REC RULES (#2)

Written by: Gabe

The search for lost glory. The registration fees. The tragic team names. The championship t-shirts. The inflated egos. The weekend war. This is rec league soccer.

The rec league is in many ways like a bloodsoaked Darwinian social experiment.

Due to the impossible task of evaluating new, unfamiliar teams, league organizers have no choice but to handle the insertion of these teams as a realtime assessment. Consequently, newcomers are usually placed in a skill division that is no more than a best guess. Imagine if you had never seen a wolf before, and upon adopting one, opted to keep it in a pen with your goats. They’re roughly the same size, hairy, with four legs. A reasoned but wholly uninformed guess just slaughtered all your goats. And just when you figure out where the wolf ought to be kept, a lion shows up looking for a home.

Add to this the spotty reliability of recreational players, and you occasionally have games so severely lopsided it’s hard to watch. In fact, teams that are too often the goat usually go extinct altogether. Natural selection is a brutal judge.

I have personally suffered through a savage attack (losing by 10) and have had the sadistic pleasure of winning by 20. As good as you think you are, there is a team somewhere in your past or future that will tear out your guts like a National Geographic documentary. The good news is, sooner or later, we all get to be the goatslayer.

[Anecdotally, I just realized I once played for a team whose mascot was a goat. And we lost a lot.]

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There is a tiny nation in the world of soccer of which many of us are citizens: The Recreation League. Far from Old Trafford, papparazzi, and highlight reels, you’ll find me playing co-ed, open age group, in a middle tier division, in Columbus, Ohio. In the grand soccer scheme, my team hardly exists. There is no cup for us. We have no fans, no salary, no recognition, and no respect outside our microcosm. But what is inside the microcosm is what Rec Rules is about—a regular look inside the American recreation league culture.