Who and What We Are - Fall 2021

Albuquerque Soccer League offers men’s, women’s and coed competitions. We are affiliated with the New Mexico State Soccer Association, the United States Adult Soccer Association and the United States Soccer Federation. For fall and spring competition, our games are on Sundays and we play at the New Mexico Soccer Tournament complex in Bernalillo. Yes, we know it’s a long way to drive, but we also own the fields and can make sure they’re repaired and maintained, unlike the fields at Bullhead park where other leagues play.

More important is what we’re not. We’re not the English Premier League or La Liga. We’re an amateur recreational soccer league comprised of people who play for exercise and to have fun and generally have to get up go to work after a weekend game. If you have players who decided to play here instead of joining Ronaldo at Real Madrid, your player is misguided and needs to play elsewhere. We have a low tolerance for people who show up to fight, riot and abuse and assault referees or other players.

If you skipped it on the front page, go here for the short explanation of the changes to the player registration system now that we have no office.  Go here for the long explanation.  For those of you won't go read that and prefer to be surprised, the annual fee to NM State Soccer association is $20.  Everyone pays that annually, meaning this season for those of you playing fall season.  Then you don't pay it again until next fall. The ASL registration fee is $80 for Sunday play and $50 for Wednesday coed.

Important points to be aware of:

1. In order to accommodate online payment, we have to break the team and player registration into a fall season (fall 2021) and a spring season (spring 2022).  If you sign up for fall season, the assumption is your team is going to play the entire competition, meaning you'll register for the spring season and the final standings are based on a 17 game competition in the fall and spring.
2. The cost of soccer now is broken into two parts.  We collect the ASL portion through online payments using this website.  The ASL fee for the fall 2021 season is $80 and must be paid online through your team folder. There is no registration at the office anymore.  We have also separated out the payment each player must make to the New Mexico State Soccer Association for our membership in the United States Soccer Federation and to obtain liability and player accident insurance that all the field owners require.  The NMSSA fee used to be mixed in with the other fees, which made it very difficult to keep track of what the fees were depending on when you last played.  This takes care of that.  The NMSSA fee is $20 and must be paid once a year regardless of the number of teams a player is on. Everyone who played in the summer 2021 season has already paid for twelve months.  Players whose first registration is fall season must pay and will be good for the following 12 months.
3. The first game is on September 12.  The last day to register for the first game is Tuesday, September 7 at 5 p.m.  Registration continues through the season starting again on Monday, September 13.
4. Do not pay for another player's registration fee.  If they do not pay you back, that is an issue between the two of you.
5. We are no longer rescheduling games in the fall and spring seasons.  Games are played on the date in the schedule.  The city has taken the goals out at all of the fields we used for reschedules and the entire practice was out of hand with people expecting us to reschedule two or three games a season.  If your team makes other plans for a game day, then you get a 1-0 forfeit.

Important things to do register your team for the spring season:

1. Submit your team application. If you’re an existing team from Spring 2020 or summer 2021, do this from your team folder. If you are a new team, do it from the link in the article on the front page of the web site. There is no longer a team application fee.  The software does something a little funky and may lead you to believe your process didn’t finish.  Make sure you wait till it pops up a Submit button.  That’s because we don’t collect an application fee and it doesn’t expect that.  In short order from you submitting your team application, we then accept it and you can then go the Teams section of the web site, click your team name, and log in to your team folder in the upper right corner.
2. Get enough players to have a team. Please don’t assume that we have a bunch of extra players to fill out your roster and especially please don’t assume we have five women looking for a coed team at any point in time.
3. If you are a new coed team and you decide you have to be in the bottom division, we’re going to ask you for your roster and a description of each players playing history. Until we get that, your application doesn’t get accepted so we can have a chance to keep you from sandbagging. If this offends you, we apologize in advance.
4. All payments are online.  We're setting up a new office and will not be set up to take player payments in person.
5. For Sunday play in the fall and spring a player may play one one men's team, one women's team, and one coed team.  For clarity, that means a player cannot play on two men's teams or two women's teams or two coed teams.

Dates to Remember

We want you to complete your player registration as soon as possible. We’ve discovered that setting arbitrary dates for arbitrary numbers of players to be entered in your team folder (further information in the Registering Players link on the left) is somewhat pointless. Hence, we monitor the activity in your player folder. We begin putting the schedule together starting August 17. If there has been no activity in you assembling player records and no players have been paid for, we are going to contact you to see if you really have a team, as including a phantom team in the schedule causes a lot of problems. If you are one of those teams, and particularly if you are a new team, we’re going to be very pushy about you moving the process forward.

