April Tovar / Submitted photoDefender Vincent Tovar steals the ball and advances it to the Team USA's midfielders during a game at the 2014 Bend Premier Cup.

Tara Bilanski is pretty sure she has tracked down every last goal frame and net in Bend.

And she’s going to need them.

Bilanski is director of the Bend Premier Cup, an annual youth soccer tournament that this year will include a field of 220 teams from Central Oregon, around the state and across the West.

A late surge in registration put the tournament’s number of entries well above the 183 teams that took part in last year’s Cup.

“It’s gotten crazy in the last two weeks,” Bilanski said Thursday. “It surprised me. We knew we had 22 fields, and you figure about 10 teams for every field, so 220 (teams) was about our limit.”

She said scheduling the tournament’s expected total of 428 games onto those fields has been like working “a jigsaw puzzle.”

The Bend Premier Cup, in its sixth year, gets underway today and continues through Sunday on playing fields in and around Bend. The primary tournament sites are Pine Nursery Community Park, Big Sky Park, and Camp Fraley Ranch southeast of Bend.

All of the fields are natural grass, which Bilanski believes is a significant attraction to the Bend Premier Cup.

“Every field we use here is grass (as opposed to artificial surface); it’s all on prime fields,” she said. “For the teams coming here, it’s good to know you’re going to play on a nice soccer surface.”

The tournament field is made up of boys and girls teams playing in various competitive divisions in age groups ranging from U9 to U19. The host Bend FC Timbers club, for which Bilanski serves as technical director, will account for about 20 of the participating teams. Teams representing other clubs in Bend and around Central Oregon will also be in the mix.

In addition to rounding up the goals needed for all of the playing fields, Bilanski has arranged for dozens of officials to work the weekend’s contests. To meet the demand, she said, many of the officials will be coming from out of the area. And because the tournament itself is helping fill area hotels and motels to capacity, many of the out-of-town officials are staying with host families affiliated with the Bend FC Timbers.

A lot goes into staging the Bend Premier Cup, which Bilanski said is the Bend FC Timbers’ largest annual fundraiser.

“Since the beginning, the club has done a great job putting this tournament on,” she said, explaining the event’s growing popularity and yearly expansion. “It’s such a destination tournament. It’s a great sporting event, but it’s also great for the city of Bend.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0359; bbigelow@bendbulletin.com/