Tag: AYSO Select

Davis World Cup 2025

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Davis World Cup 2025 It’s not May in Davis without the annual youth soccer bonanza, the Davis World Cup. I am on the committee for this tournament (I design the logos, medals, pins, t-shirts and I update the website; all the hard work is done by everyone else). The committee has had many of the same members for a number of years now so we’re a pretty efficient team; all our offspring have either aged out or no longer play regular AYSO to even take part in the tournament themselves; I last coached at the tournament in 2018 (with the Spurs!), and my own teenager last played the Davis World Cup in 2019 (for the Dawgs, they were a nice team with a great coach). Above, I sketched all the flags displayed outside the AYSO headquarters in Community Park. This is what I love about the Davis World Cup. Each team that applies (and they come from all over northern California, plus we always get a few from Nevada) gets assigned a country, and they get the flag of that country and are encouraged to offer their opponents little gifts or such associated with that country. So for example if you are Spain, you give a little keyring that says ‘Spain on it, or if you are Uzbekistan, you give a little keyring that says ‘Uzbekistan’ on it, and so on. Actually teams get way more thoughtful and creative than that, giving out candies or trinkets, when my team Spurs played we were assigned as Serbia, so I made little keyrings with ‘Serbia’ on them (along with information about the country and the Serbian alphabet, showing you how to write your name in Serbian).  Fun stuff. I coached another AYSO Select team in 2020 (the Titans; I still wear the t-shirt as it was one of my best logos) and I was really hoping (as a committee member) to maybe be able to pick a country for our team, probably Belgium to give out chocolates, probably Ireland due to the family provenance of both coaches, but I really wanted Italy because I was hoping to have the team sing the anthem before each game, they have the best anthem. However, we never got that far because 2020 turned into the 2020 we know and can’t forget, so the tournament was cancelled that year (and I recycled the retro Top of the Pops style logo for the 2022 event).  I enjoy making the logo, but I spend an inordinate amount of time faffing about with the design during the year before. I went this year for a more playful design again, using a similar kid-like graffiti style lettering that I’ve used for some of our old teams (like the ‘Duh’, the first AYSO Select team my son played on, coming 4th in the 2017 tournament at U10 level). I went with a ‘splat’ background full of flags, after my friend spilled some milk at a cafe in Nob Hill and I really liked the shape it made on the table. I’ll have that, I thought. So the logo below was born. It was a hit with the t-shirt vendor. I got very excited when I first drew the little cartoon water tower on my iPad, and abandoned the cartoon cow theme I was originally going with. Maybe I’ll resurrect that for next year, if I don’t go with a classic retro World Cup style again.

Some of the cartoon cows came back for the Keeper Wars logo though, as you can see in the sticker design below. This went through a lot of versions too, one of them looking like an explosion in hyperspace. One of the balls says “Footy Footy Footy” which is a reference to the Adam and Joe “Footy Song” from the 90s (watch that here). Keeper Wars is a fun tournament, though I didn’t make it out to watch it this year. While my wife did a lot of running around from field to field, I was at home a lot as the guy in the chair, to be on hand for any last-second website updates (which I had to do during that sketch at the top, but I only live about three minutes away by bike).

And below, here are some of the medals, pins, stickers, coins and the committee t-shirt. The medal came out particularly well this year, it’s my favourite one yet. If in doubt, always add some stars, that’s my design rule. Splats don’t always work.

Here is how the t-shirt logo looked, as sold by the on-site vendor. So cool seeing so many people lining up to get them. It was cool to see someone running in one of my older shirts from 2022 the other week. What’s even cooler is when I see people wearing an AYSO or DWC shirt I have designed and I show them the original concept drawings on my iPad.

And here are pins from the previous World Cups I have designed. I love this year’s one, I kept the pin just black and white.

over the mountains, in the high desert

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Comstock Panorama April 2017 sm

At the end of April, we drove over the Sierra Nevada mountains, still heavily packed with quickly melting snow, across the state line into Nevada. My son played AYSO Select this year at the U10 level, and his team (the Davis “Duh”) were off to play in their third tournament, the Comstock Shootout at Carson City. It was a two-day tournament, playing against other teams from northern California, but the location was utterly spectacular. The backdrop of the snow-peaked Sierras on one side, and rocky high desert hills on the other, this was, let’s say, a little bit different from Davis. The sketch above, a panorama in pencil and watercolour in a Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook, was sketched in roughly 20-25 minutes while our team warmed up elsewhere; this was actually the U14 team, the Davis Dissent, for whom several older brothers of our lads were playing. But I couldn’t resist those mountains! I was trying to channel my French urban sketching friend Vincent Desplanche, who does amazing sketches up in the mountains back in Europe. Davis is too flat for mountains, they are usually too far in the distance.

Comstock Duh practice

The altitude was high, so our players had more sub breaks during the games (our coach was really good at managing that). I was reminded of when South American teams go and play in Bolivia, and struggle with the altitude in La Paz, which the Bolivian players are well used to. This was so problematic that between 2007 and 2008 FIFA actually banned international games from being played at above 8,200 feet. Carson City is at around 4,800 so nowhere near that high, but you do feel it. I was also reminded of when Premier League teams go to West Brom, who have the highest ground in England, and they often struggle with the altitude, which is a whopping 551 feet, so actually it’s more the Tony Pulis tactics they struggle against.

Comstock game sketches

We were actually put to the test though by another team who were much more used to playing at altitude, a team from the town of Bishop, which is in California but on the High Desert side of the Sierras. Bishop is at 4,150 feet, and their players definitely outplayed ours, giving us our only defeat of the competition (and a pretty big one too). Davis, I might add, is only 52 feet above sea level. We may not be mountain-top athletes, but our cakes are baked to perfection. Above, here are some sketches I did during the game.

Minden Holiday Inn, Nevada

We stayed in the nearby town of Minden, at the Holiday Inn. There isn’t a whole lot to do in Minden, so in the evening while my son slept I grabbed a cold drink from the gas station across the street and sketched in the seating area of the hotel. I brought my books about perspective, as I was planning for my workshop in June, and so couldn’t help a nice bit of interior perspective. It was very yellow in there, though.

Minden Nevada

And here are those mountains again, this time sketched from our hotel window in the morning. It’s pretty beautiful there with that backdrop. I’d like to explore that part of Nevada some day, the High Desert, see some of the old abandoned ghost towns. I’d like to go to Virginia City, where they filmed that TV show Bonanza; I remember once joking it would be fun to do a sketchcrawl there, but at the end you would have to burn your sketches and ride off on horses, like in the opening credits. Tell you what though, those mountains look really pretty but that snow was melting fast. As we drove back over it, you could see it all stacked high but weeping in any direction, with waterfalls gushing and creeks rushing. And the rocks…we saw a huge boulder which had fallen into the road and forced a big car to swerve off, and passed the section of highway that had been partially washed away by the heavy rain and snow in the winter. It was a fun trip, definitely a change of scenery, and a cool tournament for the boys to play in.