Thanks to Ted Werbel and Elliot Trotter for filming, and Elliot for editing this vid. More photos and videos from the tournament to come.

Seattle Goaltimate League – Season One (Unedited) from elliot trotter|Melon Visual on Vimeo.

So say most people, I hear. From this organizer/player’s perspective I don’t think the league could have gone any better and I hope you feel the same.

Thanks to all the captains for wrangling players and keeping the trains running on time. Also a huge thanks to anyone that helped set up, break down, or schlepp equipment over the course of the last month – your assistance is greatly appreciated.

Congrats to Team Reid Koss for winning the first SGL championship. Final scores from the tournament will be posted at a later time. I hope that this is the first event in a long serious of goaltimate leagues for Seattle.

Yup – SGL Fall tournament is tomorrow afternoon. Please check the schedule page for the format/times. Results and rankings  going into the event are below:

1. BJ: 6-2-1 dif +7
2. Shek:  6-3 dif +20
3. Reid: 5-4 dif +6
4. Andy: 5-3-1 dif +11
5. Danny: 5-3-1 dif -4
6. Ted: 3-5-1 dif -7
7. Cyle: 2-6-1 dif -11
8. Tyler: 1-7-1 dif -22

See everyone tomorrow!

First off, how happy are you that SGL has moved indoors for the season? I can’t imagine playing in this weather tonight, and I’m pretty sure most of you feel the same way.

On that note, we’ve come to a little bit of an impasse concerning the rest of the season. The original budget for SGL was built to rent outdoor turf fields for four nights and a four hour block on Saturday, Dec 4, but renting the indoor fields has been much more expensive.

From talking to a lot of captains and players, it seems like there’s been an overwhelmingly positive response to the indoor play (the timed games, the exciting blade action, etc etc) – and we have enough to continue playing indoors until the tournament.

However, that’s where things get complicated. There will not be enough $$ left to play out the tournament indoors. What I would like to propose is that each player pitch in an extra $5.00 to finance having the tournament at the current site. What that gets us is another 3 hours of play indoors to finish out the double round robin and host the final tournament.

I don’t believe we can have a player-wide vote on this – with the holidays coming up and the need for making the reservations as soon as possible, we won’t have time to get a full roll call from folks. However, because this is a deviation from the original plan, I’m asking anyone who has an issue with the extra $5.00 to contact me directly to discuss.

Thanks – and more on this to follow.

All -

T-minus 24 hours until the second SGL night. Few things for all of you:

1. To minimize wardrobe changes between games, each team will now have a season-long color. The color breakdowns are as follows:

• Ted: Green
• Danny: Yellow
• Sheck: Black
• Andy: White
• BJ: Purple
• Cyle: Blue
• Reid: Brown
• TK: Red

2. Second night’s schedule is now up on the schedule page. You’ll notice that in this week (and almost every one from now on), there are some teams that will have back to back games. This was done to avoid a rematch from the first SGL night.  After Monday, each team will have played every other team except one.

Steven Spielberg I’m not. However, here’s a little snippet of Monday’s action.

Seattle Goaltimate League, First Monday from hudson wallace on Vimeo.

F U Chinese robot. After a solid week of malware messages, google harassment, mySQL injections, and general consternation, seattlegoaltimate.com returns. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to let us know things were afoul. Super special thanks to Elliot Trotter for WP debugging assistance, and Andy Lovseth for general tech support and new server hosting.

The last day and a half has seen some pretty big shake ups for the first SGL. I’m going to try and boil this down to a manageable size, with associated headings. It’s pretty important that you read this email.

Fields:
Yesterday, I went in to the Seattle P&R department to pay for our field reservations for the SGL. I was informed by the head of field reservations that “Championship soccer” (?) had had two solid weeks of rain outs, and that they were canceling the SGL reservations at Magnusson and Ballard to have room for make up games. No turf field site in the city would be available to us (and yes, I asked about each one).

Flustered, I made a ton of calls and visited a bunch of locations – and came up with few alternatives. The most viable of which was to move us indoors for the season.

So, the final field location will be the Arena Sports Complex in Magnusson Park. It’s two turf fields inside an old airplane hanger on the north side of Magnusson (next to the NOAA station). Full maps of this can now be found on the website at

http://seattlegoalty.com

What this means for the schedule:
Because of factors like a limited SGL budget and indoor field availability, rounds will now be 15 minutes each. Teams are guaranteed 3 games a night, and the dates WILL NOT CHANGE. We’re still on for Mondays in November (8,15,22,29) and the final tournament on Dec 4th.

However, the first round will now start at 6:45 PM on the nose, and the last round will end at 8:20 PM. There will be no margin for lateness for any team, any night. I will have a sample breakdown of the schedule for all format dorks on the website soon, and a full night by night schedule up by Saturday. If you take nothing else away from this section, it’s that every team has three games every SGL Monday.

What this means for you as a player:

• Playing indoors and on turf is awesome. The game moves much faster. Every throw is perfect and uncontested by the wind. On the last two Mondays of SGL, when it’s pissing rain and 32.3 degrees, you will be playing in short sleeves and shorts indoors – and you will be loving it.
• Games are shorter, and there will be a premium on smart subbing. Because the game is sped up, players will be expected to elevate their pace as well, and should think about pushing hard and subbing more often.</li>
• We cannot play in cleats. The turf is old school – like astroturf, and hard. Flats or turf cleats are not only recommended, but required. You will break your ankles in real cleats.
• Laying out is discouraged. The turf is hard. Falling is not an issue (3 of the captains field-tested this last night), but going full layout for a disc will get you bruised at best and broken at worst.
• Each of you will need to sign a waiver before playing. This is the ArenaSports house rule. I will be sending out a link with the waiver tomorrow so that you can print and sign it for next Monday.

I am sure there are a ton of questions regarding this information – and I am more than happy to field questions by email or phone over the next few days. Please check the FAQ section before reaching out to me, as I have put a lot of work into anticipating questions there.

Hope to see everyone at pickup tonight. (and I can answer more stuff there as well).

Best -

Skip

As the league has now expanded to 8 teams, there have been some captaining changes. Skip is stepping down from a captain spot in order to pay full attention to making the first SGL run as smoothly as possible. Final captains are:

1. Andy Lee
2. Ted Werbel
3. Joe Sefton
4. Tyler Kinley
5. Greg “Sheky” Shiring
6. Cyle Van Auken
7. Reid Koss
8. Danny Karlinsky

Based on feedback from SGL participants, we will be instituting a gender ratio of 2 female and 6 male players per team. Teams may still play any ratio of genders at any given time on the field.

Thanks to everyone who emailed in with feedback.