Dear Parents,

Please read this letter for important information about the St. Luke’s Upward program. The link to the registration form is at the bottom of this letter.

ALL SOCCER PLAYER REGISTRATIONS ARE CONTINGENT ON THE AVAILABILITY OF COACHES!

Welcome to the 2008 Upward Soccer Program. This league is very different from other sports programs. The Upward Sports Ministry introduces children to Jesus Christ by creating opportunities to serve through sports. The fundamentals of soccer will be taught to your child, but an emphasis will be placed on sportsmanship, team work and being Christ-like.

As a ministry Upward Soccer is designed to involve the whole family in a community of learning and support. Everyone who helps to create this league is a volunteer and the more volunteers there are the easier it is to do a great job of ministering to the children. Without enough volunteer help it will be impossible to even put the league together. So please consider how and where you can help. 

We are always looking for coaches and referees! Even if you have never coached or played soccer, we will provide a detailed training session, coach’s book, DVD, and much more. We will also try to place first-time coaches with a “veteran” coach. We want to accommodate all of your children, and this largely depends on the number of coaches that we have to assign to all of the teams. We will need at least 100 coaches this year to make this season a success. We hope that you will prayerfully consider helping the Upward Ministry Team build a successful Upward Soccer season.

Team practices are arranged according to coaches’ availability. On the registration form you are asked to select one day your child cannot practice. If you circle more than one, then the first day you choose will be put in the computer selection process (the program only allows us to enter one day) unless we reach you by phone. We will always try to work with everyone, but with more than 300 players it can become cumbersome to put every player on a desired team on a desired night of practice. .

Teams are drafted using an Upward Sports computer program that assigns players to teams according to their evaluation scores and heights. This is done in order to create teams of overall equal playing ability. When we move players around using other parameters such as carpool requests, team scores become skewed and the league suffers. Over the past few years, our league has grown tremendously and it is almost impossible to honor every player request to be on a specific team. Therefore, to keep with the integrity of the program, the car pool request will not be shown on the registration form. We will try to avoid problems ahead of time by calling you to clarify your child’s registration form when necessary, but if your child has been put on a team with a practice day that is not suitable, please call the Upward Hotline at 407.876.4991, ext 312 or email at upward@st.lukes.org.

Thank you for sharing your children in this very special sports program,

The Upward Ministry Team

Soccer Registration Form