February 2

We’ve posted the updated schedule for the APS complex as of 2 pm today.  Still spots available for this Sunday afternoon.

We’re back to 10 to 2 office hours and will start Thursday hours again In February.

We’re reservng the APS complex for practice sessions starting this Sunday, February 5 and Sunday, February 12.  The schedule of available and taken slots is posted on the left, the detailed story on the right.  Heated bathrooms and don’t have to worry about six youth teams being on your field when you show up.

We’re working on the spring schedule and plan to have it finished and posted by next weekend.  We’ll play some makeup games starting on February 26 and the additional game for the Coed B teams who didn’t get 9 games in the fall.  The full spring schedule kicks off March 4.  For the weeknight coed division at the complex, we’re hoping for a start date of March 21 if the weather is warm enough, otherwise we’ll push out a week to March 28.  The spring registration fee for ASL is $60 for players who played in the fall and $70 for new players.

Office hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday. During the playing season we’re open on Thursdays 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.  We are not open on Friday, regardless of what "they" told you. The office is at 1820 San Pedro NE, Suite 6. You can bring gifts and the staff will be very grateful. Please don’t bring them firearms or distilled spirits as league management often meets with them later in the day when their stress level is increased.

In the fall and spring, where we play at three locations, if it rains, we e-mail everyone, update the web site and post notice on the rainout phone at 341-5015.  The first update of the day will be posted at 7 a.m.  Please listen to the message, as it will tell you whether you need to call back during the day for updates.  The phone will handle 500 callers at a time, so you won’t get a busy signal.

a) she is in an offside position (closer to the goal than the second to last defender) WHEN

b) her teammate kicks the ball forward, AND SHE THEN

c) gets involved in the play (by receiving the ball or moving toward the ball or otherwise involving herself in play in the judgement of the refs).

Note: What’s important is where she is when the ball is kicked. Not where she is when she receives the ball, or where she is when the rest of the players notice her. This call is the responsibility of the Assistant Referee (also knows as Linesperson), who stays with the offside line. The offside line is defined as the second to last defender or the ball, whichever is closer to the defensive goal.

AR’s are instructed to wait to make the call until the player actually gets involved in the play, so they don’t call someone "off" who doesn’t get involved. This can result in what seem like late offside calls. We know you don’t like running for nothing, but we also know you would not like us to make a wrong offside call.

By the way, there is only one "s" in OFFSIDE.

According to weather.com, next Sunday it is supposed to be a high temperature of 49 degrees and sunny.  I fully acknowledge that anything other than that is my fault.  Also, next Sunday, Feb 5, is Super Bowl Sunday.  The kickoff is at 4:30 p.m. Albuquerque time.  The pregame show probably started on Sunday January 29.  As I want to see the game, and I'll be the ASL babysitter at the complex, we'll finish this Sunday at 3 p.m. so I can go home and you can too.  Hence, for Feb 5, we'll offer 90 minute time slots at these times:

9:00 a.m.

10:30 a.m.

12:00 p.m.

1:30 p.m.

On February 12, we'll add a 3:00 p.m. time slot. 

There are four fields and they are artificial turf.  You don't need to tell me on the Facebook page that you refuse to play on artificial turf as it will shorten your lucrative ASL soccer career.  I'll figure out you don't want to play on artificial turf via the elimination process when you don't schedule a time period.  I would also note that it has nice heated bathrooms.

You arrange your own opponent or you can ask us to post you on the web site looking for an opponent.  We'll post a schedule of what's committed and what's still available on the web site. Your opponent needs to be an ASL or AWSL team.  This isn't for the benefit of the other profit making soccer enterprises around town.

The weather is real nice while I'm typing this, so you can go outside and start doing laps and pushups to get ready.  Call the office or e-mail me at aslsoc@swcp.com aslsoc@swcp.comto reserve your spot.

Mike

1. Head to head competition.  Hence, for example, our standings following the October 16 games show in Women's First Division that Defiance and Oldies have the same number of points at 15.  However, in their game on September 11, Oldies beat Defiance, so based on that result, Oldies will show ahead of Definance.  At least until they play a second game and we'll see how the Cray Supercomputer at the ASL office handles that if Defiance wins the rematch.

