All eyes will be on the Bay Hill Premier Cup competition over the Easter weekend at Erica Park in Belhar where u-19 soccer players will display their talent on the soccer pitch. The draw of the competition was held at the Civic Centre in Cape Town recently.
Premier League teams, Cape Town City, Cape Town Spurs and Stellenbosch, will all field their youth sides.
The competition is from Wednesday 27 March until Sunday 31 March for the knockout stages before the final moves to Athlone Stadium for the second time.
This is the 35th edition of the tournament and Bafana players like Benni McCarthy, Steven Pienaar and Nasief Morris, all made their debuts in this tournament before becoming household names here and abroad. The tournament is the birth place of many dreams and all youngsters who will be in action will use the tournament to follow in the footsteps of the above mentioned Bafana players.
The tournament was launched in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain, in 1989 and has a rich history of nurturing future football stars and promoting game at grassroots level.
The tournament will consist of 32 teams divided into eight divisions of four teams each. The automatic qualifiers are Grassy Park, Bayhill United, two invitation teams, namely LFA Mitchells Plain and a SAFA CT XI, plus the three local PSL teams.
The 12 teams who qualified via the play-offs out of 194 other sides are Hanover Park, Rebels FC, Westridge FC, FC Porto, Young Bafana Soccer Academy, FN Rangers, St. Agnes, Ubuntu Academy, Junction Rovers, Elsies River United, Clover FC, Rygersdal FC and Everton FC. Junction Rovers last played in 2012 in the tournament and would like to show that their absence from the tournament was to the team’s benefit to build a team to be reckoned with this year.