I knew England had a number of soccer leagues in a hierarchical structure where teams could be promoted and relegated between them. But I never knew it was made up of 24 levels, 140 leagues, 480 divisions, and over 7000 clubs.

If England can manage to promote and relegate teams within 24 levels, why can’t we figure it out with just five or so? (Yes I’m being rhetorical )

10 people were struck by lightning at a soccer match yesterday. Thankfully it looks like everyone will be OK, though some injuries were serious. The spectators unfortunately took shelter under a tree when the storm came through. I’ve had trees on my property take direct hits by lightning and they’ve had the bark plus large pieces of wood blown off them like the tree exploded from within. Scary stuff. Here’s a snippet on things to remember if you’re caught in a storm outside:

If caught in the open during a thunder and lightning storm and the hair on your head or neck begins to stand on end, go inside the nearest building immediately! If no shelter is available, crouch down immediately in the lowest possible spot and roll up in a ball with feet on the ground. Do not lie down!

If outdoors during a thunder and lightning storm, avoid water! Also avoid metal objects such as wires, fences, power tools, railroad tracks, etc. Unsafe places include: tents, golf carts, underneath trees. Avoid hilltops and open spaces. Where possible, find shelter in a building or in a fully enclosed metal vehicle, such as a car, with the windows shut.

Here’s hoping everyone makes a full recovery!

UPDATE: Here is a more in depth article about the recent spat of lightning strikes nationwide. 17 have been struck in the USA so far this month and seven have died. Be careful out there!

OK, while I wouldn’t advocate shooting a soccer ball into an open police van, some of the shots this guy makes are pretty impressive, even if a couple might be fake - others sure look legit. And it is pretty funny watching the bewildered police chase him down the street. Cleary Nike has a hand in it and these commercials of theirs usually are legit (think Rooney’s camera hit).

H/T dibbo

As leagues gear up for the Fall season, discussions are underway across the country on which teams will be placed into which brackets and which teams will play each other. Now a new discussion is taking place - how much will it cost to play those matches. A while back we talked about the impact of gas prices on youth sports and wondered if they really would have an effect. At least for our area, it has.

At last night’s meeting to discuss how our regional Challenge divisions would be organized, it was the clear preference of member leagues to help people save money on travel. In divisions where there were enough teams to make two or more groups, they would be organized by geography. Being on the eastern edge of our region, that means we’ll likely play teams in the eastern part of our region and not travel to the western side (which can be about 90 minutes max) Even if there was only one division, geography would be taken into account when matches were setup. In the Spring, the divisions/matchups will be based on the Fall results, which makes sense so you get competitive matches more often. But it’s nice to see the rising cost of gasoline being taken into account so quickly.

This is just a regional scheduling league, where maximum travel is 90 miles or less. Travel costs are even worse for our top level - Classic. Teams might travel 3+ hours to some away matches as there were only East and West divisions. Now there are more and more ‘Piedmont’ divisions, allowing teams from central North Carolina to stay local more often, instead of having to travel to the mountains (west) or the coast (east).

Are you all seeing this type of effect in your Fall brackets/divisions? How are your scheduling leagues/coordinators handling things? Are coaches/teams/leagues more willing to reduce travel, even if it means a less competitive schedule? Where do you draw the line?

Can’t resist posting. I really should, but I can’t.

Keep an eye out five years form now - you never know who might show up on the parent sideline!

For those of you who have children that participate on USYSA or US Club teams, it can be easy to forget there are other national soccer associations out there. The AYSO is a less competitive oriented program, but that doesn’t mean they are just grassroots and local. They’re holding their National Games in Hawaii this month, with teams chosen to participate by lottery:

The AYSO Games are held every other year, and for this tournament they incorporated a system where teams are chosen by lottery. They don’t need to qualify, which is why they don’t call the winners of the tournament “national champions.”

Following the philosophy of AYSO, which embraces participation and sportsmanship, the National Games also feature Soccerfest as part of the tournament’s festivities.

In Soccerfest which will be held today players in each division are mixed randomly to form teams and play against each other. While it is not mandatory to participate, playing in it is worth just as much as a win in pool play.

Almost 140 teams from the mainland are traveling to Hawaii for the games. Talk about the ultimate vacation excuse! Though a number of teams selected had to back out due to travel costs and local teams were recruited to take their place.

