May 16

The summer season mandatory meeting is Tuesday, May 22, at 7 pm at the Uptown Sheraton at Menaul and Louisiana.  If your team is not represented, it’s a $50 fine.  There is no makeup session.

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.

A substantial amount of the day was cancelled.  All games starting at 11 at the complex in Bernalillo and the games for the remainder of the day were cancelled.  The games at Pius and ADO were cancelled beginning at 11 as well.  Hence, 75% of the day was shot.

We have neither the fields nor the referees to make up an entire days worth of cancellations.  Every weekend in November after the fall season ends, in February before the spring season begins, and in May after the spring season ends, is absorbed by youth soccer tournaments.  The complex in Bernalillo is filled up each of those weekends, which takes the majority of the referee population with them.  I reserve Arroyo del Oso and Pius to play makeup games for one weekend after the end of the fall season and after the spring season.  That’s why we tell you when you ask to reschedule a game that your team needs to be prepared to play on the Sunday after the end of the regular schedule.  That’s it for fields.  After we complete the makeup games this Sunday, the city will remove the goals from Arroyo del Oso and Pius and begin much needed maintenance work on both.  They advise they will do the same at Bullhead.  That’s why I am on my ongoing search for usable “non complex” fields for summer weeknight soccer play.  Bullhead, ADO and Pius are not available for the summer and no teams want to use the well-maintaned fields at the complex and play under the lights because it’s a loing drive and it costs more money.

We have a policy posted on the web site in the Team Rep Notebook that if a day or substantial part of a day is cancelled, the games not played will not be made up because we don’t have the resources to do.  We then remove any games that did get played from the standings.  That’s what has happened here.  Rescheduling a handful of games across the entire season is one thing, attempting to find places for those games and 77 others is simply impossible.  All the games that did get completed on March 18 have been removed from the standings.

Just for further information, the goals at the complex are the original goals we started with when we opened the complex in the mid 1990s.  They cost about $3,000 a set.  They wear out and, frankly, all of them need to be replaced.  That would cost about $50,000.  Fortunately, the complex manager is a certified aluminum welder.  Unfortunately, he is not a certified magician.  Eventually there’s nothing left to weld.  We’re currently talking with a couple of local operations to see if we couldn’t have new goals fabricated here, which would save about $300 a set in trucking costs to get them from Jaypro or Kwik Goal and possibly save more on production costs.  We’re also looking at new nets with a wider weave to reduce the wind drag on them.  The $45 nets we sell for summer coed don’t work here.  The nets are about $200 a set for those goals.  So the money we didn’t spend on referees on March 18 will be spent on our share of getting the new goals moving along and fortunately we have the summer to get things in order.  There is no sugar daddy for money at the complex.  It’s essentially owned by the various soccer operations such as ASL, Duke City Soccer League and NMYSA.  That’s good in that we can make our decisions to how it’s used.  It’s bad when we have to spend a bunch of money.  One can reasonably assume this is one of those bad times and we’re trying to minimize the bad part.

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.

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.