Jefferson Cup 2013 Girls Weekend – Day 3 recap and photo gallery

By Jimmy LaRoue

RICHMOND, Va.–The teams who showed up at the Jefferson Cup 2013 Girls Weekend had a purpose about them throughout their time in Richmond. And with a cold rain greeting them on the final day Sunday, they needed it.

But it’s not as if they didn’t already have a purpose in the first place.

For the teams in the showcase brackets, it was about continuing to master their craft and hone their skills before the plethora of college coaches who came from far and wide due to the nature of the talent at one of the country’s premier tournaments.

It’s one in which more than 1,600 sought entry, just over 900 got in overall between boys’ and girls’ weekends, and nearly 500 girls teams came looking for bragging rights, challenging games and a chance to expose their talents to those who could very well be guiding them at the next level. And for those who showed up at Striker Park Friday for the James Madison-Virginia Commonwealth spring exhibition, they got exposed to the rigors of Division I soccer.

Some, including Louisville assistant Andrew Quinn, talked about the Division I experience and the benefits of their school.  Former MLS star Chris Armas, now the head coach at Adelphi University, says the recruiting part of coaching has been an eye-opening experience for him.

The dedicated players coming up are just starting their education in terms of recruitment. Shaun Cryer, coach of the U-15 champions New Jersey Stallions Dynamite, is in the midst of that process with his girls, noting that coaches have already been taking an interest in players on his team, some of whom have a deserved eye toward representing the United States somewhere in the national team pyramid.

Their schedules can be mind-boggling to the casual observer, but it’s something college coaches have generally noted as a positive. And there’s even a team, Omega Select Black–very loosely based in Kansas but more like a global all-star team–that’s never the same team twice. Some players, like Allison Abbe, wanted to be at the Jefferson Cup to pique the interest of the Division I coaches at East Coast schools, including a few in particular.

But the payoffs, as can be seen in the myriad photos that made it into our social media feed celebrating Jefferson Cup trophies and medals won, finishing at the top of their brackets and finding their form over the course of the three-to-four games played over the course of the weekend.

So if you were out there and missed the teams’ dedication and purpose, along with the obvious skill out on the fields throughout the River City area this weekend, you couldn’t have been looking too hard, or somehow missed it in the raindrops. That, or you’re still blurry-eyed from seeing the abundance of talent on display.

We hope we’ve captured that here as you re-live yet another stellar Jefferson Cup girls’ weekend.

So here’s mud in your eye, a look at the champions in each bracket and the overall results and a photo gallery to wrap up the weekend (Note: All the photos have now been uploaded to the photo slideshow – all 86 of them from Sunday.).