Sometimes you know Murphy just has it in for you.  All of our championship matches are scheduled for tomorrow and what pops up on our weather bug?

Special Weather Statement Statement as of 1:44 PM EDT on April 29, 2005

… Risk of severe thunderstorms Saturday afternoon across sections of central North Carolina…

Low pressure will move northeast into the Ohio Valley by Saturday with a trailing cold front that will move across central North Carolina Saturday afternoon. The airmass over central North Carolina is expected to become unstable during the afternoon. The combination of the approaching cold front and the unstable airmass will support the development of scattered thunderstorms.

The wind profile suggest the potential for damaging straightline winds with the stronger storms. The storms may also produce hail. Finally… torrential downpours and frequent cloud-to-ground lightning strikes can also be expected with the storms.

The threat for severe storms appears to be greatest between 1 PM and 7 PM. The risk of severe storms exist across the entire area but more so along and east of Highway 1.

If you have plans to be outdoors… keep a close eye on the sky and move quickly into a sturdy shelter when a thunderstorm approaches. Stay tuned to NOAA Weather Radio and other local media for further details or updates.

Hail, frequent lightning, strong winds - all that’s missing is locusts!  Oh and guess when our matches are scheduled for tomorrow - you guessed it - 1PM through 7PM.  Oh joy!

Last summer when I was doing my usual preseason SoccerSys updates and adding new features, I was curious how registrations were going.  We have almost 3/4 of our players register online while the rest use paper forms which we enter into the system manually. So I threw together a script to display realtime registration statistics from the database. It really helps with planning since the division coordinators can see how many players are going to be in each division.  Its not perfect (note the New column is all zeros - happens when the new kids get assigned to teams), but it does give a nice snapshot of registrations as they are coming in.  But to make it really cool, I think I’m going to experiment with one of the many PHP graphing packages out there so I can generate some charts showing the registration stats.  That would be too cool.  I wonder what other stats I should track for registrations.

When it comes to collecting money, thankfully we only have about 550 players in our league.  But that’s still a lot of players to collect from! I just got done counting the money turned in by my division’s coaches.  And there are still a few coaches we’ll have to track down with ‘Vinny’ to collect from.  I can’t imagine how larger leagues do it.  Actually I can - credit cards.

Now that we’re on our way to incorporating, I’ve often given thought to adding some type of payment collection system to SoccerSys.  That way parents could pay when they register.  Since almost 3/4 of our parents register online - it sure would make things easy.  But taking credit cards online is involved - I’ve done it before.  There are services out there that will collect the money for you - for a fee of course. Paypal probably would be easy to setup and use, but the trick is what type of fee we’d have to pay as a non-profit.  Need to look into that.

Since Fall 2005 Registration starts in like days, I won’t have time to do it for this upcoming season, but definitely something to consider!

So our championships are tomorrow and the weather doesn’t look that promising. But we really don’t want to postpone given how far into baseball season we are. Well, on our league officers mailing list, our ref coordinator posted this:

Here’s the way I plan to handle the situation. Of course, lightning and cancellation by the directors outweigh anything else. Aside from that, unless a jokulhaups completely washes away the refreshments booth, I plan to run the games.

Um, ok. What exactly is that? Well after most of the officers replied asking him what it meant, he replied:

A fjord & a glacier & hot water to melt the glacier = 1 big flood with rapids and mass destruction, a.k.a. "jokulhaups"

Heh - that makes it crystal clear!  So feel free to use the new word of the day when you email your coaches about a potential gully washer!

Our annual meeting is approaching and we’re looking at the various agenda items that have come up. Beyond the fairly large changes related to possible NCYSA affiliation, one item is requiring mouth guards for our U8 players and above. Most of our kids don’t wear them - a few do. Seems at the U8 level where most kids are getting their adult front teeth, etc - it’s very important.

What do other leagues do? My bouncing around association websites doesn’t seem to point to a consensus. I’m sure US Soccer and the like weigh in on it. Sigh - more research to do!. Just was curious if other groups had any trouble implementing a mouth guard rule or if they even have one.

Normally after our season ends, the coach of each champion team orders trophies for their kids that the local Recreation Department subsidizes. This year, since we’re doing a full blown tournament, we figured it would be nice to have the trophies there on game day so the kids could see them and we could hand them out after each championship game. So I was tasked with getting some nice trophies. Talk about a recipe for disaster! » Read the rest of this post…

Since our league began, we’ve always had the #1 and #2 teams in U8 and higher play in a championship game at the end of each season. The kids really enjoyed it and it gave them something to work towards at the end of the season. But as our league grew, our divisions became more competitive and sometimes it was clear that teams landing at #3 or lower in the standing were peaking and would have given the top two a serious run.

Well, this season the league officers decided to try something new. We decided to hold a single elimination tournament for each age division that keeps score (U8 and up). This gives even the last place teams a shot at the title. None of us really knew how it would turn out - would the top two teams make it for the most part? Would the kids handle the added pressure?

Well we just finished up our semifinal round and all I can say is WOW. What a great day of soccer for our young league! » Read the rest of this post…

I’m drafting up our league’s initial Articles of Incorporation and North Carolina requires that a corporation have a clause about dissolution. Most basically state the last remaining board member can dissolve the corporation, etc.

But you also have to specify how the corporate assets will be handled. I understand completely why such a clause is needed. It just struck me as funny trying to figure out who should get any remaining assets should the league fail. Of course if it failed one would assume there would be no assets left, but…

So it just got me thinking what the right thing to put in would be. I’m going to have to look at some other league’s articles (our state has them in PDF online) for some ideas. I guess in our case it could be donated to our Recreation Department, the state soccer association, charity. But still - have to pick one!

When the MYSA first started out - the coaches just wanted to play soccer. I remember the first time I proposed a set of bylaws. People’s eye’s glazed over

When we first started out, we used rules from a nearby city as the basis for our Laws of the Game. Well, those rules were anything but Small Side. We also had trouble finding coaches at first, so we actually played 6v6 in U6 one season because we had so many kids and not enough coaches. Note to self - trying to keep 12 kids focused on any type of practice is next to impossible without 3 or 4 assistants!

Well, now that the league is growing and we’re trying to get affiliated with our state organization, we’ve got all sorts of catching up to do. One thing that’s clear is our rules are WAY out of whack with the state and national rules and we’ll have to address that before we can affiliate. » Read the rest of this post…

You know the Internet is a dangerous thing! Give any idiot a computer and they’ll start spouting off like an expert on all sorts of subjects! Hopefully I won’t come off that way! If I do, I’m sure the dozen or so readers I may attract will tell me so

Well I guess an intro is in order. I’ve been a soccer dad for about 4 years. About the time my oldest son was old enough to play soccer, some local parents in the area, tired of being told there wasn’t enough demand for a city league, decided to put together a small mini-camp for area youth interested in soccer in the Fall of 2001. We signed our oldest son up and along with about 15 other children, they practiced, played scrimmages, and had a really good time. The two coaches who put it all together did an excellent job.

While there were leagues 30 mins or so away from our town, the parents weren’t satisfied with that being the only option. So a handful of parents decided to put together a soccer league in the Spring of 2002. Well over a hundred children signed up to play in U6, U8, and U10 divisions. My son played U6 for the coaches who originally ran the mini-camp and had a really good time. We played out behind one of the local elementary schools while the older children used the outfields of our city ballfields, with the blessing of our Recreation Department. Since I had a web background, I offered to help the league communicate with the parents online, and thus mebanesoccer.us was born. » Read the rest of this post…