About 5,000 people are expected to come to Columbus for the state’s second biggest soccer tournament this weekend.
Referees, coaches, players and their family members will begin arriving today for the Admiral Cup Soccer Tournament, which begins Saturday at 8 a.m. Games will continue all through the weekend on fields at Columbus High School, Joe Cook Elementary and the Lowndes County Soccer Complex.
“Every hotel room is sold out in Columbus,” said Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Nancy Carpenter.
About 100 teams, including athletes in the U-10, U-12, U-14 and U-16 age divisions, will participate, according to a CVB press release.
“Any time that we can bring that many people into our city that have to spend the night, stay in our hotels, they have to purchase our food, they have to buy our gas, that’s a tremendous plus for the city of Columbus,” said Greg Lewis, director of the Columbus Recreation Authority. “And that’s really one of the reasons that we bid on the tournament, to make sure that we get people to come into our town.”
The numbers don’t include athletes coming to town for the Mississippi Over 65 USTA League Championship tennis tournament at the Magnolia Tennis Club Saturday and Sunday. Carpenter said there will be about 450 players participating in that event.
“These men and women who are coming to town also have spouses or friends that are coming with them, so that’s another 1,000 people that are coming,” she said. “So I expect overall for us to have 7,500 to maybe 8,000 that will be … in-and-out of town. … For the most part, we’re expecting overnight stays.”
Tressa Black, sales manager at Hyatt Place, said the hotel is booked for the entire weekend. In addition to corporate guests, she said, the hotel has about 50 rooms for soccer players and their families and another 55 for tennis players and their families.
She added most of the other hotels she knows of, including some in Starkville and local Bed and Breakfasts, are also full.
“Whenever there’s a big event, we sell out and we sell out in advance,” she said.
This will be the first time Columbus hosted the Admiral Cup, Carpenter said. The city has twice previously hosted the President’s Cup, the state’s largest soccer tournament.
Field conditions
A particularly rainy April means not all the fields are in the shape organizers would like for the tournament, though Carpenter said that shouldn’t hamper the tournament.
“(Joe Cook) looks wonderful,” Carpenter said. “It’s in really good shape. There are several fields at the Soccer Complex that they’re safe to play, they’re just not as pretty as we would like for them to be for the tournament.”
Roger Short, director of Lowndes County Parks which is responsible for maintaining the Soccer Complex, previously told The Dispatch in early April some of the fields would need hot, dry weather to help the grow the Bermuda grass planted on them.
“We’ve had neither,” Short said on Thursday. “But it wasn’t going to happen in a month anyway.”
Short said the county had planned to paint over the fields Thursday but couldn’t because of the rain that day. Depending on weather conditions today, he plans to have parts of the field mowed today.
Three smaller fields on the west side of the complex toward Highway 182 are brown and muddy from a constantly wet winter.
Short said he has been in touch with the Mississippi Soccer Association’s director about those fields’ condition.
“(She) said, ‘I don’t care whether they’ve got grass or not. … Are they safe? Are there holes in the fields? That’s the things that I’m concerned with,'” Short said. “And those things we don’t have, so we (don’t have) to be concerned with that.
“But still, we wanted the fields to look better,” he added. “It ain’t going to happen.”
Carpenter also said she didn’t think muddy fields would hurt Columbus’ chances to host more tournaments. Everyone understands the area has had a lot of rain this month, she said.
Both Short and Lewis said mud and rain wouldn’t stop soccer players anyway.
“If this was a baseball or softball tournament, we’d already have canceled it,” Short said. “…But soccer? Hell, they’ll play in anything.”
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