This summer we did something controversial – for the first time in 15 years, we ran our entire soccer program with no playoffs.

There were a number of reasons we did this. Primarily, it was to continue to nudge teams into seeing themselves as playing sports for fun, not to win at all costs, and the word “playoffs” tends to trigger a lot of us into trying too hard to lunge into plays that are out of reach, leading to temper flare ups and injuries.

We also still have problems with teams bringing in subs above their level for playoffs, and we felt the removal would lead to teams being more evenly rewarded for the consistent performance of their core roster.

On the management side we were happy to remove them, as it made the pacing of the season more consistent for staff. In long summer seasons, it’s often stressful when any of our strongest senior refs take vacation as playoffs hit, so this removes that problem and we can then give both staff and management a more stable work environment.

On the player side though, it remained controversial.

Some Comments from players on the change:

“The lack of playoffs seemed to have a direct effect on the sportsmanship exhibited during each game. They were friendly, cleaner and generally more fun. There was no unneeded competitiveness or ringers who magically show up at the end of the year that inevitably defeat the purpose of playing co-ed rec soccer.”

“Dropped down the competitiveness that would have been normal in playoff games, but made things confusing when scores weren’t input in GOL and some teams played more games than others. Reduced the effectiveness of potential ringers brought in for playoff games too.”

“I enjoyed the league standings based on the season’s table rather than playoffs as some teams get very rough and competitive with the old format”

“The lack of playoffs was no fun. I personally find playoffs to be the best part of the league. If the league is concerned about subs causing a disadvantage, maybe people need to be carded before playoffs.”

“I think it improved player safety and reduced aggressive play during later games in true season.”

“Playoffs add an extra thrill to the game. Feels like you’re actually playing for a chance to win.”

Responses by individual league:

Within individual leagues, the change was welcomed most by the Sunday Matt Anthony League (11 for, 2 against) – Maybe because summer Sunday tends to have more subs than any other league. All other leagues had more votes against the change, though Indifference won the day.

Conclusions:

Playoffs create a higher stakes environment, which can be more fun, but also more frustrating. Playoff games are harder on refs and often leads to more injuries and more rivalries developing. The sub problem is a real one. If our next technology shift leads to a fast way to card players pre-game, we may revisit playoffs. I’ll ask this question again after a few more seasons without playoffs and see how people are adjusting.

We asked all leagues to rate from 0 to 5 the competitive parity of their division. In other words, did players feel like they consistently faced fair opponents, or were games frequently unbalanced, either much too easy or much too hard?

Overall, Soccer averaged a 3.88 / 5, Multi-Sports a 3.15 / 5 and Volleyball a 4.11 / 5.

Conclusions: This data we’ll have to watch over additional seasons. The staff reported Wednesday volleyball as being unusually balanced (12 teams with no clear division lines), and multi-sports is naturally a bit erratic (though an extra division may have been called for). While I’d hope for higher soccer scores, we can only go by win/loss and goal differential data to do our best here. If players have recommendations on how we may be able to do this better feel free to reach out.

I asked players to tell us whether they felt our league was more or less recreational oriented / friendly than their average league experience. Since one of our core goals is to maintain a culture of recreational play that’s more community and safety oriented, this is an important measuring stick.

I’m happy to report no one found the league Much worse on average, and most found it moderately or much friendlier than their average experience.

The two Moderately less friendly votes were from Tuesday Co-Ed.

Below you can find how the ratings broke down for each league.

Conclusions: Overall I was happy to see these results, they show we are on the right track, but still have lots of room for improvement.

We asked everyone to rate the scheduling and organization of the league from 0 to 5. This is a key measurement we’ll be looking at over the next year, as we are looking at replacing some of our outdated technology with newer scheduling and tracking tools.

Across all leagues we were rated a 4 / 5 on average. Here is the breakdown by league.

Overall, Wednesday Volleyball and Tuesday Women’s soccer received the highest grades for organization, while Tuesday Co-ed somehow, as part of the same schedule, came in last, followed by Multi Sports and Thursday soccer.

Additionally, we asked everyone to rate the organization/scheduling from “Much less organized” to “Much More organized”. In retrospect, this question was fairly redundant following the star rating. Next time I may ask how teams are experiencing on-site direction vs off-site. Anyways, here is the data from that question.

Conclusions: Although 4 / 5 is okay, if it was a sportsmanship grade, I’d tell the team they should be aiming for a 4.5 . In addition to a new database, I’m currently codifying standards for when schedules, division changes and scores need to be turned in by, and the addition of a full pre-registration period each season will be a big part of speeding us up.

