Dear AYSO Parents,

This has been an enormously stressful period for all of us, and we cannot wait to have the kids back on the field playing soccer! Your AYSO board is working hard on the new season, and we are delighted to announce that REGISTRATION IS OPEN now through February 26.

We are all hoping that our daily lives can return to normal sooner rather than later, as the COVID vaccine becomes more available. However, we need all our parents and players to understand that our season will operate under the COVID guidelines set forth by the PA Department of Health, AYSO, and the CDC. When you register your child with us, you are agreeing to abide by these rules, including but not limited to the following:

• Mask regulations. If regulations stay the same as they are now, players will not have to wear masks when they’re on the field, but they will on the sidelines. Coaches will also need to wear masks during practices and games, and parents will need to wear masks on the sidelines. Again, we hope this will change, but we need for you to be prepared for this possibility. We will communicate what the rules are. Please do not make your board police them.
• Limits on attendance at practices and games. Currently, only 250 people can gather for an outdoor event. We are working to schedule our practices and games to minimize the number of people to follow this guideline, but this MAY mean we will need to ask, for example, that only one parent comes to games.

Other things we need for you to know:

• We’ll do our best, but teams may not be as balanced this year. Our goal is to balance teams by athletic talent. We don’t always succeed for a number of reasons, but this year will be especially hard because coaches haven’t seen returning players in two years – kids grow and develop at different rates.
• Concession stand may be different. As things are now, we will only be able to sell drinks and packaged food like candy and snacks, no homemade or cooked food.
• We don’t yet know how much we’ll be able to travel. Our older teams travel to play other nearby regions. We don’t yet know if all neighboring regions are planning a spring season.
• Limitations on crowd size and traveling may influence how many games we play. We will do our best for kids to play as many games as they typically do, but a slight reduction may be necessary because of crowd restrictions and/or fewer traveling regions.
• Tournaments are an open question. We don’t yet know if crowd restrictions will be eased enough for traditional AYSO tournaments. If tournaments are not possible, we are committed to developing an alternative for players who want to experience a more competitive form of AYSO soccer.

At the moment, due to COVID, we are not planning in-person registrations. Please let us know if you have trouble registering your child, and we’ll do our best to help.

Welcome back to AYSO!