Tag: Super Sunday

by Mike Birchall

THE 100 CLUB!

We are roughly 6 weeks away from marking a significant milestone of 5 years in business, but before we get to celebrate that, we have something else to feel pretty pleased about.

Having recently restarted a number of our league seasons across our two venues, and having been in a position to add extra teams to each of these leagues, we have hit triple digits in our league team numbers for the first time!

To be able to say that we now have 103 teams across our 6 leagues feels like a significant achievement, and should certainly cement our position as a major player in the small sided football game in the Stockport area! Hopefully a few of you will see that number and realise just how many teams we have to juggle around on a weekly basis!

If you have been with us or were with us since day 1, we couldn’t have done it without you and we’re so grateful to you all. If you’ve only recently discovered us and are part of the new batch of teams, we’re glad you were able to find us as we continue to build our dynasty. Every piece of social media commenting, liking or sharing has helped us keep spreading the word, as we don’t exactly have a massive advertising budget, so if you could all continue to do your part it would be appreciated.

Potential further venues could be in the pipeline going forward, so it’s time to start aiming at 200…!

by Mike Birchall

SUNDAY LEAGUE – AN UPDATE

To all Sunday league teams,

The last few weeks have seen numerous disruptions to what seemed like being an extremely competitive Sunday league season. It’s reached a point where we want to give you a little update as to how the league, and in particular your division, is currently up to.

When the season started, we’d made it to 5 divisions, we’d worked out how we were going to cope with teams wanting later or earlier kick off times, and we were feeling fairly pleased with ourselves. However, there have been very few ‘clear’ weeks where we would realistically have a chance that all teams could play. We know that we have some teams that will field a team, no matter the occasion, but we also acknowledge that not everyone is in a position to put a game of 6-a-side on a Sunday evening above all else in their lives. On week 1 we had to cope with the final day of the Premier league season, with fans back in stadiums and City lifting the trophy. Week 2 saw the bank holiday, week 3 was fairly clear, and on week 4 we had England playing. We’ve even had Fathers Day, then the Euros Final! These are things we just have to cope with, but it will go some way to explaining the difference in the number of games certain teams have played. Every season we expect teams to play 10 league games in a 12 week period, we expect that this season may be slightly longer. We would always rather have leagues decided on games played, rather than forfeit wins, but we know seasons can’t go on forever and we don’t want those teams who smash out their 10 games in 10 weeks having to play 4 weeks of friendlies while everyone else catches up!

Fingers crossed, all the major issues are now behind us until the new Premier League season kicks off, so we need to make some headway into getting this season back on track!

Here’s a quick breakdown of the how each division is currently looking, and the issues that have faced teams so far.

PREMIERSHIP

Despite telling us the lads were keen to carry on, Dunno 2.0 dropped out of the league before they had kicked a ball, leaving a space in the top division. Top division gaps are notoriously difficult to fill once we’re into a season, as it takes a team that fancies their chances to step up to the top flight straightaway. This past week we have found such a team, but with them joining so far into the season they will play just one round of fixtures. This means all the other teams in the league will finish their season having played 9 games, and the new team playing 5.

CHAMPIONSHIP

Long standing Bangers & Pash left us just before the season started, meaning we had a space heading into the season. After a heavy defeat in their opening game, we had to drop The McMuffin Men down a level in order for them to be able to continue. This has left the Championship with 4 teams for a while, but we have now filled both of those spaces. With one new team taking over The McMuffin Men’s fixtures, there’s a chance they could play all of their remaining games. The other new team will play one round of games, again meaning that most of the teams will finish their season having played 9 games.

LEAGUE ONE NORTH

This division has been mostly fine, there’s just a couple of teams who could really do with getting some games played in the coming weeks…! The McMuffin Men jumped in after the first week, and It Wasn’t A Foul FC came in when Team Tom dropped into League Two in order to give them a chance to survive.

LEAGUE ONE SOUTH

No major issues here either. Cale Green Canaries joined us a few weeks ago to replace Making Emile Of It, who dropped out after the first game, but they will be on course to complete the remaining fixtures.

LEAGUE TWO

This is where we got greedy… With teams waiting to join, we added two extra teams to League Two after the first week, with the idea being that all teams play each other once, then the league splits in two with the top 4 and bottom 4 playing each other for a second time to make a 10 game season. Pathetico Madrid dropped out early, and have only recently been replaced by Exeter Gently. But with Exeter being 4 games behind Holland FC, who have played every available week, it’s doubtful that we’ll be able to get them to catch up all of their missed games before we have to split the league. Our priority is to establish a top 4 and bottom 4 in the next couple of weeks so we can get the second part of the season started without having to make some teams wait around.

So there we have it. There is a chance that if all of the top places in each division are clear and sorted before everyone has played their fixtures, we may even call the season a little early so we can get the new one set up, but that depends on the results of upcoming fixtures!

If you have any questions about your division, or your team, feel free to ask away. Whatever patience you can show while we try and get certain teams caught up over the next few weeks would be very much appreciated.

by Mike Birchall

BALLERS RE-ASSEMBLE!

It’s almost time for us to wheel out all the ‘Sixes’ related puns again (we’re bringing sixy back, let’s talk about six, baby etc etc)!

