The FIFA Laws of the Game aren’t THAT complex. A little vague here and there maybe - but they fit into a nice pocket sized pamphlet! But sometimes people think soccer is the most complex and confusing game, especially in the United States.

My kids were watching a movie recently (Soccer Dog [IMDb] [Amazon]) which was obviously a low budget attempt to replicate Air Bud’s ([IMDb] [Amazon]) success. Needless to say, like most of the ‘dog plays a sport’ movies (including those from Disney) it’s not Oscar material. But there was one scene that was hilarious. When one of the team’s players gets sick (poisoned by the Mafia boss’ goalie son - don’t ask), the coach has nobody to sub in except the dog of one of the players. So he asks the ref if its allowed and the ref yells ‘Rule Check!’ Out comes this surly old lady wearing all black carrying this HUGE ancient looking book with gold edged pages that had to be a foot tall with microscopic print. And she scans it page by page. Too funny.

Of course, bad as the movie was - it was funny seeing their exaggerated look at the crazy coaches and officials we’ve all run into from time to time.

Just letting everyone know I’ve boosted the font sizes a bit.  They were really small on some systems and made the site hard to read. So I’ve boosted the font sizes up a bit without, hopefully, making things too big for the layout. Let me know what you think.

Since our league formed, we’ve been playing on pitches laid out in the outfields of our local ball fields. Our town has 4 beautiful ballfields plus an older field we sometimes use when field space gets tight. We’ve got 10 fields of various sizes spread out across the outfields and our Rec Department does a great job keeping the fields in good shape since we beat on them pretty hard in late Fall and early Spring when the Bermuda grass is brown.

In 2004, our City Council approached us about building a new soccer complex. They had some funding available and recognized that soccer was growing quickly in our small town. We were floored since our league was only just over 3 years old. However for a league that started out with 200 players in the first season, we now expect almost 600 players in our Spring 2006 season. The council saw the growth in our league and realized how popular soccer was with our kids. They felt they could spend approximately $1 million on a new complex and asked for our thoughts. Needless to say, once we picked our jaws up off the ground, we had a lot!

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I’m a n00b when it comes to coaching youth soccer as I’ve only been doing it for about 5 years now. Having not had an extensive soccer background as a kid, I’m learning a lot! Most of that learning has to do with the game itself and drills for the kids, etc. But then there are the other, not so glamorous things about being a soccer coach (and no I’m not talking about the parents The one item in the job description nobody tells you about is pack mule.

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