Just in case you might have missed it, or have been in a coma for the last 20 years and have just awakened, Soccer is a big deal. In fact, it’s a really BIG DEAL and when it comes to Foster City I don’t have a font size large enough to express how big of a deal it is here. Let’s just agree to say that in Foster City people like it a whole bunch. Maybe it’s because this community is enormously blessed with many wonderful and expansive parks with fields large enough to allow soccer to be played there and people from all over the Peninsula have been attracted to them like Stanford alums to a good Cabernet. Five parks, Edgewater, Boothbay, Port Royal, Catamaran and Sea Cloud have soccer fields and the last one is the most coveted destination…maybe on the whole Peninsula. Drive over to Sea Cloud Park some weekend and check it out…you’ll be amazed.

Because of all this interest a brouhaha has sort of developed because groups of recreational adult soccer players like to meet and have pick up games during lunch hours or after work in the parks and at Sea Cloud in particular. The city put tough new restrictions on field use and wants these groups to organize, pay fees and be insured to use these city parks. Recently, games in which players don’t have permits have been broken up by the Police. The recreational players argue that it’s impossible to buy liability insurance for pick up games since the participants are different from one day to the next.

Parks and Recreation committee meetings have been exciting as debate has gone on about the purpose of the city’s fields, the nature of liability insurance, and what constitutes an organized group as opposed to a pick up game. Naturally, the fact that Foster City is such an attractive location for soccer for the whole Peninsula underlies the controversy and makes competition among groups an inevitability. At this point it appears there is actually some movement toward compromise and in this mornings San Jose Mercury-News we had this story:

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_8461416

So, back to the original point…soccer’s big, and it’s not gettin’ any smaller. If you’re at all interested in youth soccer in Foster City, and you’re not aware of this already, click on the following local links for more details.

http://www.aysofc.org/ 

or:

http://www.pyscsoccer.org/pysc/index.php