This is a big one, as the refs are on the front lines and have a direct impact the quality of any given game. If they are early, organized, attentive and firm they can keep games running safely and smoothly. If they are distracted, bored, disorganized or unable to assert themselves over a match, it can lead to dangerous and unfriendly games.

I will say in their defense, it’s a challenging and often thankless job, and sometimes they are blamed simply for presiding over a game where a team is frustrated over a loss, even if they did a competent job.

Summer staffing is always more difficult than the indoor seasons since our resources get stretched over many more fields running simultaneously than they do during indoor leagues, so I will be interested to revisit these stats in the winter.

Overall our soccer refs were rated a 3.88 / 5 , our multi sports refs were rated 4.05 / 5, and our volleyball refs  were rated 4.33 / 5. You could see these ratings as directly correlating to the amount of contact is in each sport (volleyball refs will likely always receive less blame than soccer refs as a missed swing in soccer usually leads to a bruised ankle, whereas in volleyball it just leads to a dropped ball). Nonetheless, these do give us a baseline to improve on.

Breaking things down further by league, the Thursday Louis Riel/Hornets nest and Sunday Matt Anthony crew received the highest ratings from the community, followed by the Tuesday women’s league staff. The lower rated were the Wednesday co-ed league.

Continuing on, we also asked players to answer whether they found the staff “much worse”, “moderately worse”, “about the same”, “moderately better”, or “much better” than other league experiences. This time I don’t think the question was redundant, as it can help us create a baseline to compare ourselves to  other leagues.

Overall, across all leagues the refs are generally rated better than average, though about a third of all respondents said they were about the same.

Even moreso in soccer, “about the same” had the same number of responses as “much better”.

Although we’re happy to not have the staff consistently pegged as worse than average, we’d like to set a higher than average standard, and will use this data as a measure of progression over the coming years.

Below you can see a more detailed breakdown by league.

At a glance we can see the most consistently highly rated staff were in Wednesday Volleyball, followed by Sunday at Matt Anthony, Tuesday women’s, Thursday co-ed and Multi Sports, while the Tues and Weds co-ed soccer leagues were mostly rated about average.

Conclusions: Lots of room for improvement, next time around we will survey a bit deeper into each ref skillset (speed, organization, safety, communication, etc) to try to dig into which areas we should be focusing training efforts on.

Finally, we asked everyone to give us an overall rating out of 5 and a yes/no/maybe on recommending our business. Here I think people were generally more generous than in some of the specific areas of critique. Maybe out of pity, or maybe because they saw some value in the business that wasn’t captured by this set of questions.

The highwater mark was again Wednesday Volleyball. Sunday @ Matt Anthony, Thursday co-ed, and Tuesday women’s were all highly rated experiences. Monday volleyball (only 3 respondents) and Sunday at Algonquin received the lowest grades (4/5).

Alright, I’ll take it! Not a victory lap, as we have lots of areas where we’ve only been performing at an average or slightly above average rate, but I’m happy to see this response.

This summer we removed Lester B. Pearson as an outdoor grass option for our Thursday summer league, moving the league fully indoors, after years of complaints that the field was not maintained well by the city. We asked the community to respond to this change. Here is how they felt:

Only a couple of respondents were against LBP’s removal, but the majority indicated they would like outdoor games again on a better field or turf.

Unfortunately most high quality grass fields are maintained by youth clubs and are rarely rented out, so we are unlikely to solve this without investing in maintaining a field ourselves, but I will keep these preferences in mind next summer.

Here are some additional comments from respondents:

“Fields were perfectly fine. Climate control was rough.”

“Definitely loved outside games”

“I’d be happy to play on grass too if it’s decent quality. LBP was a lower quality pitch, but I was still happy to play outside there.”

“While I enjoy playing outdoors in the nice summer weather, the fact that we did not need to cancel any games was a bonus. I’m open to whatever works!”

We also asked the Sunday teams their opinion on moving from all grass at Ben Franklin/Craig Henry Park to being 60% at Algonquin Turf for the summer. Responses were generally positive.

Here are a few added comments:

“The location was great for my team!”

“Turf quality was great. Algonquin turf was as good as Lees turf, and way better than Franco Cite turf.”

“Sucks when playing keeper, you really get scratched up.”

We asked two bonus questions – an open space for additional feedback and a section for any new sports leagues you’re looking for. Here are some of the responses we received.

Sports:

“hockey!”

“Summer beach volleyball!”

“A dodgeball league for fall and winter, on Tuesday or Wednesday in downtown Ottawa”

“Women’s hockey”

“Ultimate Frisbee”

“ORS is mostly in the east end/downtown. If you don’t want to play on weekends there are no west options. It’s very difficult for people coming from the west end to make early games.”

