After a 28 day hiatus, I finally got a chance to play soccer again. I signed up for a soccer league I found on the internets which is just as shady as their website makes them appear. To say that the organization is poorly run would be a horrible understatement. I’ll give you all the gory details: I was given almost no instruction and after getting a bunch of run-around through email from the guy who runs the league, I was told to show up at the rooftop field promptly at 8:15 where someone in an “official shirt” would be there to tell me where to go. Seriously, “official shirt”. That makes sense.
The field is at Pier 40, though the google maps image is a bit out of date and still shows it as a shipping pier – the center in the satellite image is actually two full size soccer fields. We’re talking 70+ yards wide. You can still make out the rooftop field(s) in the bottom right corner. There’s a fence that’s about 30 ft tall to keep the ball from going into the Hudson or onto Westside Highway. It’s actually kind of cool to play on the rooftop field there. The games take place after dark and every now and then when I stop to take a breath, I can look out at the downtown skyline. Pretty cool. The fields themselves are not grass (of course). They are actually very similar material to the stuff they use at the indoor arena in Austin. Fake turf with the small rubber pieces.
Back to how terrible the “league” is. First off, I’m in a coed league (which is fine) but the rules are strange. You have to have two females on the field at all times – excluding the goalkeeper. I’ve never played anywhere where they use these rules. It flat doesn’t make sense. If you have a female keeper (generally considered a disadvantage) you still have to field two girls. Strange. The gameplay is much like indoor (free subbing, continuous running clock) with two important differences – the field is much smaller (almost half the size of the indoor arena I’m used to playing at) and there are no fucking walls or nets. Now this might not seem like a terrible inconvenience, but consider that you have to chace the ball every time someone misses a shot and once you’ve gone 10 yards, you’re almost close enough to shoot. I’d estimate that 3-5 minutes of each 20 minute half is spent chasing the ball after someone misses a shot. On top of that, the league is always running behind and rarely sure of what field each team is supposed to play on because there are no field numbers. So every time you show up it’s just a free-for-all for the first 15 minutes. I should mention that I’m paying $15 for this per game. $150 for a ten-game season. This league is still dramatically cheaper than the Chelsea Piers league, which is a ridiculous $225 per season.
My team is a “house” team – that is, it’s all the people that signed up to play as individuals. Somehow we’re the best house team I’ve ever played with. We have one of the best female soccer players I’ve ever played with (apparently she currently plays soccer for some college team), some other players that are pretty good, a keeper that is also very good (strange that he doesn’t already have a team; it’s rare to find a keeper that is both good and doesn’t already have a team), and this guy. Yeah, one of my team members is a freelance writer that writes about the competitive eating circuit. He’s pretty good at soccer too.
Our season is about to enter the playoffs (funny, I started writing this post over a month ago) so I’ll keep you (and by you I mean the thousands of regular readers of this blog) posted on how the season works out for us.
