Tournament time has a double meaning for a lot of high school teams around here. First, there's the early-season tournament usually against teams you would not otherwise have on the schedule – a time to tune up for league play. Later comes the post-season tournament – a time to have everything fine-tuned for a run at a title.

Eight of the top 12 ranked field hockey teams played in the first kind of tournament over the weekend. Most of the teams look in pretty good form already, but there were still opportunities to work on different parts of the game.

No. 1 Garrison Forest rolled through its Grizzly Tournament, beating North Harford and McDonogh by a combined 12-0, but coach Traci Davis said the experience was more valuable than the scores might indicate.

"It’s nice to be able to relax and try some things that we might be a little more reluctant to try within our conference games," said Davis, whose team won the tough IAAM A Conference tournament last season. "I think we try to play the same hard way every day, but it’s helpful to try to tune some things up and to improve on some things that you might not have done over the course of the preseason."

At Roland Park’s Sally Nyborg Tournament, which draws the strongest field of any area field hockey tournament, No. 5 Fallston split its games. The Cougars dropped a closer-than-it-sounds match to No. 2 Severna Park, 3-0, and then topped No. 13 Hereford, 2-0.

"This is a great tournament, because you get to see what we’re made of going into the real season," said Fallston coach Alice Puckett, whose Cougars are the defending state Class 3A champs. "It doesn’t count against our standings in the region and we played two teams before this that weren’t this caliber, so it allows us to see what exactly our problems are."

- Katherine Dunn