The IMS soccer tournament is an annual event that happens every year for the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders to do. You create your teams with friends but with only 5 people per team. Mrs. Neilson, who is also the Spanish teacher here for 7th-8th grade, hosted the soccer tournament here.
The IMS soccer tournament happens out in front of the school on the grass soccer field, the tournament begins at 3:30 then starts to end at 5:40.
This year the winning team are 8th grade students who are Louis, Eddie, Gurtaj, Abhir, and Derris. They were able to win this tournament, so I was able to get in contact to be able to ask them and Mrs. Neilson some questions about the tournament.
“It probably takes me about 2 weeks [to organize] once I have all the information on everybody’s roster and permission slips to organize my brackets for the tournament,” Neilson said.
Two weeks is enough time to organize it, but how many teams usually participate in the tournament?
“So it’s an 8 team tournament bracket format with single elimination,” Neilson said.
So it is 8 teams with 5 players on each team. With so many kids, do any teachers help with the tournament though?
“Including myself there are 10 total teachers that help me out with the event and I assign them different jobs,” Neilson said.
Having help with this tournament I feel like is needed, but is it hard to manage the tournament?
“Not at all, this is my 7th year doing this so it gets easier every year,” she said.
Wow that’s cool you have been doing this for a great amount of time, and you have experience as well. What supplies do you get for the tournament and if you have an amount of money you usually spend?
“Well the school has been wonderful enough that over the summer they’ve purchased brand new goal nets specifically for the soccer tournament and they purchased 6 soccer balls specifically for the tournament. So we get to reuse this stuff every year so our cost is minimal to run the soccer tournament. Everything is basically paid for already and we also use the money we also raised that goes toward the gift certificate surprises towards the winning team. The rest of the money goes back to the school and we use it for any other student activities,” Neilson stated.
Now for our winning teams’ responses, who is Gurtaj, Derris, Louis, Abhir, Eddie.
Were you confident in your teammates?
“I was confident in my teammates the whole time. I’ve played with Abhir, Eddie, Derris, and Louis before and knew how well they can play, and that together we can win this tournament,” Gurtaj stated.
Who did you rely on the most to help you guys win this tournament?
“I feel like Gurtaj helped us win this tournament because of the way he played well in defense and especially in the finals being goalkeeper and playing well,” Derris said.
Did you think you were going to lose at some point in the tournament against a team?
“No, I didn’t think at some point we were going to lose because with my teammates also helping scoring the goals I knew we were going to win this,” Eddie stated.
What tactics did you guys use if you had any?
“We played tiki tika and parked the bus when we were up by two goals and played a 1-2-1 with me at striker,” Louis stated.
Who on the team do you think did the most work to lead you guys to win?
“I think Gurtaj did the most because of his defending, passing and goalkeeping in the final,” Abhir stated.
