Who and What We Are - Fall and Spring Edition - Fall 2019

Albuquerque Soccer League offers men’s, women’s and coed competitions. We are affiliated with the New Mexico State Soccer Association, the United States Adult Soccer Association and the United States Soccer Federation. For fall and spring competition, our games are on Sundays and we play at the Arroyo del Oso and a couple of individual fields in town and at the New Mexico Soccer Tournament complex in Bernalillo. Yes, we know it’s a long way to drive, but we also own the fields and can make sure they’re repaired and maintained, unlike the fields at Bullhead park where other leagues play.

More important is what we’re not. We’re not the English Premier League or La Liga. We’re an amateur recreational soccer league comprised of people who play for exercise and to have fun and generally have to get up go to work after a weekend game. If you have players who decided to play here instead of joining Ronaldo at Real Madrid, your player is misguided and needs to play elsewhere. We have a low tolerance for people who show up to fight, riot and abuse and assault referees or other players.

Important points to be aware of:

1. In order to accommodate online payment, we have to break the team and player registration into a fall season (fall 2019) and a spring season ( spring 2020).  Since we have about 1400 people who take advantage of the online payment system, that's why we do it.  If you sign up for fall season, the assumption is your team is going to play the entire competition, meaning you'll register for the spring season and the final standings are based on a 17 game competition in the fall and spring.
2. The cost for the Fall 2019 season is $75. It hasn't changed.  The online payment system only allows us to have one payment amount, so we have set it at $75.  
3. The first game is on September 8.  The last day to register for the first game is Thursday, September 5.  Registration continues through the season starting again on Monday, September 9.
4. We do not reschedule your first game unless you have completed registration for a minimum of 11 players by Thursday September 5.
5. In the past, we have held the passcards as players register and then set a specific date and time for team reps to come pick up the passcards and make sure everything is accounted for and everyone’s passcard is there to avoid problems on the first game day.  If you want us to return the cards to the players as they walk in and register, please let us know and we’ll do that.  However, be aware that you’re taking complete responsibility for the people on your team and we will not be tracking registration rosters to send you throughout the process.  You get to contact your individual players and track them instead.  If you opt to have us return passcards as players register, they can send you a picture of their passcard to prove they registered.

Important things to do register your team for the spring season:

1. Submit your team application. If you’re an existing team from spring 2019 or summer 2019, do this from your team folder. If you are a new team, do it from the link in the article on the front page of the web site. There is no longer a team application fee.  The software does something a little funky and may lead you to believe your process didn’t finish.  That’s because we don’t collect an application fee and it doesn’t expect that.  In short order from you submitting your team application, we then accept it and you can then go the Teams section of the web site, click your team name, and log in to your team folder in the upper right corner.
2. Get enough players to have a team. Please don’t assume that we have a bunch of extra players to fill out your roster and especially please don’t assume we have five women looking for a coed team at any point in time.
3. If you are a new coed team and you decide you have to be in the bottom division, we’re going to ask you for your roster and a description of each players playing history. Until we get that, your application doesn’t get accepted so we can have a chance to keep you from sandbagging. If this offends you, we apologize in advance.
4. Right now you and your players can pay in a couple of different ways. Rather than go into depth in this brief introduction, please go to the link on the right titled How to Pay.
5. Please direct your players to complete their annual Online Liability Waiver.  Every player must complete the online waiver annually and annually starts with the fall season. Important change:  if you pay online, you complete the waiver during that process now and do not have to separately submit your online waiver.  Otherwise, if you pay at the office in any form go to the Online Waiver link on the front page of the website.  Starting August 1, we’ll post on the web site an alphabetical listing of the players who have completed their waivers, as copies do not go to the team reps, only the ASL office and the player.  Your player does not need to send it to us.

Dates to Remember

We want you to complete your player registration as soon as possible. We’ve discovered that setting arbitrary dates for arbitrary numbers of players to be entered in your team folder (further information in the Registering Players link on the left) is somewhat pointless. Hence, we monitor the activity in your player folder. We begin putting the schedule together starting August 15. If there has been no activity in you assembling player records and no players have been paid for, we are going to contact you to see if you really have a team, as including a phantom team in the schedule causes a lot of problems. If you are one of those teams, and particularly if you are a new team, we’re going to be very pushy about you moving the process forward.

• August 29 - the online payment system closes until after the first game.
• First games for Sunday play – September 8.
• Team passcard pickup - Sunday September 1, 6 to 8 pm
• Last day to register players for the September 8 game for all divisions is Thursday, September 5. The office will not be open on either Friday, September 6 or Saturday September 7. Player registration begins again on Monday, September 9 and continues through the season.
• Last day to transfer between teams for the fall season is October 5.

