Speculation, Rumor and Hearsay

So Chattanooga FC is gearing up for the 2012 season: the first round of official tryouts was this past Saturday at Finley Stadium. Your favorite nosey scout from the Chattahooligan was there to scope out the scene. Here’s a few short notes:

It’s always tricky to know who’s going to be picked for the team and who’s going to come next summer at these first of 3 tryouts — as a good amount of the really talented players are given a bye by the coaches. They are allowed to show up at later tryouts, if at all. So we can’t really get a sense of how important this batch is… A few really talented guys standout, as do some really bad players, but the rest kind of blend together as pretty decent.

But new Head Coach Bill Elliott was there, along with Assistant Jimmy Weekley and GM Sean McDaniel.

Several three season CFC players attended: Russell Courtney, Moises Drumond and Ivan Heredia. A pleasant surprise was that former Dalton standout Irvin Espinal was back after walking away from the team early in the season last year. Perhaps he had issues with former Head Coach Crossman?

We weren’t able to identify all the talent there, but some current or former NCAA Div I players were there — a Clemson teammate of forward Michael Brooks and a younger brother of a Covenant kid who starts at the U of South Carolina. There was a good bit of local talent trying out too — kids from CCS, McCallie, UTC and Covenant, to name just a few…

The play looked good in general, and we’ll be excited to see how the team shapes up.

Other notes:

News on players from last season: Forward Mark Sherrod had an insane sophomore season at Memphis University — finishing as something like the second leading scorer in all of NCAA Div I! So while that looks good on CFC’s resumé for developing talent, it means that Mark is on the radar for some pro teams and looks like he’ll be heading elsewhere for the summer (we’ve heard rumor of Portland, not a bad place to go).

Another first season player (and Memphis teammate of Mark’s), midfielder Cody McCoy is rumored to be heading to NC to tryout with the USL Pro team Charlotte Eagles.

First season midfielder José Robles is also going to tryout at some sort of a pro combine, so he may not be able to return either.

All the best of luck to you fellas! Make Chattanooga proud!

The conference:

Apparently the Southeast Conference of the NPSL is being broken into 2 divisions: East and West, each compromised of 5 teams. All the teams in the same division will play each other twice, once at home, once away. They will also play some (maybe all?) of the teams in the other division once.

We think this is what we heard on the division break down:

EAST
Chattanooga FC
Knoxville Force
Jacksonville United FC
Myrtle Beach
Mississippi Storm

WEST
Atlanta Silverbacks
Georgia Revolution
FC Tulsa
Rocket City United
Galveston Pirate SC

Or something like that. If anyone knows more that we do, please correct us in a comment.

And the winners of each Division facing off in a playoff game to get to the national championships.

So it looks like our arch-rivals Atlanta and Rocket City won’t be playing us as often.

Post by John Q. Chattanooga | Chattanooga FC, Local
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