Tormenta to potentially tie up the game against the USL Championship side heading into halftme. The two teams had met twice before in the Open Cup, with Tormenta winning in 2022 and then falling in the final minutes of Extra Time against the Battery in 2024, when MD Myers scored in the 120 +1 minute to end Tormenta's 2024 Cup run. Over the past few years, the teams had been equals in the Open Cup and a tie at halftime would only continue that trend. Tormenta had beaten other USL Championship teams over the years, including Birmingham in 2022, Rio Grande Valley in 2023 and Miami FC in 2024. Competing with, and even beating, teams from a division above them is nothing new for Tormenta. Taking the penalty was Mason Tunbridge. He's scored four times for Tormenta in 2025, leading the team. In just h...

Photo Credit: Tormenta FC So normally, in addition to my oldest, I attend Tormenta games with my dad. Three generations of us all enjoying our Saturday nights outside watching soccer. It's a good time and while I admit I often take those times for granted, I still know I'm lucky to get to do that. But this past week, my dad had surgery (he's fine) and wasn't able to go to the Portland game. He sent me his ticket and told me to find someone who might enjoy going. As luck would have it, there's a friend of mine who has been talking to me for the past year or so about wanting to go to a game so I sent him a message and, sure enough, he was free. Now, he'd never been to a soccer game in his life and knew the very basics. Two goals, two teams of 11 (he did know that), no hands. That is oversimplifying his soccer knowledge, but only slightly. He was excited to learn and told me that my son and I would have to be his interpreter for the night to explain what was goin...

Photo Credit: Luke Martin At Tormenta practice Wednesday. At the beginning of the year, I thought it would be nice for you all reading this if I reached out to others in the USL League One media ecosystem and ask if they'd contribute a short bit on the team they cover whenever they played Tormenta. My initial plan (and still the plan) is to see if someone wouldn't mind writing a paragraph or two about key players, what to watch for and things like that. If you're reading this, you're invested in Tormenta and want to know more about who they're playing when you show up to the stadium or turn on ESPN+.  The people who are generous enough with their time are doing me a favor and I am grateful for whatever they want to do.  So when I reached out to this week's guest contributor for a preview of Portland and he asked how much he should write, I basically told him the advice my first newspaper editor gave me in my first job, "Write until you're done." An...

Photo Credit: Tormenta FC Hello and welcome to the first edition of The Six Yard Box . Originally it was going to just be six random questions, but then I started asking follow up questions and it went on more than that, but I'm stubborn and I kind of like the name for a recurring interview feature, so I'm keeping it. And who do we have for our first ever interview for the Six Yard Box? None other than Tormenta Assistant Coach Jordan Bell. I'm going to call this an exclusive interview, but I think that's only because no one else was at practice on Wednesday wanting to interview him. Nevertheless, it's a Stormwatch912 Exclusive with Jordan Bell. Bell joined the Tormenta coaching staff in 2024, having spent time previously with One Knox under then head coach Mark McKeever. Bell previously coached under McKeever at Young Harris College. On Saturday he'll be the head man for Tormenta as Ian Cameron is unavailable as he's in Wales working on things for his Coachi...

Photo Credit: Tormenta FC So I was watching the Cubs game Sunday afternoon and saw something that had never happened in Cubs history. They scored two runs on balks in the same inning, which hasn't happened since at least 1920 when that kind of thing started being recorded. For those who aren't baseball fans and are wondering what a balk is, well, in theory it's a rule to prevent pitchers from deceiving base runners. In practice, no one really knows. There are some obvious violations, but by and large, balks are called and sometimes the announcers will come back from a commercial break and show us the slightest flinch by the pitcher and tell us that was a balk. In the game Sunday, the first balk was called and then the umpires got together for about five minutes, presumably to figure out if it actually was a violation. Even they weren't sure at first. In practice, balks are, at best, ticky-tack calls that an umpire makes. Seeing two in one game, let alone one inning, is ...

Image credit: xkcd To paraphrase one of the classic tweets that lives rent free in my head, I'm a modest blogger with modest goals: 1. To write a humorous blog on a semi-regular basis. 2. drain the world's oceans so we can find and kill god. Unfortunately I've had to put the second goal on hold as a much, much more serious matter has come to my attention.  This all started because I was trying to find some statistics from Union Omaha before they played Tormenta last week. "Hmmmm," I thought to myself. "I'll just hop on over to their website and surely they'll have stats galore. A virtual smorgasbord of stats for me to peruse and enjoy at my leisure."  So I fired up the old internet machine and made my way to the Union Omaha page and.... well it's a nice website. But no stats to be found anywhere. At first, I thought it might be under the "Club" heading. There I was able to find the 2025 roster, but no player or team stats. None of t...

Photo Credit: Tormenta FC I going to apologize in advance, which is a weird thing to say about a written post that I can edit and write it exactly as I want it before anyone sees it.  Nevertheless, I'm going to apologize now as this will be a shorter post leading up to Tormenta's Second Round US Open Cup match tonight. And to make matters worse (well, maybe better depending on your thoughts on my writing), I'm going to miss tonight's game. Longtime readers ( Editor: Luke, this is only the second year you've written this blog. At best someone has been reading this for 15 months. I'm not sure you have longtime readers. Are you sure you want to leave this in?) Fine, readers from last year will recall that I missed every Tormenta Open Cup match because I decided to be a supportive parent and go to my oldest's soccer games or, in one case when he didn't have a game, was at the ER with him. Well, I lucked out with Tormenta's first Open Cup game as Statesbo...