Some of the best young soccer players from across the country are at Grand Park this week for the U.S. Soccer Development Academy Summer Showcase and Playoffs.
The event is free and open to the public.
Games take place through Monday at the various Grand Park soccer fields. Teams come from everywhere, New England to California – as well as Indiana. The Indiana Fire is playing at this event, and its U17/18 team won its first game, 3-0 over Players Development Academy out of New Jersey.
Jared Micklos, Development Academy Director, said the event “brings all of our 14 and older clubs to one location, where we’ve got a world-class environment to be able to have the best teams playing against the best teams in a competitive environment with meaningful games and is a great opportunity for talent identification for our scouts and youth national team coaches.”
A handful of players from the Fire are from Hamilton County. Will Harrison, Tyler Gainer, Will Hirschman, Taylor Crull, Richard Bennett and Ethan Lee all call Carmel home, while Jake Gruber and Hunter Bartholomew are from Fishers.
Each team at the playoffs is placed in a group of four, and will play three games against the other teams in their group. The winners of each group advance to a knock-out stage of the Playoffs; sites are to be determined.
The Fire’s next game is Saturday against Real Southern California; the team then plays Orlando City SC on Monday. Both games start at 6:30 p.m.
“We feature two games each day that we believe are marquee match-ups and in this case, it’s nice to be able to feature a local team where you can get support from the community and it’s great to be able to display the product that’s being built and worked on every day here in Westfield to the public, so that these kids can have something to aspire to as they look to play in the academy in future years,” said Micklos.
Carmel’s Taylor Crull is one of several Hamilton County soccer players on the Indiana Fire U17/18 team at the U.S. Soccer Development Academy Summer Showcase. (Richie Hall)