“Casual basketball. I love the sport but I’d like to play in a relaxed environment.”

“Please keep going with the training league – I’ve referred a few people there who want to get better before joining my team!”

“Cool question. Honestly? If you could figure out a way to do archery, I think a lot of people would be into it”

“Pickleball would be so much fun!”

“Squash, handball, padel, ultimate frisbee”

“Multi Sports in West End”

“Would there be an appetite for an actual ball hockey league (wood sticks, hard(er) balls?) I play pickup with friends, and I played some mens leagues years ago that were pretty rough. Hat Trick Ball Hockey has a pretty big league, and pick-up nights too.”

“Bowling maybe? or badminton”

“West end sports of pretty much any kind.”

Response: Definitely have our mind on pickup basketball, West end sports, and continuing training. We are a long way from going into hockey, as that sport requires really good ice contracts. Ultimate is possible eventually.

Oh and we have pickleball, come try it out!

Additional Feedback:

“Hate the 4 fields with no netting in between.”

“Games never started on time and pop up nets need to go.”

“In addition I felt the field was over packed making parking an issue most of the games. It was much nicer when only 3 games were happening at a given time.”

“The four quadrant set up at Lees field was quite frustrating, creating stoppages and chaos frequently.”

“My biggest complaint for the summer season was having the 4th field squeezed in, the amount of time wasted with the ball from all the other fields interfering with the play was ridiculous, also the terrible nets was another big issue the whole team had… for the most part the games were friendly but seemed to get out of hand when refs weren’t putting the effort in calling people out and making sure that the unnecessary elbows and pushing was stop immediately…”

Response: The frustration with the four fields at Lees is understandable. We originally switched to this format because the University hadn’t completed netting on the side of the field facing the highway, and they didn’t want people shooting towards the highway.

Post pandemic with the netting now in place, it is lot of work for staff to do four fields. They are all the same size as the three field format, but there is inevitably more cross-ball confusion. In our early years we would setup barriers in the center of the field, but that takes a lot of work and lifting as well.

The only argument I will make in defense of the four fields is that it reduces the price per team and improves competitive balance. If you can imagine the Wednesday league reducing from 16 teams to 12, it becomes much more likely that there are a few teams at the top or bottom that are too strong or too weak to compete. More teams means more variety and depth of competition.

But we could increase the price about 25% and return to 3 fields and it would be mostly fine. We will discuss this again next summer. If we continue with 4 fields, we will absolutely retire the Bownets for another set of steel nets, and we will see if there’s any simple ball barrier setup we could add.

The other problem is the expansion of the UofO building next to Lees has reduced the parking, making fitting 8 teams worth of cars there sometimes impossible. I do not know if they have any plans to improve that yet.

“The indoor fields for fall/winter soccer are really hard to get to without a car, if there is any field closer to downtown/more accessible it would be great for the future”

“Inside soccer during cold season need to be organized near or at downtown Ottawa to be centralized and accessible. Keep up the great organization, this is a fun league!”

“Again, would love some weekday west end soccer. I’m not available to play on weekends and it’s not possible for me to make the 6pm games at Louis Riel/its 30+ minutes without traffic. Hoping some more west options pop up.”

“I and many of my friends live in Barrhaven, and most games happen either downtown or towards the east end. I would love to play more, but it’s not feasible for me to drive 30-45 minutes each way for a game every week.
Also, about the refs, there were multiple occasions were refs were rude to me even though I am very cordial with them and have never complained about a call. There were also a couple of no-shows and way too many late starts. I pay for 90 minutes but between late starts and early finishes (and breaks which are necessary) many games only had 70 minutes of play time.”

“Thanks for the great season! One note is to please look for venues that people can use public transit to get to. The games we had that were rescheduled to Louis Riel we often had players who couldn’t come simply because they couldn’t get there without having a vehicle.
We also lost a player anytime the games were indoors due to covid concerns. So ideally for outdoor leagues any replacements are at outdoor fields. Real grass is fine in my opinion! Actually for that matter, if you can find cheaper and more central grass fields I bet there would be a lot of interest.”

Response: This is a tough one, I am always hunting for downtown venues, as I know they’re the only ones accessible to friend groups all over the city. But the venues are limited and the contracts are hard to acquire. This and expanding to more cheap west end space are definitely in our goals.

I generally recommend anyone who can’t access the east fields look at our gym league options, right now our volleyball leagues are all downtown Monday, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. I’d be happy to add recreational gym soccer to this grouping, but in the past that has attracted only very competitive male players.

