US Youth Soccer National Workshop Report
Indianapolis, IN, February 6-9, 2003

Tina Patterson: State Registrar

Wednesday, February 5, 2003 -

The registrars of region four met on Thursday February 6. Every state registrar except one was in attendance. We are working on a region four registrar manual. We will be unifying forms, registration procedures, tournament requirements by state, travel forms, etc. We would like to include a list of tournaments and requirements from every state in our region. We were told that the national association is watching to see what we come up with. They were going to do a national manual. If ours works well they may use ours as a model.

We discussed how every state differs in tournaments requirements. One state (Cal North) will only allow guest players to total 18 on a roster. If a team has 16 players on their roster they are only allowed two guest players. It doesn't mater if three of the players can't attend the tournament, they are held to the two guest players. Their reasoning is that you can't have more than 18 on your roster at one time.

We worked on unifying forms. We took samples of our forms and are trying to develop a form that every state can use. We are going to be putting this information on the web site as soon as we can develop it. We feel that it is important that we do things as unified as possible.

Leisa, Scott, and I met with Karen of Logical Solutions to get some insight on how to get the most use of their product. Karen gave us some good ideas on how to use uniform coding while imputing data. I will be covering this at my registrars meeting on April 12th. I will be giving out a list of abbreviations to be used at that time, both team and street. If we all use the same abbreviations we will be able to get data easier.

I attended the National Rules class. We discussed some of the new ideas for that they had for new rules. One of the rules (221 section 2; a 1) was that they would increase the number of transfers from 3 to 5. They felt that this would allow more flexibility for the teams in the event of injury. However the way that they had it worded allowed a team to have unlimited number of transfers as long as there were only 5 on the roster at the time the roster was frozen, example: a team has five transfers, these five don't work out as well as the coach thought. He then releases them and adds another five. The coach could do this until he found the perfect group. (paperwork nightmare).

Another one (rule 221 section 6) was that the roster was frozen at the time of kickoff. The states could mandate that a period of time not to exceed 168 hours (seven days) The states could make a rule that a player had to be on a roster for a period of time before the player would be allowed to play, for example Johnny transfers to Team A just before the game kickoff, but because the state has a, say 14 day waiting period, Johnny can't play until those 14 days have passed. This rule would have to be the same for the state league play as well. I know that there isn't a coach out there that is willing to wait two weeks for that player to play. The reason that they were interested in changing these rules is, some states freeze their rosters in the fall and don't play state cup until spring. The rules committee felt that this wasn't being fair to the teams.

The rules committee had been told, that the registrar committee had approved these changes. Most of us hadn't heard of them. Paul Burke had sent me an email telling me of these suggestions. So I had a little advanced notice. I printed it out and was able to supply it to Cheryl Harrington, region four registrar chairman.

The registrar committee met and reworded the proposed changes. We wanted rule 221 section 2 a 1 to remain as it is. We felt that three transfers were enough. We also felt they should be a total number. No more than three, period. We also wanted rule 221 section 6 to read: The team's roster for National Championships competition is frozen no earlier than three weeks before the first national cup game. This would allow the state association some say in when the rosters are to be frozen. This would also allow the teams time to replace any players that had been injured or had lost interest.

I have not seen the approved rules.