All stars ready to battle Tide

A team of Fort Lewis, McChord soccer players join forces to test skills against local semi-pro team from Tacoma

By Matt Smith, Northwest Guardian

This one will come down to youth versus experience.

The Tacoma Tide, a local semi-pro soccer team of the United Soccer League composed mainly of graduating high school seniors and college athletes, has scheduled an exhibition game against a Fort Lewis-McChord Air Force Base all-star team, set to take place June 17 at 7 p.m. at Curtis High School.

“I haven’t seen them play, but just looking at the league they’re in I know they’re pretty young,” said James Royston, an Air Force Master Sgt. who helped orchestrate the game. “We’re going to be relying on experience mainly.”

Though many on the combined military squad are several years older than their counterparts are many on the team have played at either an All-Army, All-Air Force or academy team level. Royston said three of the Air Force players finished playing for the All-Air Force team three weeks ago, and that McChord’s intramural season just ended last week so they should be good to go.

Fort Lewis’ soccer season finished about a month ago so conditioning shouldn’t be a problem for the Soldiers or Airmen.

“We should be in pretty decent shape still,” Royston said. “We play a lot, we play as much as we can.”

The military all-star team will be mostly composed of Airmen, but is slated to have about five Soldiers on it. That number may increase after yesterday’s scrimmage between Fort Lewis and McChord, that information was not available to the Northwest Guardian before its print deadline.

“Obviously we want to win, but we’ll see what happens,” Royston said. “We’re just trying to put together the best team we can, we don’t want to go out there and get waxed.”

This game will mark the first time the Tide has played against a Fort Lewis-McChord All Star team, but the Tide’s general manager Mike Jennings said it’s about time.

“It’s a natural thing,” Jennings said. “We’re a Tacoma team and the military bases are a big part of our community. We’ve thought about this last couple of years. We’ve wanted to showcase our and (the military’s) players together.”

The Tide is part of the Player Development League of the USL, of which the Seattle Sounders are a Division I team.

“We’re basically a league that connects the amateur with the professional league,” said Jennings of the under-23 league.

Jennings also said the only real difference between the Tide and the Sounders is age, and that the talent has actually been comparable in the past.

“We (played to a draw) 2-2 last year against the Sounders,” he said.

Royston, who has been at McChord since 1994, said this combination of talent between the two military installations harkens back to the mid-90s when a team called the Vets, comprised of talent from both the Army and Air Force, used to play teams from around the Greater Tacoma-Seattle area relatively frequently.

“That kind of fell apart, eventually,” Royston said. “Maybe with this joint base stuff, maybe we can get back to that.”