2. Goal differential.  

3. Goals allowed

4. Value of gifts delivered to the office staff.

And yes, we realize that in the really good soccer leagues the tiebreaker is whatever measurement puts your team ahead.

Update on entering game results in your team folder – 9 30 11

OK, time to unveil another feature of your handy dandy team folder and web based registration system.  I’ve just finished entering the game statistics from referee reports for the games on September 11.  So let’s have a few background items first.

The official game results are obtained from the referee reports.  The referee has seven days to submit the game report.  If the referee does not submit the game report in that time, the center referee, who is responsible for the game report, does not get paid.  The ARs do get paid.  Hence, if you are an AR you should keep track of your games for reasons I’m going to explain.  The referee reports are submitted to Bill Albert, who records the referees and games and enters them into the payroll database.  Bill then sends the reports on to me.  Hence, there is up to a 14 day difference between game day and “reports in Mike’s hands” day, which is a national holiday in many countries.  But not here.

Mike then sorts the game reports by division (this also is important for future reference), and records them in a spreadsheet titled Game Reports Received.  Pretty clever, eh?  When the game report is received, I blank that cell on the excel sheet that is identical to the schedule file in the Fall 2011 schedules folder.  Hence, if your game no longer displays, that means we received the game report.  Mike posts that spreadsheet on the web site in the folder titled Referee Information.  It’s in PDF on one page so you can zoom in and look at it.  If you can read it without zooming in, see your doctor immediately.  The main purpose of this is so referees know their game report was received.  If a person is an AR, this is also how the AR knows that a game on which he or she was an AR has been reported. It also will let the team know we got it and that we’ve entered or checked your entry of your game stats. 

As an interesting further side issue, Mike does the game reports in this order:  Premier, First, Second, Third, Coed A, B, C and D.  This means, for example, that the statistics for Club A-1 may be posted more quickly (and we’re talking hours) than DNR.  Apparently, judging from my e-mail, this practice results in lowered self esteem for at least one person who was offended that other teams had their goals in and his team didn’t.  In case you wonder why I may not seem to be in a good mood when I’m at the office, e-mail like this contributes in no small part.  Hence, every other week I will reverse the order, which nonetheless will result in Men’s Third and Coed A being most qualified for a class action lawsuit for my ill treatment of them always being in the middle.

So let’s move along.  Each Sunday I send out an e-mail asking for your scores and enter those in the system.  In week one, 12 of the scores I got were wrong. Who won was correct, by how much they won was not.  I corrected them from the referee reports, which is not really news, as I note often that we play three games in each time slot, one recorded by the referee and one recorded by each of the teams.  So I enter the score in your spot and it shows up in the overall scores element and in your team folder. It also determines how many goals you can record based on that score.

I’ve flipped the switch on that will allow you to click on the score in your team folder (not the scores in the Score folder) and you can enter some game statistics for your team only. 

So, for example, on September 18, The Hooligans and Legion played and the score may have been 4-3  in favor of legion.  At least that’s what I entered.  Ricardo from Legion can log in to his team page, scroll down to the scores at the bottom, click the 4-3 score and it will open up a game statistics menu.  Ricardo can click the green link titled Edit Legion Match stats and it will open a page with various stats that can be completed, such as who participated in the game, what the weather was, who the MVP was (whoever’s mom brought the oranges) the honorable mention MVP (whoever’s mom brought the vodka) and in this case will offer 4 drop down menus to record who scored the 4 goals and at what minute.  Each menu will offer a list of all the players on your team.  Ricardo can enter as many of those items as he wants and save it and it will display on his team folder.  For September 11, I’ve entered all that information for your teams with the exception of about 4 game reports I have not yet received. If your team scored no goals and had no misconduct, there isn’t anything there, at the risk of stating the obvious.

It does not let you enter yellow and red cards.  We do that from the game reports.  That keeps you from “unentering” them.   We will also check the game reports against your version in case the person entering the goals conveniently had a memory lapse and scored all of them him or herself.  If you wish to enter assists, that’s up to you.  They don’t count in the goal scoring competition. You can also enter a game recap, noting individuals who hogged the ball or made everyone look bad by showing up early.

So that’s the ASL feature of the week, brought to you by…..well, by me I guess. 

