Scott Swanson
On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, two girls soccer teams, both from Sweet Home, played a game – at Cheadle Park in Lebanon.
That bothers John Fassler, a local coach, referee, and trainer of coaches and referees for the American Youth Soccer Organization.
Since the Boys & Girls Club of the Greater Santiam stopped offering soccer several years ago, children in this region of the Willamette Valley have played under the auspices of AYSO, a nationwide organization that is one of the two largest focusing on general youth soccer in this country.
Currently, games are played in Albany, Lebanon and Halsey. Though, Fassler said, Sweet Home has roughly 115 players, all of its games are elsewhere.
One disadvantage of having so many games in Lebanon is that youngsters are playing until as late as 6:30 p.m. on Saturdays on Cheadle’s four fields, due to the number of games necessary to get into the schedule.
“I want to start having games here,” Fassler said. “They have games at the elementary school in Halsey, so it kind of sticks in my craw.”
There are a number of challenges, he said.
One is numbers. Halsey and Brownsville have 120 players participating this fall, which is proportionately about three times the participation from Sweet Home, based on the fact that Central Linn School District’s population is about one-third of Sweet Home’s.
“We have two Under-10 girls teams and one U12 girls team,” Fassler said. “We don’t have any sixth-grade girls in Sweet Home playing. Right now we have a bunch of fifth-graders, fourth-graders and third-graders who play up (in a higher age bracket than their actual age). These are all kids from Sweet Home.”
Another need is volunteers.
As an all-volunteer organization, AYSO depends mostly on players’ family members to act as coaches, referees and administrators, though leagues will often have help from people who simply love the game. AYSO requires all volunteers to have instruction, and provides various levels of certification for those who successfully complete training.
“Being an all-volunteer organization, we have to have people stand up and say, ‘I will coach, I will ref, I will organize things for the team,” Fassler said. “The biggest thing we don’t have filled is refs. We have probably seven to 10 trained refs in Sweet Home. We need 20 or more to be able to put games on.
“All of our high school players could be a ref for a game on a weekend. Our junior high players could be refs for younger teams – U8 and below.”
He said that even though AYSO officials don’t get paid, as Boys & Girls Club officials are, the training is “far superior to every other organization” and can lead to opportunities to make real money. Fassler said he and two other AYSO referees tested to get their U.S. Soccer Federation licenses.
“You can count on no fingers how many we missed,” he said. “You can take any referee out of AYSO’s regional referee certification and they can pass the USSF test with 90 percent.”
That leads to opportunities to referee weekend tournaments, in which an official can make $240 to $400 over two or three days – “all summer long, every weekend,” Fassler said.
In Sweet Home, AYSO would need to get access to fields on Saturdays. The Boys & Girls Club used fields at the high school and Hawthorne School for soccer, but those were shared with youth football. He said he’s working with high school Athletic Director Steve Brown on field availability.
Fassler said one reason he wants to get games back in Sweet Home is to increase participation.
To have teams in Sweet Home, 12 to 15 players are needed per age group, per gender, he said.
Sign-ups for AYSO begin in April for the fall. Players who register for fall are automatically eligible to play in the spring, which has a more relaxed, developmental schedule, Fassler said.
“I have told people that, come January, I’d like to see six sixth-grade girls jump up and say, ‘I want to play soccer in the spring.’
He said cost shouldn’t be an issue.
“When you have 70 sixth-grade girls in schools and none want to go out for soccer, you have a problem.
“We want to have these players develop so we have enough players in high school. It’s sad that, in a couple of years, at the rate we are going, we won’t have a high school team because there won’t be enough kids to play it.”