From today, Monday 1st March, we are back on it! We’ve taken the opportunity during the latest lock down to have a break, do some housework etc, but from today we will be regularly checking the Ballers phone and social media pages. We’ll work out where we were at the time of lock down, work out what league spaces we have to offer, and try and make sure they are filled in time for the return! If you weren’t playing with us at the time of lock down, you best get onto us quickly as spaces will be extremely limited.

As things stand we are due to start back on Monday 29th March at Reddish, and Wednesday 31st March at Woodley.

All leagues will continue from where they left off, so you don’t need to worry about losing whatever progress you had made at the time of lock down.

As we receive any further updates on the protocol surrounding covid measures, we’ll be sure to let everyone know.

We haven’t completely switched off during the lock down, as work has continued on what will become our BRAND NEW WEBSITE, which will hopefully contain enough new aspects to keep even the hardiest of geeks happy!

With gyms, pubs and restaurants remaining closed, and crowds still unable to attend football matches, this is your best bet for catching up with the boys…

Don’t hang around!

by Mike Birchall

TUESDAY LONGIES LADDER LEAGUES!

Here’s something new…

As we don’t know how much longer it will be before we can get back to full contact football, there is no point in setting up any more standard Longies Leagues, so here’s one that can run until we get the ok to start up again.

LADDER LEAGUE – How it will work!

  • Games kick off at 8pm every Tuesday, from 7th July
  • Maximum of 6 teams per week (first 6 to register play on the first week and have first ‘dibs’ on the second week, but new teams can join if spaces come up)
  • Each team will play 5x 8 minute games (2 mins between games = 1 hour total)
  • Pitch 1 is the top of the ladder, pitch 3 is bottom
  • If you win your game, you move up the ladder, lose and you drop down. Win on pitch 1 and stay at the top of the ladder, lose on pitch 3, stay bottom!
  • Win the final game of the 6 on the top pitch, and you win that week’s tournament!
  • All 6 teams will get points from 6-1 depending on where they end the night (winners get 6 points, losers of the last game on the bottom pitch get 1)
  • In the event of drawn games, the team that scores first is declared the winner. We have plans for deciding winners of games that finish 0-0…
  • Teams who lost their previous game will kick off, giving them that very slight advantage
  • To increase the pace and intensity of the shorter game, the time for each team to get their shot off is reduced to 5 seconds from first touch. If you fail to do that, the ball is returned to your opposition.
  • All other rules remain as per the standard Longies rules
  • We will play until the lockdown allows full contact football again, then the team with the most points will be the LONGIES LADDER LEAGUE WINNERS!

The league will start next week as long as we have 6 teams ready to go. Get in touch to reserve your place.

by Mike Birchall

SOMETHING NEW! TEAM PROFILE VIDEOS!

⚽🆕SOMETHING NEW!🆕⚽

We hinted at this last week on our social media channels, but here we go!


Following discussions with Alex at Viaduct Video, our Ballers promo video is going to be made up of INDIVIDUAL TEAM PROFILE VIDEOS! The first of which will be filmed NEXT MONTH.

For the first one, we are looking for a team made up of lads who are mostly aged 21 or under, who have been with us for at least a year, and already have or are currently due a set of Ballers loyalty shirts (which we will make sure we get ordered before the night of filming).

We’ve got some teams in mind, but if you genuinely would love to be the first team involved, get in touch and let us know. The profile will involve:

⚽ A team interview before a game (would involve your team getting to us an hour earlier one night)

⚽ The filming of your game, potentially with a player or two mic’d up to catch some of the in game chat

⚽ Quick post match interview with individuals after the game

Alex will then trawl through the footage and put together a kick ass final video which we’ll use to promote Brand Ballers!

We’ll be doing two more team profile videos at a later date (hopefully quite soon after), and these three will go towards completing the full promo video.

That won’t be the end of it though, as team profile videos will become part of what we offer up to our long standing teams as time goes by…!

by Mike Birchall

BRAND NEW SUNDAY LEAGUE – THE FORMAT

We’ve had a little play with the format in the Sunday league in recent seasons in an attempt to accommodate all teams who wanted to take part while also attempting to expand the league where we can.

At times this has meant we have had some divisions containing 6 teams, playing each other twice, while others have contained 8 teams, with the division being cut in half after everyone had played each other once. Both of these formats meant that the season remained at 10 weeks in length, but to be honest it started getting quite messy last season.

The other issue we have is that with kick off times that vary from 5.30pm to 8.30pm, we have a number of teams who want / can only do early games, while others only want / can do later ones. Having these teams in the same division can cause nightmares…

So, here’s our plan for the new season:

DIVISION SIZE

The 8 team division experiment is OVER. We are going to limit the Sunday league to 4 divisions of 6 going forward, unless we have an influx of teams that could make up an entire extra division.

KICK OFF TIME ISSUES

We think we’re being dead clever here… Of the 4 divisions we currently have, the top division will be the top division, the bottom division will be the bottom division and the teams in those divisions will still have to play the variety of kick off times (though we will do what we can to accommodate). The two divisions in the middle will effectively become two ‘Championships.’ One of these Championships will primarily have earlier games, the other will primarily have later games. This won’t be an exact science, but will only be used to try and accommodate those teams that specifically struggle for the earlier or later games. This will make it a lot easier for us to schedule games in general, but also easier for us to give the teams what they want.

Fingers crossed for a strong Autumn 2019 season!

THE BRAND NEW SUNDAY LEAGUE KICKS OFF ON 22ND SEPTEMBER – GET IN TOUCH FOR DETAILS!