Jenny Chiu was nervous when she first got to Speedy Turtles training camp. After almost a decade away from playing professional soccer, she was back in the kind of intense environment that she thought was long in the past.
Instead, she found a meticulously planned out weekend: workouts, team dinners, scrimmages, meetings, photographers, videographers. Those gathered - some of whom she knew, and others who had only been introduced on a Zoom screen - were her new teammates.
And she was supposed to be their star player.
“First day, I'm like, ‘Oh, my god, these people are going to think I'm horrible. They're going to think I'm horrible because I couldn't get the passing movements down,’ ” Chiu said. “Of course, I made up for it in the scrimmage.”
Such is the often bizarre nature of The Soccer Tournament (TST), due to start in North Carolina this week. The men’s version is well established at this point, with the women’s in its second year as a separate entity. But while the men’s iteration seems more of a casual get-together, a group of old mates showing up to play footy for a couple of days, the women’s is a far more competitive, significant exercise.
This is a pickup tournament in the North Carolina heat that requires immense training, nonnegotiable professionalism, and a route back into the game for some footballers who thought they had left it long ago.
“More than anything, it's the glory and the experience of getting to play again, like my personal story, putting my boots back on and showing people that I was a damn good player,” Chiu said.
She’s not the only one. In 2023, TST was formed as a co-ed tournament that didn’t quite generate the buzz many had hoped. A year later, it was more fleshed out with a separate women’s bracket that featured eight teams. This year, it’s up to 16, and littered with a mixture of ex-pros, current college students, and everyone in between.
This is a microcosm of the women’s soccer world. And to the players, it is much, much more than just a kickabout with some friends with a hefty prize pot.