Richard's Blog

 Archive for the ‘Soccer’ Category

Where I live in New York City- its very hard to get fields for youth soccer and other sports. Virtually any decent field needs a permit.

The big weekend soccer league is West Side Soccer League (which actually has players from all over Manhattan – not just the West Side). And games are played at numerous fields on the west side, central park and even Randall’s Island which is about 30 minutes or so from the West Side.

My daughters are on a team which as of the end of October will have played one game (which one daughter missed due to a fever).

They have had 4 scheduled games and 3 of them were rained out. This is because they are scheduled to play on North Meadow in Central Park on what is considered one of the nicest, newest grass fields (not compared to suburban fields – but its grass and this is New York City) – so the threshold for canceling a game seems like any water.

The game canceled yesterday was from Saturdays rain and Sunday was one of the nicest games of the year. From the league website:

Some good soccer this weekend, just not on North Meadow.
Sorry to the kids who were unable to play.
Hoping for sun for the rest of the season

There are other fields played on Turf which never get canceled. When my son played soccer -I remember reffing games when the weather was 40 degreees and windy and rain. But they didn’t care about the field – so the game could be played.

I asked the league commissioner if anyone had done any data analysis of what fields have gotten rained out historically – to see if they should be rotating teams between fields rather than scheduling each team on only one field for the entire season.

They said they hadn’t looked at this data.

My point isn’t that whether or not a soccer game is played or not is so important – but what continually strikes me is the lack of data and quantitative analysis going into everyday decisions. People are conditioned in many cases to not think quantitatively and analytically in making decisions.

I wonder as we move forward – and have data like that is available from Therap and other systems in other parts of life- when will data analysis become a more accepted part of all decision making and discussions.