Fund raising

We went out and signed up with Community Discount Cards, a fundraising group.  We select 30 local business, and then they go out and try to get them to give some sort of discount (10% discount, free drink, etc).  We get 50% of the selling price, and the company sets up incentives for kids selling the most, and so forth.  I polled the board for suggestions, and only a few came back with anything.(I told the rest they had no right to complain in the future).  The RC signed, and we are ready to go!
Initial order is 1000 cards, which is about how many players we have in,  I suspect each player in the competitive divisions should be able to sell two cards each.  Let's see how it works!

Turkey Tournament 2012 is moving closer!

Jay agreed to be our Referee Administrator for the tournament!  He wondered a bit about what he would have to do, besides looking cool in his shades, master of his domain, kind of like the Road Boss in "Cool Hand Luke."

Essentially, the RA has to round up sufficient 'local' referees to to handle any matches that won't be covered by referee teams provided by the participating teams; verifying the eligibility/appropriateness of the referee teams provided by said teams; making sure all games are covered; and finally verifying that the referees for a particular team fulfilled their obligations thus can get their deposit back.

I have been corresponding with other regions about their tournaments, one RC told me that 70% of the teams forfeit their referee deposit!  (which run about $300 per tournament!).

So far, this is the swag (Stuff We All Get):

Region tournament pins - Everyone
T-shirts - Everyone
Ref Patch - Referee
Ref Flipping Coin - Referee
Ref Food - three games and you get a greasy burger and limp french fries

Ray Bradbury died.

What does this have to do with soccer?  Nothing. However, we need more than soccer in our lives.

I like Ray Bradbury's earlier works.  Farenheit 451 was ground breaking, read that when I was quite young.  I liked the Martian Chronicles; at the time I was a big fan of "hard science fiction" with rocket ships and technology - these stories explored the human side of science.  Then he drifted into fantasy, and I sort of stopped reading his stuff.  There was a huge paradigm shift in science fiction, away from science and predictions of the future; everyone turned to fantasy works. Now, I like swords and magic as well as the next guy, but I missed the future stuff.  Almost nobody was able to predict how computers would change our lives and society; all the SF writers thought we would have atomic powered cars and FTL transport capabilities; little did they realize that we would have computer driven cards and the Internet.

Science is coming back into Science Fiction; and Ray would have been right up there, reminding us that for every alien we crush beneath our treads, the loss dimishes humankind.

Spring League is over!

Had no team to play against for the last game :(

We played 3 on 3; the kids had a good time - however this personified the season for me.
I don't think we will bother with Spring soccer next year.  No focus, no commitment, and we weren't able to wrestle at any tournaments which hurt us at the National wrestling finals.