Still - a neat concept for a higher level event in an organization like the AYSO that focuses on equal playing time.

It’s so quiet. Is everyone enjoying their offseason? Mine was kind of short - optional practices are starting up in a week or so. It’s going to be HOT. But what are you all up to?

As the next season approaches, I wanted to reach out to you all and see what you’d like to see here at On The Pitch. Things you’d like me to write about, products you’d like reviewed, stuff like that. I’m working on some significant new features for the site that hopefully will make it more useful than just a place for me to spout off In the three years I’ve been writing about youth soccer, I’ve been amazed at how little online discussion is going on about it.

I’m also interacting a lot more via social networks, so if you ever want to chat with Soccer Dad or even just follow other conversations I’m having, you can find me at Plurk, Twitter, Pownce, and even Facebook (which I don’t use much). I use Plurk the most. My goal is to try and use social networks to build youth soccer conversations that may spill out on the blog here or the youth soccer forums.

As you probably noticed, I’ve made a few changes here at On The Pitch. For a long time I’ve wanted to make the front page more than just ‘the blog’. So the front page is now much easier to navigate. You can easily view the latest posts, popular posts, recent comments, and my favorite posts by simply clicking a tab below the latest entry’s excerpt. The site can now be navigated via a high level menu, and as I add new features, there will be new tabs added as well.

So let me know what you think. This is just a start. At some point I’ll move the site to a fresh theme that is wider. However I want to work on some of the new features first. My goal is to make On The Pitch a complete youth soccer resource over time.

Now that the popular posts section is live, you can have an impact on what is listed there. Simply rate the posts you read by clicking the yellow stars at the end. The system will dynamically update the popular list, which can be helpful for new visitors.

What do you think? What could I have done differently? All feedback is welcome!

UPDATE: Yes, the tabs look bad in Internet Explorer (v5.5 and v6 anyway). Fixed now. They look fine in Firefox, Safari (fixing IE broke Safari slightly), Konqueror, and Opera. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, you really should consider switching to Firefox 3. It’s faster, safer, and uses MUCH less memory.

UPDATE II: Yes - I know the ‘Latest Post/Comments’ tabs on the main page are still messed up in IE. Just need to make the changes to that like I did the main menu. But gotta bolt. Will work on it tonight.

My U11 Girls team had one last hurrah at the NC State Games last weekend, and you just knew there would be a few Tales From The Lunachick Fringe!

The NC State Games are a huge annual amatuer sporting event styled after the Olympics, including opening ceremonies. The youth soccer tournament is only one of dozens of events, but attracts teams from across the state. So we were excited to be going as our last event together as a U11 team. The girls did well, reaching the bronze medal match, but that’s not what this post is about! It’s about the fun that ensues when the Lunachicks play soccer!

» Read the rest of this post…

Baseball Mom has a great list “You Know You’re A Coach’s Wife When…” from the perspective of a baseball mom. A number of them could just as easily be for soccer wives!

8. People are paying you for trophies, tournaments, and parties.

9. You have a category in your email address book for team people, so you can send out practice reminders and game changes.

10. You know the website to look up tournaments in your area.

11. Your crock pot gets a workout during baseball season.

I know I really shouldn’t make an attempt at this since I’m, well, the coach and not the coach’s wife, but what’s life if you don’t live a little dangerously?

» Read the rest of this post…

One of my favorite quirky comics is Rhymes With Orange, and this recent strip about ‘Youth Soccer From Above’ is all too funny (and true)

If you want a good chuckle, check out this collection of rants against soccer and youth soccer from the National Review. It never ceases to amaze me that these people get paid to write this stuff. Some of my favorites quotes include:

There is no surer sign of the decline of America’s culture than the craze over this awful European sport. Drive past a park or a schoolyard on a clear spring afternoon and you’re likely to witness a depressingly unpatriotic sight: the baseball diamond lies empty and crab grass grows in the infield, while herds of American children dressed in preposterous polyester uniforms run around kicking a white and black ball in no particular direction and to no apparent end.

Can someone explain to me how it’s unpatriotic that ‘herds of American children’ are having fun running around no matter what they’re wearing? It gets better.

