On The Pitch

As the Fall 2007 season fast approaches for our soccer league, we’ve been hard at work getting things ready to go. This includes finalizing team rosters, setting practice schedules, finalizing the field layouts (we flip fields around annually to help with wear on the fields), and much more. This past Saturday was ‘Fix The Goals Day’. A group of volunteers come out with their tools to ensure the goals are in top condition for the upcoming season.

We have been very lucky as a soccer league since our local Rec Department has purchased great goals for us to use. They are all very nice 4″ round post goals from Back of the Net and PEVO. However, many of them are 3 or more years old, so they’re showing some signs of wear. Many of the bolts are loose and a few are stripped – meaning the goals are not 100% secure. We’ve also had a really tough time keeping the nets on them. When they were assembled, large cable ties were used to attach the nets. These rarely last a season, as the sun degrades the plastic and they break (even the black ones designed for outdoor use). Plus the sharp edges on a cable tie are dangerous if someone hits it. So this year we decided to completely change how we attach the nets. We also decided we had to change how we anchored the goals to the ground as we were constantly losing the metal goal anchors. I’ll go into more detail about those changes in future posts.

We spent the past Saturday overhauling all 30 or so goals we have. But before we could do that, we had to get them all back to the soccer complex. We had closed the soccer complex all summer to allow the turf to strengthen, so we had goals over at the baseball fields. Moving a 6′ x 18′ goal can be tricky. They aren’t exceptionally heavy – but when you’re going a good 1/3 mile with it – carrying it isn’t ideal, even with 4 people carrying it. The Rec Department usually will ‘borrow’ a large flatbed trailer to move them. But being Saturday and on our own, we didn’t have such a luxury – so we improvised with a small 4×8′ utility trailer and physics. Did you know you can tip an 18′ goal upright with very little effort?

Don’t try this at home kiddies! It looks crazier than it was. As long as the pivot post was held in place on the trailer – tipping it up and down was easy. Once we had it upright, we strapped it down to the trailer using heavy duty nylon straps. Of course we were also lucky there were no power lines in between the baseball and soccer complexes!