Who and What We Are - Fall and Spring Edition

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:

In order to accommodate online payment, we have to break the team and player registration into a fall season (this one) and a spring season. 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.
The cost for the fall 2018 season is $75. The online payment system only allows us to have one payment amount, so we have set it at $75.
The first game is on September 9. The last day to register for the first game is Thursday, September 6. The online payment system will be closed from 5 pm on Friday, August 24 to Monday, September 10 The reason for this is that we can’t handle the long line of people standing at the office and online payments from people who expect their passcard to be delivered to the first game when they pay at 8 am on the morning of the first game. If you did not pay online by the time the system closes on August 24, you need to pay in person at the office until Monday, September 10.
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 fall season:

Submit your team application. If you’re an existing team from spring 2018 or summer 2018, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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 10. 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.

First games for Sunday play – September 9
Team passcard packages, meaning the little envelope with all of your team’s passcards, will be distributed on Thursday, August 30, from 6:30 pm to 9 pm at the ASL office. After that date, all passcards will be returned to the players as they register.
The last day to use the online payment system the first game is 5 pm on August 24. All payments after that time and the last registration session on September 6 will need to be made in person at the office.
Last day to register players for the September 10 game for all divisions is Thursday, September 6. The office will not be open on either Friday, September 7 or Saturday September 8. Player registration begins again on Monday, September 10.
Last day to transfer between teams for the fall season is October 6.

Three Important Steps to Register a Player

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.
Sign the Liability waiver. Information is on the right and the link is on the front page of the web site.
Pay your player registration fee. Details are on the right.

Extremely Important Information You Should Know

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.
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.
Player passcards will be held in your team folder at the office for pickup by the team representative. The pickup date will be Thursday, August 30 between 6:30 and 9 pm. This is NOT a player registration session, it is only to pick up your team’s passcards and avoid standing in line.
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.
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 15 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.
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.
Refund information is in a separate link on the right.
If you have a schedule request, we need it by August 10. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 2018 on the front page of the website in the section on the left titled Unpaid Player Fines….
If you have a sponsor paying your registration, please let us know. Otherwise, you pay when you register or you don’t register
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.

Who and What We Are - Summer Edition - April 19 2018

Who and What We Are – Summer Edition - April 8 2018

During the summer we offer coed soccer on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, women’s over-30 soccer on Thursday evenings, men’s 7 v 7 over-30 soccer on Friday, and men’s and women’s open competition and women’s over-40 on Sundays. We offer a small coed division on Sundays that plays during the day, not after work like the weekday coed. However, because we're using city parks and a lot are no longer usable, we'll probably only have space for one or two fields of play.

To play coed and men’s and women’s open, a player must be at 16 years old on the date on which they register. This is not a youth soccer league. For Over-30 and Over-40 competitions, the player must have reached their 30^thor 40^th birthday on the date they register.

We have made several substantive changes to make your life easier:

1. The situation with city and APS fields is simply no longer working both from a safety perspective and availability of fields. We’ve worked out arrangements with the soccer complex in Santa Ana to play weeknight coed games there and will not need the additional expense of turning on the lights. Hence, you also don’t need to buy or bring a net or flags to your game.

2. Tuesday coed games will all now be played on Tuesday. We will no longer move games back to Sunday.

3. It will cost $10 more for coed.

4. We will only assign a center referee for the summer coed games.

5. We will offer men’s 7 v 7 Over 30 play on Friday nights on one city field. We will offer women’s 7 v 7 Over 30 play on Thursday nights on one city field. Because we’re using smaller field dimensions, we can fit three fields on one city park and accommodate 12 teams each night.

6. We’ll try offering women’s 7 v 7 at the same location on Sunday afternoons. Whether we actually make it happen depends on teams singing up.

7. We’ll try offering a men’s Over 50 competition after the women’s Over 40 games on Sunday morning. The league will divvy up players into teams to avoid problems we’ve had with this division in the past.

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

Submit your team application. If you’re an existing team from spring 2018 or summer 2017, 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 team application fee for summer soccer. All player fees will be submitted either through the online payment system or in person at the office.
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.
Do not pay for another player's registration fee. If they do not pay you back, that is an issue between the two of you. We only do refunds to the person whose name is on the passcard.
We have space for 20 coed teams on each of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. When it’s full, that’s it. You hit the waiting list in hopes that someone drops out.
We are not separating teams out for upper and lower competition levels in coed soccer in the team application process. Based on your track record as an existing ASL coed team, we will group the good teams together and the teams who still have potential to be good together. If your team is new, we will request a roster of your players and their experience when you submit your team application. As a bit of advice, the more you try to sell us on how bad your team is, the les persuasive your story get.
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 left titled How to Pay.
Please direct your new players to complete their annual Online Liability Waiver. Players who registered in the fall 2017 or spring 2018 competitions do NOT need to complete the Online Liability Waiver again for summer play.

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 May 20. 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.

Start dates:

Women Over 30 – May 31
Men Over-30 – June 1
Men and Women Open, Women Over-40, Sunday coed – June 3
Monday Coed – June 4
Tuesday coed – June 5
Wednesday Coed – June 6

Three Important Steps to Register a Player

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 the link titled Creating Player Profiles
Sign the online liability waiver. The link is on the front page of the web site and is the first item under Headlines.
Pay your player registration fee. Everyone can go online and pay by credit or debit card. If you don’t have one, go to Smiths and Walgreens and get one and use it. You don’t need to come to the office.

Extremely Important Information You Should Know

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.
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.
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.
Refund information is in a separate link on the left.
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.
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.
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 Spring 2017.
If you have a sponsor paying your registration, please let us know. Otherwise, you pay when you register or you don’t register
Men’s and women’s open division require numbered uniform pursuant to the same rules of the fall and spring season. We do not require numbered uniforms for coed, over-30, or over-40.