I am convinced that the ordeal of soccer teaches our kids all the wrong lessons in life. Soccer is the Marxist concept of the labor theory of value applied to sports — which may explain why socialist nations dominate in the World Cup. The purpose of a capitalist economy is to produce the maximum output for the least amount of exertion. Soccer requires huge volumes of effort but produces no output.

Wait - what? Baseball scores rarely exceed 10. If we got 7 points for a goal in soccer, you’d think they were American football scores. And this makes us Marxist? Of course it wouldn’t be a good National Review rant without some sexism:

What makes peewee soccer particularly insidious is that boys and girls play together. At this level, the sport has become a giant social experiment imposed upon us by the same geniuses who have put women in combat. No one seems to care much that co-ed soccer is doing irreparable harm to the psyche of America’s little boys.

At this pre-puberty state of life girls tower over boys and typically have better coordination. Last year the Pele of my son’s league was a kindergartner named Kate Lynn. During one game, Kate Lynn repeatedly stampeded over Justin. After the third knockdown, I quietly pulled him aside and advised: “Remember that rule about never hitting a girl? Let’s suspend that for the next forty minutes.” But he never did, because she was likely to hit back.

Um - just wow. And that was only from the first article. Keep reading if you can. The mind boggles.

H/T yhatemetoo

I’m not going to try and say our recent rains have ended our drought. We’ve only had about 14″ of rain in five months this year, vs ~30″ all last year. But we sure seem to have had a lot of rain when it rains. Looking back at our Spring season, we rescheduled at least half of our regularly scheduled matches, mostly due to rain. Many teams managed to get one or two practices completed in February before matches started in March. I can’t prove it (because I’m too laz^H^H^Hbusy to look up rainfall for every day this year), but it sure seems like we got a lot of rain either late in the week (Thursday/Friday) or on the weekend, which made mincemeat of our schedule. My U11 Girls had one match rescheduled four times before we finally got it completed.

So I guess this is a fitting end to our Spring season.

» Read the rest of this post…

It never ceases to amaze me how absolutely crazy May can be. Between end of season events, tournaments, state championships and festivals, planning for tryouts, starting registration for the Fall, developing/changing programs for the coming year, Annual General Meetings, travel team selections, and more, May is one chaotic month. Which is why OTP was so neglected. I hardly had time to read email, let alone write, and that’s unfortunate as May is full of post topics!

So my apologies for things getting so quiet here. We still have a lot going on (tryouts next week, AGM preparations, and more), but I’m slowly getting back to a normal schedule and hope to have lots of in the coming weeks. My draft queue is jammed, so they may come in bursts!

What excitement have you all seen this May?

As I’ve written about youth soccer over the years, I’ve always been surprised how few youth soccer parents there seem to be who are active online related to youth soccer. The coaches are and obviously some parents can be very vocal online. But overall, you get a sense of silence online from youth soccer parents. It’s hard to describe. I’ve wanted to try and do my small part to change that by encouraging commentary here at OTP and putting together other things that give soccer parents, especially those at the Rec and lower competitive levels, a place to interact and share.

I know ther are regional and local forums for youth soccer than can be very active, though even those tend to have a fairly homogenous demographic. So I put together a set of youth soccer forums in the hope that a segment of soccer parents from across the country could interact with each other, share stories, etc. It hasn’t caught on just yet, but I’m not one to give up on something I believe in (I’m stubborn that way). So over the next few months I’ll be trying different things to better integrate the forum with the blog and try to get some dialogs going.

My first attempt will be ‘Tales From The Pitch‘. Each weekend, I’ll startup a new thread where parents can share their funny stories, highlights, shout outs, touching moments, etc. from the previous weeks worth of matches. We’re parents - we love to talk about our kids, their teams, and what is happening with them. So I thought it might be neat to have a running commentary from a wide spectrum of soccer parents about what they experienced in youth soccer.

So if you have something to share from the previous week in youth soccer, hop over to Talk On The Pitch and post something in the ‘Tales From The Pitch’ thread. While you’re there, check out the wide range of forum topics and share your thoughts and opinions in any that interest you. Remember - if you’ve created an account at On The Pitch, it works over in the forums as well. Also - the forum software we use has RSS feeds for just about everything - latest posts, tags, topics, threads, users, etc. - so if you use an RSS reader, you can easily keep up with whatever specific things or topics interest you most.