Over the summer (and winter!) we spend many weekends traveling around Southern California attending soccer tournaments. As always, all opinions are my own and based on personal experience unless otherwise noted. If you have reviews of your own, please add in the comments! This time we traveled…again… to Las Vegas for the Las Vegas Players College Showcase!
Name: Vegas Players Showcase
Overall Impressions:
This was our second year attending the Vegas College Showcase with BSG. You can read about last year’s experience here. This is one tournament that most of the older teams attend and becomes a melting pot of ECNL, CSL, SCDSL, National League and more. It’s a Friday through Sunday tournament… so many girls miss school I’m sure the schools wondered what was happening! This time BSG and I took on Vegas together and had a great time!
Depending on the age group this is either a traditional tournament (U13-U15) or just a four-game Showcase. National League was also playing their league as a part of the Showcase, making it a party for everyone. At u16 it is just a Showcase with four scheduled games making planning very easy.
Dates: March 10-12 (boys) March 17-19 (girls) 2017
Location: All over (and I mean ALL OVER) the greater Las Vegas area
Check In: One-hour prior check in at the field- yay! Check in was organized and easy and was also required before and after each game.
Number of Teams: Seemed like thousands, but somehow not as many as last year.
Strength of Competition: There are multiple brackets at each age level and it was interesting to see who got seeded where. BSG’s U16 team was bracketed pretty appropriately and played all out of state teams which was fun and different. It was also fun for them to win all their games. 🙂
College Coaches: There was a huge list of college coaches scheduled to attend, but we didn’t see tons of them.
Fields: Games were played all over the Las Vegas area. National League and the top brackets seemed to play all their games at the regular large Bettye Wilson and Kellogg Zaher complexes, but the other brackets were all over the place. BSG’s team played at two nice locations- Silver Bowl in Henderson and Ed Fountain.
Weather: Las Vegas is much warmer in March than January so the girls were hot, especially on the turf fields. We enjoyed the sunshine but definitely needed lots of sunscreen and shade. I bet it was difficult for teams coming from cold climates to adjust to the very warm afternoons. BSG played a team from the midwest whose faces got VERY red by half time.
Hotels: This is a stay and play tournament so all hotel bookings are required to go through the tournament, but we were accepted pretty late, so they let us do our own booking. We all stayed at the Golden Nugget downtown which although very convenient, is not my favorite place to stay in Vegas. Let’s just leave it at that.
Things to Do: It was fun being downtown and going out on Freemont Street- especially on St Patrick’s Day. There was live music and lots of activity, but not a lot of… clothes. Ha Ha! I thought it would be a little scary to have a group of 16-year-old girls down there, but no one really hassled them and we had a great time.
Being downtown you drive by a lot of things you might not see up close and personal on the strip… BSG and I had an interesting discussion about the differences between a Gentlemen’s Club and other venues. Yikes! In addition to those attractions, we were very close to the outlet mall which had some great stores.
We also went out to explore and ate at a local place called the Omelet House that I found on Yelp. I say it’s local because all the cars in the parking lot had Nevada plates and it wasn’t near any tourist attractions. We had a good (and huge!!) breakfast and really enjoyed our great waitress and kitschy atmosphere. It was a nice change from our usual Panera/Starbucks.
I had a really fun weekend with my BSG. She’s growing up so fast and I truly treasure these soccer weekends. I know I’m going to blink and she’ll be in college.
Glad you guys had fun and did well. It was interesting to see who made it into the showcase and who didn’t. Of all the local teams we know the same age group as my dd (2001) hers was the only one that got in and some of the other non-local teams that we were familiar with that were accepted weren’t always that much better in quality.
Like you, we also got accepted late so were able to book where we wanted. This resulted in our team ending up at many different hotels to accomodate different cost levels (we stayed at Mandalay Bay which was nice). Unfortunately our schedule had a couple night games so the girls didn’t get to explore too much.
Our team was bracketed pretty well, also playing all out of state teams which we always appreciate. Unfortunately our team didn’t really perform to their usual which was frustrating but not surprising considering they hadn’t all played together since November and a few players (my dd included) didn’t make it back to practice until the week of the showcase because their high school teams went far in playoffs.
We lucked out and played 3 of the games at Kellogg Zaher and 1 game at Bettye Wilson and according to our manager we had 15-20 coaches watching which was amazing given that we didn’t have the best times (two 8pm games and the Sunday game wasn’t until 2:30pm). We’re hopeful we can come back next year. However, if our team doesn’t make it one of dd’s friends had a pretty good experience guesting with a 2000 team so it’s nice to know that that’s always an option too.
Having such a late game Sunday we decided to stay the night and leave early Monday morning, but I heard the traffic wasn’t as horrible as normal.