Tonight I completed what was possibly the most frustrating soccer season I’ve ever played. My team, the Spurs in the Ayr Adult Soccer League, managed to finish the season with a record of 0 wins 14 losses and 2 draws, including the playoffs. It just absolutely eats me up that we were unable to get a single win during this whole season.

Our problems started at the teams very inception. In this league there is a draft and each team captain chooses his own team. The only problem is our captain couldn’t make it, so the team was drafted by another person who had no vested interest in the team, and was drafting another team at the same time. Talk about a conflict of interest. So our team was off to a rocky start.

We started the season off reasonably well, picking up 2 draws in our first 3 games, which gave us hope that we would be at very least competitive over the span of the season. Little did we know this would be the high point of the season. Our team played hard, we were never a pushover to play and we frequently lost close 1 goal games. It wasn’t like anyone on the team folded. We started playing very well down the back stretch of the season, but still couldn’t catch any breaks and simply didn’t have enough scoring power.

Our first round opponent in the playoffs was of course the #1 seeded team that only lost twice during the course of the season. We played our best game of the season in pushing them to a 0 – 0 draw through regulation and overtime, only to come up short in penalty kicks. Tonight was our last chance to avoid the embarrassment of going winless over the entire season as we played in the consolation semi-finals. Again we pushed a much better team to overtime, but ended up coming up short in extra time by a score of 2 – 1.

This whole thing really pisses me off. My whole team was full of good people, we fought hard and played our asses off all season. There were no jerks, there was no attitude, egos or infighting. We just couldn’t buy a break all season. Nobody on this team deserved the infamy of going winless over a whole season. The reality of the situation was that we simply didn’t have enough talent on our team to compete. I was the leading scorer on the team with 6 goals and was one of our better players. While I’m a decent soccer player I know I’m also not someone who you’d pin your hopes on to carry the scoring load over an entire season. I know that I’m a complimentary player, not a natural goal scorer. Before this season I hadn’t scored in 2 previous Ayr league seasons.

In my opinion the league definitely let our team down. They had it fully within their power to trade players from one team to another to restore the competitive balance. There were teams that were absolutely stacked with talent that could have easily withstood losing a decent player. Instead we got a guy off the substitute list who only showed up to half the games as the band-aid solution to the problem . He did help when he was there, but there was probably a reason he was on the sub list in the first place. Everyone in this league signs up to have fun and get some exercise. Obviously there is good natured competitiveness that factors into things, but at the end of the day that is why everyone signs up for this league.

I hope that in future they learn from our experiences and actual set out rules to combat things like that. Every team in the league should have an opportunity to compete and I don’t think we were necessarily given a fair shake.