I just wanted to follow up on two quick items:

1. JV/Varsity Playoffs.  Today is the last day to get your JV/Varsity Soccer matches played and uploaded.  Immediately following your game please upload the scores.  Several playoff matches will be determined by today’s games so I can’t do anything until those results are uploaded.  If I get all of the results in this evening I will try to get you all out the Playoff Schedule by the end of the day tomorrow.  If I don’t receive them all this evening that timeline will be set back.

2. Developmental Tournament – Thank you everyone for coming out yesterday for our end of season developmental and all girls tournaments.  We had a record number of teams register for the fall and thanks to a lot of great volunteers we were able to get all of the games relatively on schedule.  It was great to see so many kids out there having fun and playing soccer on what ended up being a surprisingly dry day.  A few things to follow up with you on tournament-wise:

• Let me know your thoughts on how the day went, what worked well and what could use a little more refinement.  Each season we get this a little more fine tuned but there is always room for improvement.  I’m particularly curious about your thoughts on the venue and the new 7v7 format for the 3rd and 4th grade teams since both were new to this season’s tournament.

• If we decide to use this venue again there are a couple items we as a league will need to improve upon:

• • Parking  I would have thought it went without saying, but we cannot allow our parents to triple park people in.  We had 7 or 8 families stuck for a few hours because some people couldn’t be bothered to not park them in.  I personally went and checked out the situation, and while the lot was very full I did see many spaces open farther away in the lot.  Please be mindful of this next time.  If it happens again the venue will make us hire staff to park cars and that cost will increase tournament registration fees across the league;
  • Post game clean up.  We were allowed to set up our tents and watch the games from the turf.  This is the same turf that other teams have their games and practices on throughout the week.  While cleaning up post tournament it quickly became apparent that numerous tents left uneaten chips, cookies, sunflower seeds, and other garbage on the turf (and as a reminder, sunflower seeds were not permitted at all).  This resulted in me and my son personally spending an extra hour or so on the fields on our hands and knees picking them– needless to say, my day started early and I was on the road at 5am to set up– ending the day by picking up peoples leftover garbage, sunflower seeds and crumbs is not how I expected to end it.  I am left with one of four options:
    • (1) Ask (and receive) everyone’s cooperation in the future to not allow this to occur again,
    • (2) not book large turf venues like this in the future,
    • (3) forbid the use of team tents and forbid spectators from being on the turf,
    • (4) increase registration fees to hire someone to come in and clean up after us.  My preference is to go with option 1 and ask that for future tournaments each school be responsible for making sure that every bit of food is off the fields near and around them.  If that doesn’t work out though I’d need to resort to one of the other three options.

That was it on my end, overall the day went great and if we can do a little better on the above issues, I think we will be in great shape going forward.