Why do I need to manually submit game reports?

From time to time we are asked why can’t you accept referee reports online, or use copies of those submitted on assigning sites. Often, this is accompanied by: “like the OYSA” or some other soccer organization.

OASA requires the referee report (which can come from one of the assignment sites as long as it provides us the information we need) and ROSTERS for each team.

The reason we need the rosters and other soccer organizations do not, has to do with the way OASA registers players – most soccer organizations, including OYSA, link a player to a team, thus TOM SMITH is registered to, and can only play for TEAM A.

So, on any given day TEAM A consists of the (usually 18 or less) players register to that team, and TOM SMITH can only play for TEAM A. For legal and insurance purposes you can assume that if TOM SMITH played on that date he played for TEAM A.

For reasons we won’t go into here, OASA does not register players to teams, we have over 6,000 registered players and any one of them could (given age, gender and certain other criteria) play on any one of our over 400 teams on any given day. OASA also does not limit the number of players on a roster (although some leagues do).

The only way we can determine who played on a given team on a given day is to have the teams provide rosters to the referee and to have the referee provide those rosters along with the game report to OASA. We need them to come in together so we can match them up. It is very important that players who were present are identified.

We continue to explore ideas to allow online referee reports, but the stumbling block is the need for rosters. We are not interested in changing our player registration system, but if you have other ideas about how OASA could allow online referee reports (and get the information we need, including a list of who played in a game) please contact our office.