Roger can you tell us why St Louis Soccer Club and Scott Gallagher do not play on SLYSA North fields? Isn't this favoritism to those clubs?

The simple reason that there are fewer Scott Gallagher teams scheduled to play on SLYSA North fields is that a number of teams from Scott Gallagher requested not to play on SLYSA North fields. This was a request made by individual teams (I think there were 6 of them), not the club.

I don’t recall any ST. Louis Soccer Club teams requesting to not play on SLYSA North fields, so if there are fewer of their teams playing on SLYSA North fields that would be by chance, although I do start scheduling with division 1 teams from younger to older; so that may have an effect. I haven’t looked.

By itself, this could be interpreted as favoritism toward Scott Gallagher, but when you factor in the following, I think you will agree that it is not. This spring we had over 160 requests from various teams. These include requests such as: some teams want no games at the Soccer Park; some teams want as many games as possible at Omni; some no games at Omni; out of area teams want two games per weekend day; some teams want no Sunday games; some no Saturday games; some no weeknight games; and some want all weeknight games; some teams want to play only on Thursdays; some teams can only play in the afternoon, some only in the morning; some want back to back games scheduled. There are a lot of requests. If a team makes a request, we try to honor it.

I have summarized the number of requests by teams in clubs is as follows (I chose to list only those clubs with 4 or more requests):

Avalon – 4
AFA – 12
Carrera – 4
Lou Fusz – 14
Metro Strikers – 22
Mid Rivers – 5
Missouri Premier – 9
Scott Gallagher – 18
St. Louis Soccer Club – 9
Tony Glavin – 13
Woodchips – 5
Webster – 5

Note that there is really no correlation between the number of requests and the size of the club. You can also conclude that it is not about favoritism.

In general, we try to honor requests when we can. As the season progresses, it gets harder to do. On occasion, there are conflicting requests such as when a game has to be played between two teams and one team only wants to play Sunday and the other only wants to play Saturday. I don’t know what Marty does in this situation, but I usually pick the day that has fewer games scheduled at the time, independent of the club the team is from.

At some point in the future it may be impossible to honor a general request. For example, if everyone requested all games at the SLYSA complex, we would currently not be able to honor those requests and would have to establish some set of criteria to make a choice. So far, we have not had to do that, but if we did, we would probably consult the club directors or teams to reach resolution.

Incidentally, there are two other teams (not Scott Gallagher and not St. Louis Soccer Club teams) which requested to not play at SLYSA North. I will let you find them if you like!