Four alumni players and one former player from the Georgia Southern University club soccer team recently won the highest level of 3v3 Soccer Nationals at the As a unit they made up their tournament team name, Longrod Von Hugendong; with the team slogan of, “Look sexy. Feel sexy. Play sexy. Win.”

On Oct. 20, 2013, these former teammates lost their friend, Martin Parris, who played men’s soccer for GSU. In his honor they put his initials, MP, on all of their jerseys.

“We all met at Southern other than Colin, my brother on the team. Most of us have graduated in the past two or three years, so we hadn’t played together in a while; every now and again kind of thing for the past two years. Between the five of us, we live in four different cities,” Holliday said.

In order to make it to the national tournament teams have to go through a series of smaller tournaments. Over the summer, they played the required local tournament in Augusta, Ga., qualifying for the regional tournament in Charlotte, N.C. After they did well in Charlotte, they got the bid they needed to head down to the ESPN Wide World of Sports at Walt Disney World.

“We are all pretty confident guys, and we went into the tournament expecting and wanting to win the whole thing. We didn’t really know what the quality of the other teams or games would be,” Holliday said. “But, we played nine games; seven of them were actually very competitive, but the other two teams were blowout games. It was all really intense, competitive soccer, so we were just really proud to do it.”

Although their 2013-2014 quest for the national tournament win is over, they are already getting excited for next year and thinking of the competition to come.

Holliday said, “We are ready to go back and defend our title next year. So, anyone out there who thinks they are decent enough to bring on the challenge, we will see you next January.”

All photos are courtesy of Matt Holiday