Who and What We Are – Summer 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.

During the summer we offer coed soccer on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, women’s over-30 soccer on Thursday evenings, men’s 5 a side soccer on Thursdays, men’s over-30 soccer on Saturdays, and men’s and women’s open competition, women’s over-40 and women’s 3 v 3 on Sundays.

To play coed, men’s open and 5 a side, women’s open and women’s 3 v 3, 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^th or 40^th birthday on the date they register.

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

1. We have eliminated team application fees for all divisions.  This should eliminate confusion about the fact that the team application fee did not show up as a player registration fee for the player who submitted the team application fee.
2. If you played in the fall or spring season, your liability waiver is good for the fall, spring and summer seasons, so you do not need to resubmit that for the summer season. If you do, it doesn’t matter. If you did not play in the fall or spring season, all you need to do is to click the link titled “Click here to e sign the liability waiver…” under Headlines on the lower right corner of the web site and it’s take you right into it. Complete that and submit it and then….
3. We will be posting a list of players who played in the fall and spring season on the web site about May 7.  This will enable you to establish whether a player you aren’t sure about actually played in the fall and spring and qualifies for the lower registration fee.  If that doesn’t solve the problem, a player who pays as a current player rather than a new player will simply be suspended for the remainder of the summer when we catch them.
4. You need to pay and provide the info to your team rep to set up your player record so we can produce a passcard.

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

1. Submit your team application. If you’re an existing team from fall 2016 or spring 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. We have eliminated the application fee for the spring season so you won’t have to worry that we didn’t consider your application payment as your player fee. All player fees will be submitted either through the online payment system or in person at the office.
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. 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.
4. 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.
5. If you register for Tuesday coed, we move two games to Sunday evening to accommodate the monthly referee association meeting. Therefore, Tuesday games on June 13, move back to June 11 and Tuesday games on July 11 move to July 9.  If you send us an email letting us know your opponent has agreed to reschedule these two Sunday games to Tuesday at the end of the season, you'll get the cheery news that the game ins't being rescheduled and we'll book it as a forfeit for your opponent.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Please direct your new players to complete their annual Online Liability Waiver.
9. Coed and women's Over-30 teams need to bring a net to your game.  Most exisitng summer coed and over-30 teams still have their net balled up in the garage.  if your team needs a net, we buy them from Score American sports and sell them to you at the same $50 we pay for them and then the net is yours.  We also rent corenr flags for $5 each that you can use for the season.  If you return them with the flags intact, we return your $5 per flag.

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 – June 1
• Men Over-30 – June 3
• Men and Women Open, Women 3 v 3, Women Over-40 – June 4
• Monday Coed – June 5
• Tuesday coed – June 6
• Wednesday Coed – June 7
• Men’s 5 a Side – June 8

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 left
2. Sign the online liability waiver. This has changed, so please read the link on the left.
3. 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

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. 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.
4. Refund information is in a separate link on the left.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. If you have a sponsor paying your registration, please let us know. Otherwise, you pay when you register or you don’t register
9. 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, over-40, 5 a side, and 3 v 3 play.

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.