 Important Steps to Register a Player

1. Set up your roster.  If you are an existing team and submitted your team application through a previous season team folder, you can access your player pool in the roster link.  If you're a new team you'll need to build your roster.  If your players have been in ASL before, you can search for their profile and add it to your roster.  Details on creating a player profile are on the right on this page.
2. Complete the player record in the team folder. "Complete" means a picture, a complete address, date of birth, and a telephone number.  If the profile is not complete, we do not clear them to the roster even if they've paid.  Directions are on the right in How to Create Player Profiles.
3. The liability waive is now incorporated in the payment process so it won't need to be done separately as we previously did.
4. Pay your player registration fee. Details are on the right.

Extremely Important Information You Should Know

1. We do not do player registration at the office. It is all done online.  We are no longer using passcards.  We will produce player passcards if your team requests them early enough, like not the day before the first game.  The referees will use a league approved roster and players need to show a legitimate photo ID.  Normally that's a drivers license.  If you have an old ASL passcard, that works just fine as the official roster will determine who gets to play.
2. It is the team rep's job to set up a folder for each player and post the player's personal information (address, DOB, phone, e-mail) and a picture of the player. 
3. If you have a coach who is not a player, the coach must have a coach passcard issued by the office with the coach’s picture and name. If a person claims to the referee that he or she is the coach and has not provided the referee with the league-issued passcard, the person will be considered a fan and any incident will be dealt with under the league rules for fan misconduct.
4. Most games are on Sunday. We will play 9 in the fall and 8 in the spring. At the possible risk of stating the obvious, the Wednesday 7 v 7 coed league is on Wednesdays and each team fields 7 players and its coed. We’ll schedule 8 games in the fall and 8 games in the spring for those competitions.
5. Refund information is in a separate link on the right.
6. If you have a schedule request, we need it by August 10 and you need to read the article on Schedule Requests on the right. We do not do anything about it when you send it to us after we’ve published a schedule with 140 teams. If you are asking us to coordinate your schedule with another team, we want the names of the players involved in both teams. If it is one player, we aren’t coordinating the schedules. That’s why it takes ten days to get the schedule done.  We do not schedule all your games at 9 a.m.  
7. A player may play on one men’s teams, one women’s team, and one coed team in the fall and spring Sunday competitions. A player may NOT play on two or more men’s teams, two or more women’s teams, or two or more coed teams.
8. A player must be 16 years old or older on the date of player registration. There is no shortage of youth soccer leagues around town.
9. Players who owe the league fines from previous seasons and have not completely served game suspensions must do so prior to playing. There is a complete list of such player posted through fall 2019 on the front page of the website in the section on the left titled Unpaid Player Fines….
10. If you have a sponsor paying your registration, please let us know. Otherwise, you pay when you register or you don’t register
11. Every fall and spring competition requires numbered uniform shirts. That means professionally applied numbers, and each number must be different, and all the uniforms need to be the same color. The referee will not allow players to wear duplicate numbers and will not allow taped on or magic marker numbers. If the referee does and we find out, then the referee doesn’t get paid for doing the game. This tends to make the referee see things our way. Numbered tee shirts are just fine. You don’t need to break the bank buying Spain replica jerseys. If you want to know where you find uniforms for a reasonable price, e-mail us.

If your team rep cannot find someone to handle the player registration, you can do a manual process whereby you pay the office staff $50 (in advance) and they will collect your player’s pictures and personal information and enter it in the computer. This gets you one meeting with your players to take their pictures and obtain their names, address, phone, date of birth. Since your players can manage to get together for a game, they can get together for pictures once. Because they’re doing this on their own time rather than office hours, you get to pay them for assuming your burden. Call the office or e-mail to aslsoccerstaff@gmail to make arrangements. Once we have a player’s picture and personal information loaded, they don’t have to do this again.

Office Hours

Office hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 5:30 p.m. to 6:30. p.m. on Thursday so far.  Our office was closed for a year so we're in the process of setting up a new location and will update this as we get that done. Please note that the office is staffed on Thursday evening by League officers on a volunteer basis. If the office is not going to be open Thursday evenings because we’re out of people, we will try to get word on the telephone message. The League phone number is 505-346-0831 and the league e-mail address is aslsoc@swcp.com for Mike or aslsoccerstaff@gmail for the office staff.