Daily Pilot Cup set to bring Newport-Mesa community together again

The local lawns of Costa Mesa High, Jack R. Hammett Sports Complex and Davis Elementary will soon be filled with the noise of enthusiastic youth soccer players again.

That’s right. The Daily Pilot Cup youth soccer tournament is back for a 20th consecutive year. The event will start Tuesday and conclude on June 2.

Kirk McIntosh, the tournament’s founder and director, said that the event will once again feature 30 schools from across the Newport-Mesa area, a number that has remained consistent for the past decade.

The tournament features area kids between the third and sixth grades playing for their schools. McIntosh finds the departure from organized club soccer to be refreshing.

“Soccer is all about AYSO and club, but rarely do they get to play with their schoolmates,” McIntosh said. “That’s what is different about this. It’s purely kids that live within the Newport Beach [and] Costa Mesa city limits.

“It’s just that special camaraderie of being able to play with your schoolmates.”

There are no limitations beyond the total number of participating kids as to how many teams a school may enter into the tournament. This year’s tournament is expected to have roughly 195 teams competing.

“Some of these schools will put in double-digit teams,” McIntosh said. “Kaiser, for instance, which I believe is the largest school in the district, puts in numerous teams. This year, I think they had 16 teams.

“One year, I’ll never forget, they had 22 teams.”

For many years, the Daily Pilot Cup has used the same formula for success. Volunteers have helped run the tournament, and even officiate it, bringing the community together for a week of fun and fair competition.

Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley had both of her sons, Sam and Ben, play in the tournament when they attended Sonora Elementary.

“What I love about the Daily Pilot Cup is there are a lot of students who played in the Daily Pilot Cup, and then they go on to high school, and they volunteer at their elementary school to help with the team,” Foley said. “Then even later in life, you will see a lot of those students who played in elementary school, they are now the coaches coaching the teams.

“It really is truly a tournament that brings our community together.”

The tournament has been built on the back of its volunteers. While much of the tournament remains the same, one thing that will be different will be the title of the field that the kids will play on at Davis Elementary.

“One of our outstanding volunteers for the Pilot Cup, a very popular person in the community by the name of Keith Frainie,…he died actually on the soccer field playing soccer,” McIntosh said. “He was an enormous personality for Davis Elementary School, and as a result, we, the school, and the school district named their field Frainie Field.”

The field dedication ceremony took place last Sunday.

As far as the competition itself is concerned, two schools swept the Gold Division championships last season.

Davis won the boys’ third- and fourth-grade and boys’ fifth- and sixth-grade titles.

Mariners will be defending the girls’ third- and fourth-grade and girls’ fifth- and sixth-grade crowns.

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