Stellenbosch Football Club is one of the three Premier Soccer League teams in Cape Town whose under-19 sides will be in action at the Bayhill Premier Cup competition over the Easter weekend.
The competition will take place at Erica Park in Belhar.
The other two teams are Cape Town City and Cape Town Spurs, which are among the 32 teams in the line-up.
Not only will local talent be on display, but teams from the rest of the country and abroad will be in action. The draw was held at the Civic Centre in Cape Town on Saturday (2 March).
The competition takes place from Wednesday 27 to 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 Bafana players such as Benni McCarthy, Steven Pienaar and Nasief Morris all made their debuts in this tournament before becoming household names in South Africa and abroad. The tourney is the birthplace of many dreams, and youths who are in action will be following in the footsteps of Bafana players.
The Local Working Committee assured the clubs and public that all logistics are in place for a smooth and incident-free tournament. It was launched in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain, in 1989 and has a rich history of nurturing future football stars and promoting the game at grassroots level.
Thirty-two teams will see action and will be divided into eight divisions of four teams. The automatic qualifiers are Grassy Park, Bayhill United, two invitational teams, LFA Mitchells Plain and SAFA CT XI, plus the three local PSL teams.
The 12 teams that 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 the tournament in 2012 and would like to show their absence was to the team’s benefit and aim to build a team to be reckoned with this year.
Big names such as Maties FC, Antalyaspor JPM CT and FC Kapstadt all fell by the wayside when they were beaten by minnows such as Rebels FC, Porto FC and Clover FC for a place at the prestigious tournament.
