“What time will my son/daughter practice and play? ”
This information is difficult to ascertain for a few reasons, among them:
1) Other regions close their registration early in the summertime so that they know how many kids they will have and they can set their schedule.
2) We leave our registration open so that people can sign up all the way through the summer and even into the first couple weeks of the season. This allows new people to town to still sign up.
3) The downside of offering this flexibility is that we don’t know how many kids we will have until we get close to the season start.
4) The number of kids is important because it determines how many fields we need for each division.
If you email us asking what time your child will practice, you will not receive a response. This information is disseminated by the coaches near to the start of the season.
General guidelines on weekly practice/play are:
- U5, U6, and U7 play for an hour on Saturdays
- U8 and EPIC play for an hour and half on Saturdays
- U10 plays for two hours on Saturdays
- U12, U14, and U19 practice for an hour and half on Saturdays and play games against other Area towns on Sundays
Setting the Saturday schedule is a very complex project involving a number of factors:
1. Number of players and teams: We have ~800 kids on 50 teams in 16 divisions playing on Saturdays.
2. Available fields: The school district allows us to use fields at Grafflin, WO, Bell, 7B and the High School. Some fields like Grafflin are only suited for younger age groups. The large fields are required for the older ages.
3. Inter-sport conflicts: We coordinate with the other town sports organizations so kids may play multiple sports. For instance last spring 3rd and 4th grade girls’ Softball plays from 1:00 – 2:30 so we make sure that our U10G division plays at a different time (and allow for some travel time between fields). In the spring we have conflicts with baseball, softball and lacrosse.
4. Coaching Conflicts: Coaches often volunteer to coach multiple teams, for example their U10 son and their U7 daughter. We will make every effort to accommodate these parents who give even more of their time to coach multiple teams. Five of the U7G coaches and four of the U7B coaches have conflicts with coaching their kids in other divisions. So for the teams playing at Grafflin alone we have 9 coaching conflicts. Across all divisions we are accommodating 22 coaching conflicts.
More coaches would mean fewer conflicts and a bit more flexibility, although we are still limited by the number of fields and different dimensions required by the different age groups.
5. School functions: For homecoming we lose all the HS fields for the day. WO has a Fall Festival and a staff barbecue. Bell has the Children’s Book Festival and a Craft Fair. During varsity football games we aren’t permitted to use the HS fields. All the displaced teams have to play somewhere, all while avoiding the inter sport conflicts and the multiple-team-coaching conflicts.
6. Other: HS sports taking fields with little/no notice, poor field maintenance requiring relocations, goal size requirements, trainer schedules, etc.
We have 800 kids on 50 teams in 16 divisions with about 125 coaches playing on 5 school fields all on the same day. We start at 8am and go until 5:30pm. Some people hate the mornings, some have music lessons, there are bar/bat mitzvahs, birthday parties, communions, nap times and dozens of other things that conflict with soccer that we simply cannot control. Everyone’s idea of a “good” time is different. We spend hours setting the schedule and we do the best we can.