Update September 27

Several item s to be aware of now that we’re 1/3 done with the season on Sunday and half done for Wednesday nights.

Registration fees drop $20 for Sunday play after the 5^th week of the season.    In calendar terms, that means anyone who registers starting on October 10.  No, you don’t get to negotiate any early Christmas fees on Saturday, October 8.

The entry form and information for the 2011 NMSSA Fall Classic soccer tournament is posted at this site

http://www.nmssa.com/?q=fallclassic

The tournament features men’s, women’s and coed divisions and is played at the soccer complex in Bernalillo the weekend of November 19 and 20.

We’ve posted on the web site information on winter soccer possibilities.  Last February we began renting the APS soccer complex for preseason practices so people could come give it a try and got a pretty good response.  We offered a winter league, but probably got things together too late to beat the competition.  This time round, we’re looking at an 8 game season starting January 8.  Given weather and sunshine, we can probably count on playing 3 games per field per day, which allows up to 24 teams on a Sunday and we can offer Saturday play as well.   We tried summer play and the bathrooms got much better reviews than the hot field surface, so for summer play we’ll move back to real grass.  For winter play, it works fine and can help keep you in tip top condition and help you work off those extra nuts, roots and berries you stored in your cheeks over Christmas prior to hibernating.  We’ll offer divisions that are based on the response we get, be it men’s divisions or coed, so check with your teammates to see what interest you have.  You can combine teams or start from scratch, it’s your choice.

We’ve run a classified ad in the UNM Lobo that last three weeks that generated enough business to more than pay for itself (about $120 every ten days).  I’ve still got about 15 male players looking for men’s or coed teams and a bunch of couples looking for coed.  I DON’T have a couple hundred extra women for coed teams or 16 goalkeepers to satisfy those requests.  If you need male players, let us know and we can forward the contact info on.  That does not obligate you to register them, as not everyone is going to be a perfect fit either skill or people-wise.  If you’ve got ideas on other places we could strategically place ads of flyers, forward your suggestions on to us at aslsoc@swcp.com

One other tidbit of information as someone asked what you get for winning your division.  The first and second place teams get team trophies and the first place teams get t shirts and a $400 gift certificate for soccer equipment at House of Soccer.  If we have a tie in the standings, we give duplicate awards, regardless of what the goal differential is or what they do in Europe.  For the leading scorer in each division (and male and female for coed) we give gift certificates for $50 and for the top defensive player on the team with the lowest goals against average in each division we also give either a team award or a $50 gift certificate to the player nominated by the team.  Yes, we realize that in most leagues every player also gets a free car and 7 days and nights in the Bahamas,  Last year we started playoffs for the men’s first, second and third divisions because not all the teams played each other.  For the playoffs, which are held under the lights at the complex, the winning team gets a trophy.  

We’re going to start a running article with updates in a space on the right hand side of the web page.  As people notice that their scores aren’t getting posted, they then find out that the reason for that is that their team rep doesn’t respond to our weekly e-mails, which has led to curiosity about what else they aren’t finding out.  Hence, we’ll start posting a running narrative with these updates for the benefit of those who don’t get the information from their team rep.

And the good news is that the office remodeling is almost complete now that we’ve finished the decorative stacking of the toilet paper in the bathroom.  Once we get cable trays to hide all of that it should begin to look quite a bit better.

Mike

Soccer by Ives:

 www.soccerbyives.net/

The Soccer Insider, Steve Goff from the Washington Post

 blog.washingtonpost.com/soccerinsider/

Several bloggers on the Sports Illustrated/CNN website, good stuff both US and International:

sportsillustrated.cnn.com/soccer/

The Sports Law blog and the Sports Economist blogs both offer soccer issues as well as other sports and are good reading on the business side of the game:

www.thesportseconomist.com/

sports-law.blogspot.com/

ESPN offers a twice weekly 60 minute podcast that is heavily European in the first 30 minutes and the rest of us the last 30.  You can get it here:

soccernet.espn.go.com/feature

And start with other ESPN soccer news and blogs here, which is the international page from which you can refine your search:

soccernet.espn.go.com/index

If you’ve got some you’d like to bring to people’s attention, let us know and we’ll add them in.