From the time Registration closes, our volunteers are hard at work preparing for the season.
Age Group Commissioners (AGCs) start forming teams.
When they have an idea as to how many teams they have, they need to recruit volunteers to coach those teams.
With the coaches in place, they find out where they will be practicing and start trying to match players
to coaches based on player ratings, practice area preference, does parent referee?, etc.
This is usually accomplished via a blind draft with all of the coaches in attendance.
With the teams formed, they can order uniforms.
Orders take about 8 weeks to get here once the order is submitted.
And while all of that is going on, they're also trying to place players off of our wait-list onto teams.
If a lot of kids sign up on the wait-list, the AGC ends up having to recruit more coaches!
This is why it's important to register early.
Late registrants wreak havoc with our team balancing, uniform orders, etc.
Our Permit Coordinator works on obtaining permits for the fields that we use
for games and practices.
He/she also obtains permits for the various meetings and training sessions that we need to
hold before the season starts.
Sometimes coaches will request a field that we haven't used before so the coordinator needs
to go out and negotiate to obtain a permit.
By then it will be very late in the permitting cycle so it may be a lot of extra legwork
involved to get the permits.
Once we know how many game fields we need and we've obtained our permits,
our Equipment Coordinator makes sure we have enough goals, goal nets, corner flags,
anchor pegs, field paint, painters, etc.
Once the equipment is organized, he/she needs to get them into the various storage facilities at the game fields.
Our Photo Day Coordinator works with our AGCs and the photography studio to figure
out when and where we can do our picture taking.
Contracts need to be negotiated and schedules need to be set up.
And manpower for photo day needs to be recruited.
Our Uniform Coordinator collects all of the uniform orders from the AGCs and
then submits them to the vendor.
After the uniforms come in, they need to be sorted and then distributed to the appropriate
AGC before the season starts.
Our Field Manager works with our AGCs to lay out and mark all of our game fields.
Once we know how many teams we have, our Coach Administrator and our
Referee Administrator start figuring out how many training courses we need to
provide to get all of our Coaches and Referees properly certified.
Permits for the training venues need to be obtained via our Permit Coordinator.
And appropriately certified Coach and Referee Instructors need to be lined up
to teach the courses.
It is extremely important that we get all of our volunteers properly trained and certified because
this is one of the requirements to protect our volunteers from liability issues under the
Volunteer Protection act of 1997.