Mission

Socster.com is about playing pickup soccer. It is about helping you find a game to play in, possibly even organizing a new one. It is about soccer for fun and fitness and community. It is about helping pickup soccer players find each other and play the game they love.

History

Socster.com is an outgrowth of the Pickup Soccer Games Page, which was first started back in 1992, or possibly even before that - and was linked (electronically and otherwise) with Sams Army. It was originally maintained by a couple of fellows - Chuck Black and Mark Wheeler - each taking care of it for several years. A copy of the original website is here.

In or around 1998, after using the site for more than a year ourselves, with occasional success, we asked the caretaker of the site if they wouldn't mind letting us have a go at it. We did our best but it certainly didn't live up to its potential. On two occassions we made strong efforts to get a new design out that would really help folks (like us!) find pickup soccer games easier, but neither time did we succeed in a relaunch (screenshot)- we stuck to manually updating the page with game listings. Of course, this led to a lot of stale information - especially contact information.

Fast forward to 2005 and we started playing (or, trying to play) pickup soccer again, and again we had trouble finding pickup games. So, we knew the time had come to finally do something with the site or try to hand it off to someone else who might do a better job of it. Finally, in early 2006, we re-launched the site as a Wiki, and it has been mildly successful. The major problem we had was structuring of data - with non-technical users having difficulty updating the site themselves. Clearly, the Wiki idea was a good one, but it was not going to be a fix-everything solution. So, a couple of months later we found ourselves with some spare time, a growing waistline, and once again, difficulty finding pickup soccer games - we decided to spend a couple of weeks getting something going. You're looking at the results, and we hope you find it useful.

Please drop us a line and let us know about your experiences with pickup soccer and with this website.