“Some teams had much larger rosters (almost enough for 2 teams) thus giving them a lot more substitutions. We had to forfeit games due to insufficient players and were not able to find subs in time”

“1) I find a lot of teams call up subs, even if they have 1 sub. The subs, not surprising, are often really good/competitive players. Even if our team has 1 sub, we don’t call up extra players. It would be nice if this was more regulated.”

“My only feedback would be how skilled the teams are, as in their high quality of play. There are so many really good players. Which is great but at the same time, as a basic player, it is intimidating. I regularly feel like I’m playing way over my skill level. I assume it’s because players just want to play soccer and will sign up in the 2 divisions. But yeah, it can be a bit much when I just want to play and not feel like I’m in their way.”

Response: Stricter subbing rules and a better way to check players levels are the right fit for their placement are a big priority for us in our next tech upgrade. We realize it’s causing a lot of frustration where teams don’t find their matches fair, and the refs don’t have the tools/power to resolve it. We are wrestling with finding a clean solution that doesn’t lead to slower game starts or more delays/disputes.

“Plays resulting in an injury should automatically lead to AT LEAST a yellow card. Even if unintentional. Drawing blood should automatically be a red card no matter what. It’s rec ffs, nobody needs to aggressively tackle to the point of injuring the opponent. Refs letting people continue to play without even a hint of recourse (in 90% of the cases) after an opposing player has to walk/get carried off the field is very disappointing.”

Response: I agree that anything reckless/dangerous should either result in a card or the player should be pulled aside by the ref and given a warning/direction. I don’t believe in automatic yellows for players drawing blood, as two identical, accidental fouls can have opposite outcomes. We want refs to punish the moment they see someone who is playing too recklessly for the level or makes a foul where they have no angle on the ball, but if the player is reckless because they lack the underlying skills to move around properly, not due to malice, then they should be given guidance by the refs and by their teammates first.

Please do not overbook the teams sessions. Having multiple breaks throughout the summer and then having to do double headers was awful and not enjoyable.

“I also didn’t like the schedule where my team was off for an entire week just to play two games back to back 2 weeks after. It seems that there are always too many teams participating.”

Response: This is a fair complaint. It’s my intention not to overbook the fields again, as the byes/doubles and added fields were hard on the staff and the teams. We have implemented a preregistration system so that when we hit the cap/cutoff everyone will understand if they registered too slowly. Occasionally byes will still be needed when there are forfeits/reschedules but we should not be baking them into the system just to fit more teams in.

“the organization seems pretty gender bias, figure out your inclusion for non-binary and make it a more welcoming environment”

Response: My outlook is that everyone anywhere should be allowed to be a part of our community regardless of race, religion, gender, skill level, beliefs, etc. The only thing we discriminate based on is age, and that you are capable of playing safely in the community while treating teammates, opponents and refs with respect.  Gender is a complex issue that hits a number of triggers across society, particularly in sports, so how we handle every dispute will be a case-by-case discussion. If you see something you think we could be doing better please always feel welcome to reach out to me directly to discuss it.

Here a few other positive comments we received that didn’t need a direct response, but thank you to all those that left them, we will pass them on to our staff and we appreciate it!

“Just a thank you for the work you do. It provides my friends and I opportunity to see each other once a week, and play the game that we all love together. And your dedication to make the league as friendly and safe as possible is apparent and very appreciated. :)”

“shoutout to Z – he’s awesome and such a great help in the league! thanks!”

“Had a really positive experience, thank you!”

“I really enjoy the efforts made to check up on the teams weekly and the rating system is great. Though some teams may have a different definition of what counts as 5 star game, I think the added description at the bottom will hopefully help. This league is fantastic, keep it up!!!”

“These games were easily a highlight in my week. Thank you for the great work you do in bringing sports to the community, and for creating a safe and respectful atmosphere around the games. Serious respect!”

“I’ve been a part of Ottawa Rec league for over 5 years and consider it the best league from the staff to the players.”

“Love you guys”

“Great league! Everyone’s friendly and are all out to having fun!”

“Honestly it’s an awesome league after 2.5 seasons! Any of the “how would you rate” questions would be comparing my experience with OSSC over the years. OSSC was either self-officiated, or eventually just had a staff member to be there for questions with multiple soccer fields / volleyball courts / etc. Nothing wrong with that approach, but especially considering ORS multi-sports is a new sport every week, having someone there to teach the rules before and during the game is great.”

Thank you everyone for participating, it was extremely helpful and we will get this information out to staff to process as we make adjustments over the next year. Take Care!