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Community Corner

An Open Letter to the Local Youth Soccer Clubs and Parents from the ABSC Board of Directors

For many years, kids from the Albany Berkeley Soccer Club (ABSC) have played soccer with kids from El Cerrito, San Pablo and Richmond.  The local soccer clubs created a league known as Alameda Contra Costa Youth Soccer League (ACCYSL) to coordinate activities for the clubs such as game scheduling and referee assignments.

Over time, however, ACCYSL’s complex formula for assigning fees to each club has caused an imbalance - ABSC has been spending far too much of its budget on league activities and not benefiting sufficiently from those activities.  After months of asking the league to help us ‘level the playing field’ with no meaningful response, we decided our best course of action was to stop participating in ACCYSL.

In the last few weeks, the ABSC Board at has received questions about our planned changes for this soccer season.  We are sensitive to the fact that this decision could potentially have an influence on your child’s soccer experience.  However, we strongly feel that problems among adults should not affect the kids.  Although we are not participating with ACCYSL there is no reason we cannot continue playing together as we’ve done for many years.  We are currently forming playing flights for all of our recreational soccer teams.  If any of the local clubs, El Cerrito Football Club, Richmond United, San Pablo United, Mersey, etc., would like their teams to play ours, we welcome you, unambiguously and with open arms.  All of the kids in each of these clubs can continue to benefit from playing other local kids, on local fields, and with minimal travel.  We would very much like to continue having our teams playing teams from the neighboring cities and clubs.

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If you have questions about any of this please talk to your club leadership and feel free to contact us as well.  (All of our staff and board's contact information can be found at our website – http://abscsoccer.com )  Game schedules for the spring season are nearly finalized but there is still a short window to make changes.

 ABSC is made up of more than 1,600 kids and more than 1,000 member families.  We’ve been providing kids’ soccer in this community since 1975.  It’s our passion, it’s what we do well, and we look forward to playing soccer with your kids for years to come.  Come play with us!

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Thanks,

ABSC Board of Directors

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