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Summer Football

There currently seems to be great enthusiasm in some circles for changing the traditional soccer season from September / May to March / October with the main (only) justification being that better weather and drier pitches will result in more games being played.    Before any decision be made on such a change the following points should be addressed and thought out in advance.

The NDSL one of the biggest leagues in the country tried summer soccer on a pilot basis last year and gave it up after 6 weeks citing a variety of problems encountered which are listed below along with further issues that need to be bourne in mind .

• They found that teams were turning up with 3 or 4 players on match days
• 15-20 games could be called off in one area because of G.A.A. mini-blitzes
• Every community seemed  holds Summer Festivals from May - September and games are called off because of them.
• Parents take more weekends away from May - September  and games are called off as a result especially when the parent is also the team manager.
• Local Authority pitches are generally under going maintenance and unplayable for that reason.
• A full compliment of referees is not available during the summer months.
• The NDSL gave the option if a game was called off on the weekend they could play the game mid-week – this option was not taken up by the clubs.
• One of the biggest problems the NDSL found was that in the months of June/July/August  parents took long weekends and holidays and the reason they discontinued the programme was a number of teams had difficulty in fielding teams.
• Clubs found it difficult to get managers to run the teams.
• A lot of clubs organise Street Leagues during the summer and as a result games had to be cancelled.
• Another issue that arose was the “Scouts” as the children have a number of activities scheduled for weekends.
• The biggest factor in games called of was the G.A.A. play their games in the Summer and also hold Blitzes on a regular basis.
• They found the G.A.A. to be inflexible when it came to re-scheduling fixtures and were very uncooperative thereby forcing children to make a hard choice between Soccer and G.A.A. with the G.A.A winning hands down.
• There will be a huge difficulty organizing trials and pre-season training in the months of January and February.
• Already most pitches are used in the summer months for Ladies/Girls football leading to pitches being over used or unavailable.
• People forget that while we have suffered some very wet winters over the past few years we have also had record amounts of rainfall during the summer months in the same period.
• Other Countries with a lot harsher winters are coping with little difficulty during the winter months.
• The traditional soccer season throughout Europe is August to June we are far enough behind most Countries without making things worse by being out of sync with the rest of the Continent as any major tampering will sign our death warrant as a serious Football Nation.

St Kevin's Boys Club held a full and frank debate at their AGM last month on the issue of the Summer Soccer proposal and following wide ranging discussion it was unanimously agreed to retain the season as it is with some slight modification as laid out below.

 The answer is a modification of the current season - August to end of November then break until mid term February and finish mid to late June - we are more or less doing that now.