Three Important Steps to Register a Player

1. Complete the player record in the team folder. If it is not complete and ready to print a passcard, which means including a picture, your player pays an extra $10 for us to do the Team Rep's job. Directions are on the right in How to Create Player Profiles.
2. Sign the Liability waiver. Information is on the right and the link is on the front page of the web site.  If you pay online you have to complete the waiver in order to pay and do not need to do it again through the link on the front page of the website.
3. Pay your player registration fee. Details are on the right.

Extremely Important Information You Should Know

1. We do not take credit card numbers over the phone. It is a violation of our contract with our card processing company. Do not call with your credit card number, do not tell your players to call with their credit card number.
2. It is the team rep's job to set up a folder for each player and post the player's personal information (address, DOB, phone, e-mail) and a picture of the player. The team reps who don't do this are the reason why the lines at the office are so long. Therefore, if you show up and your team rep has not done this, there is an extra $10 fee for the staff to do your team rep's job and complete your folder. In the alternative, you can leave and contact your team rep to get the job done and save you $10.
3. Player passcards will be held in your team folder at the office for pickup by the team representative. The pickup date will be Sunday, September 1 from 6 to 8 pm.  This is NOT a player registration session, it is only to pick up your team’s passcards and avoid standing in line.
4. If you have a coach who is not a player, the coach must have a coach passcard issued by the office with the coach’s picture and name. If a person claims to the referee that he or she is the coach and has not provided the referee with the league-issued passcard, the person will be considered a fan and any incident will be dealt with under the league rules for fan misconduct.
5. Most games are on Sunday. We will play 9 in the fall and 8 in the spring. We will NOT reschedule your first game unless you have a minimum of 11 players registered, which means paid for. This avoids people simply looking for a one week break to do their job. If you elect to forfeit your first game because you didn’t complete player registration, there is a $100 fine.
6. At the possible risk of stating the obvious, the Wednesday coed league is on Wednesdays. We’ll schedule 8 games in the fall and 8 games in the spring for those competitions.
7. Refund information is in a separate link on the right.
8. If you have a schedule request, we need it by August 10 and you need to read the article on Schedule Requests on the right. We do not do anything about it when you send it to us after we’ve published a schedule with 140 teams. If you are asking us to coordinate your schedule with another team, we want the names of the players involved in both teams. If it is one player, we aren’t coordinating the schedules. That’s why it takes ten days to get the schedule done.
9. Teams who request their games on city fields will pay a team fee to cover the costs of field prep and toilets.  There's no reason why the teams at the complex should pay for that. We will also no longer pay someone to deliver and pickup nets and will instead assign a team each week to come to the office and pick up nets and take to the first game and a team to pick up nets after the last game and return them to the office.
10. A player may play on one men’s teams, one women’s team, and one coed team in the fall and spring Sunday competitions. A player may NOT play on two or more men’s teams, two or more women’s teams, or two or more coed teams.
11. A player must be 16 years old or older on the date of player registration. There is no shortage of youth soccer leagues around town.
12. Player passcards are not interchangeable. Each player must have a passcard with their name, picture and date of birth on it. If you get caught using someone else’s passcard, everyone involved will get suspended from the league for a year. Last year, we suspended several people because they got caught.
13. Players who owe the league fines from previous seasons and have not completely served game suspensions must do so prior to playing. There is a complete list of such player posted through summer 2019 on the front page of the website in the section on the left titled Unpaid Player Fines….
14. If you have a sponsor paying your registration, please let us know. Otherwise, you pay when you register or you don’t register
15. Every fall and spring competition requires numbered uniform shirts. That means professionally applied numbers, and each number must be different, and all the uniforms need to be the same color. The referee will not allow players to wear duplicate numbers and will not allow taped on or magic marker numbers. If the referee does and we find out, then the referee doesn’t get paid for doing the game. This tends to make the referee see things our way. Numbered tee shirts are just fine. You don’t need to break the bank buying Spain replica jerseys. If you want to know where you find uniforms for a reasonable price, e-mail us.

If your team rep cannot find someone to handle the player registration, you can do a manual process whereby you pay the office staff $50 (in advance) and they will collect your player’s pictures and personal information and enter it in the computer. This gets you one meeting with your players to take their pictures and obtain their names, address, phone, date of birth. Since your players can manage to get together for a game, they can get together for pictures once. Because they’re doing this on their own time rather than office hours, you get to pay them for assuming your burden. Call the office or e-mail to aslsoccerstaff@gmail to make arrangements. Once we have a player’s picture and personal information loaded, they don’t have to do this again.

Office Hours

Office hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 5:30 p.m. to 6:30. p.m. on Thursday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday. Please note that the office is staffed on Thursday evening by League officers on a volunteer basis. If the office is not going to be open Thursday evenings because we’re out of people, we will try to get word on the telephone message. The League phone number is 346-0831 and the league e-mail address is aslsoc@swcp.com for Mike or aslsoccerstaff@gmail for the office staff.