On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Steve Brandt wrote: > Interesting commentary on youth soccer in Minneapolis at: > http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/1614335.html
> The author captures some of the same feelings I had after coaching > youth soccer for seven years. I've been refereeing summer soccer since the summer of 1988, so I've been in the game through this last wave of immigration. I started officiating with the Minneapolis United league, which is the traveling team, and did most of my games my first few years at Pearl Park. The sport has expanded greatly in the interveening years, to the point that it has almost surpassed Little League as the sport-of-choice for kids. As the article points out, fall soccer is very limited. The Summer leagues are traveling and do cost quite a bit. Minneapolis is big enough that it can have a fully functional league in the city through the efforts of the Parks and Rec department. Which is great, as it would allow competitive games with a minimum of travel. One of the biggest problems with doing anything like that is fields. Between the middle of May through the end of July, soccer pitches dot the landscape. Come mid-August almost all of them have been converted to football fields and have armored kids or fleet-of-foot adults on them. The High School fields in use are most often a yellow-paint overlay on the white-paint yard markings. Soccer is pretty cheap to run, when compared to football. Uniforms, shin-pads, shoes, and (optionally) mouth-guards are the extent of the gear-costs. The field itself isn't much different than a football field in terms of maintinence, and actually has fewer lines to stripe. School Board/Park Board cooperation is a big issue. Both boards have separate groundskeepers, and sometimes don't get along well with eachother. Scheduling games for a Park league on a school-board field can have unexpected consequences, such as arriving to find the field isn't striped yet (a frequent occurance in May games before school is out), or the goals haven't been dragged out of storage yet (because the kids use them as jungle-gyms during recess and break them). Interestingly enougn, I got interested in officiating when my local fall-league team (Kewayden rec-center) didn't have enough kids my age to form a team in 1987. They gave us quickie linesman training, and started assigning us games. I took the full certification course the following Spring. Greg Riedesel SSP _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
