Stormwatch912

 Dear Chattanooga Fans, I have committed the grievous oversight of neglecting Rusty the Red Wolf in my recent Mascot Pants Wearing post . After consulting with my PR team, we at Stormwatch912 are issuing the following statement from our Director of Fixing Screwups division, Tommy Flanagan: Rusty is a valuable member of the USL League One Mascot family. He's important  and beloved by the Red Wolves team. And Chattanoonga as a whole. And Tennessee. And the United States. And the world. He's the most beloved mascot in the world. Yeah, that's it.  We didn't overlook him though. No, we, we just missed him. He was hiding. Yeah, that's the ticket. Hiding. He was camouflaged. Yeah, that's it. Camo. We even went searching for all the mascots before posting. Me and my wife, Morgan Fairchild. Yeah, that's it. Me and Morgan Fairchild were in charge of finding all the mascots and Rusty was so well hidden that we missed him. That's the ticket. And when we reported bac...

Welcome back to another edition of the Six Yard Box where we interview players or coaches with Tormenta but try not to take ourselves too seriously. Today we've got defender Oscar who joined us after practice on Tuesday for a brief chat. As always, I appreciate their time as answering questions from the guy who occasionally hangs around practice with his kid isn't necessarily high on any player's list of things to do, but he was great.  After that, we've got a guest post looking at Tampa Bay for Tormenta's upcoming game with the Rowdies in the Jagermeister Cup.  This interview was lightly edited, mostly to remove all my "ums" and "yeahs"  [Stormwatch912] First off, just question for jersey number. What tell me about 58 why why we're going with that?  [Oscar] So, I used to be 19, basically. But I went 58 because, as a kid, one of my first favorite players was in the Mexican league, and his name was Juan Pablo Rodriguez. He was a midfielder pla...

I've got problems with Hoot, but don't worry, I've got problems with a lot of the other League One Mascots as well. Edit: So I'm a goof and I somehow totally missed Rusty the Wolf, Chattanooga's pants-wearing mascot, when I initially posted this. This was not intentional and certainly did not happen because Chattanooga beat Tormenta last weekend and I was subconsciously still upset about it. Nope, I'm just someone who managed to overlook them and there's no one to blame but myself. I have issued my formal apology to Chattanooga fans through our Department of Fixing Screwups spokespeople and added a section about Rusty below. I'm sorry, again, Chattanooga fans. Clearly I like you all as I keep rating Scott Mackenzie high on the Manager Handsomeness rankings.  Also since first posting this, I've also learned the Texoma birds are named Tex (the red bird) and Oma (the gray bird). So we've got that going for us, which is nice.  Looking around League ...

It's Power Rankings time. You can tell by the photo not related to anything. There's an old saying in baseball that you never look at the standings before Memorial Day. The early season is too volatile and things need some time to settle down before you can make any sense of things. A six-game winning streak in early April is going to have a much more dramatic impact on the standings than a six-game winning streak in early August.  Much like bourbon, it takes time to get things right. Time in the oak barrels are needed to get the taste just right and.... you know, I'm not actually a bourbon drinker so I'm kind of just trying to sound smart. People say fine bourbon takes time. I saw a 60 Minutes piece on the people who make the barrels for it. It all seems like too much for me. I'm glad people enjoy it but I really don't need to pretend to know anything about it.  Much like baseball standings or bourbon, Power Rankings need time to marinate. Sure, some of those o...

My kid is going to be insufferable. So there I am, minding my own business last Friday night, watching The USL Show Watch Along stream the fine folks over there were doing when my phone buzzed with a message from my wife. I should probably mention that she was out of town and not, like, across the room sending me some funny Tik Tok she found. I mean, she does that and I send her funny BlueSky posts from across the room. Communication is the key to a successful marriage and sending each other the highlights of the social media platform each other is not on is, well, it's what keeps the spark alive.  But no, she was out of town and text me because my oldest's soccer coach asked if he wanted to scrimmage against the Tormenta USL-W team Saturday morning. I interrupted his YouTube watching to ask in a way that strongly indicated he should say yes, because, really, how often do you get the chance to play against future professional athletes? I've had zero opportunities in my 46 y...

We're so back.  Well, the team is back after a week off as they will take on Spokane Velocity Saturday night at Tormenta Stadium. By car, it's a cool 2,565 miles from One Spokane Stadium to Tormenta Stadium. That is roughly 10 percent of the distance around the Earth's equator. Sometimes I forget just how big this country is. For comparison, the driving distance from Lisbon, Portugal to Kyiv, Ukraine is 2,543 miles. I know you're here for the mileage facts.  My super quick Google search tells me the ball in a game travels an average of 6.5 miles per game, so it would take 395 games to cover the distance from Tormenta to Spokane.  Am I killing space here because the day job has been really busy this week and I haven't been able to do much on the blog? It absolutely is. But I had a friend in college tell me that if someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, just tell them something else they didn't know so they leave the conversation knowing mo...

Tormenta Manager Ian Cameron I was going to run this at the bottom of my post last week where Ian Cameron talked about his team two months into the season, but it didn't really fit with the vibe of that post and it was a bye week and I knew I'd need something for you loyal readers this week. God help me next week when there's another bye week.  Cameron was born in 1988 (which, I still contend is not the year someone was born but actually a world class time for the Mens 200 meter race - 19.88 would have been 4th in the 2024 Paris Olympics), but what that means is Cameron isn't that much older than some of the players. And he's still in decent enough shape to get out on the field during training to fill a spot as needed.  I'm not at practice enough to say if he does that regularly, but it's regular enough on the times I'm able to make it out to practice that it's not unusual. I asked him how much fun it was to be out there running around and he laughed...

Photo Credit: Tormenta FC Today's musical accompaniment while you read.  This week and the next two will go a long way towards determining the eventual success or not of Tormenta in 2025. That may be a strange thing to say for a team that will only play one game over that time, but South Georgia Manager Ian Cameron sees the bye weeks as opportunities to take the necessary steps to becoming the team he believes they can be. "I think the group's in an interesting place. I think Saturday showed a team that's close to being good," Cameron said of Tormenta's 2-1 win over Greenville in the Jagermeister Cup. "I think we're close, but really how we approach this bye week and the following bye week that precedes the 16th, 17th and 18th of May, those two weeks will have a big consequence for our season. Are we just going to be an okay team or we're going to push forward and learn and become a very strong team in the league." Currently Tormenta sits at...