Noon Hour Soccer at Queen’s University

For more than twenty years or so members of the Queen’s and Kingston communities have been getting together weekdays at noon to have a friendly game of pick-up soccer in front of the Frontenac County Court House. It’s great fun and any soccer player with the right attitude is welcome to join in. In the winter time we play indoors in one of the gyms at the Queen’s University Physical Education Center. For the last couple of years the Noon Hour soccer’s benevolent dictator (aka., The Commissioner, affectionately known as the Commish) has been Mike Smith.

Sometimes It’s Magic

Since January of 1999, about twenty of us have signed up to play at The Dome (Quarry Sportsplex, originally known as Soccer Magic) once every two weeks during the indoor season. Attendance is sometimes open to guests by invitation or special arrangement. Subscriptions are managed by The Commish and when there’s an opening he’ll announce the vacancy on our mailing list.

Nooners-L – The Mailing List

In December of 1997, The Commish created an electronic mailing list for the noon hour group. The following brief history and background of the group is taken from the introduction to the mailing list.

History

Sometime in the early 1970’s, the Computing Center/Computing Science Dept. entered a team in the Queen’s Grad League. After a few games, the ringleaders suggested the team might benefit from practice. The most convenient time and place for these practices was noon hour on the Cricket Field in front of the Courthouse. Grad League has always suffered from a too short season and anyway, the practices were more fun and less violent than the League. So the Computing Grad League team didn’t last but the Noon Hour Soccer Crowd has thrived uninterrupted for more than 25 years. In the 1970’s, games were Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from May to November. In the early 1980’s the schedule expanded to five days a week, 52 weeks a year, with the indoor season being approximately six months, November through April.

Do You Belong?

Here are the qualities of a successful noon hour soccer player:

1. A thick skin. You will be ridiculed. Your family and/or your high school soccer coach may think you are a god. We don’t.
2. A willingness to play by our rules. This is not as easy as it sounds because our rules are not written down. Thus, you have to play for at least a decade before you are likely to hear all the rules. This sometimes leads neophytes to conclude that the rules are arbitrary and unfair. This is not true. If you start to feel this way, it is best to wait a decade before complaining. Otherwise, you will likely embarrass yourself by revealing your ignorance.
3. A desire to play soccer. If you have the first two qualities you don’t need much skill to survive but you do need to want to play the game. Mostly this amounts to running after and kicking a soccer ball and not using your hands. However, your desire must be tempered by humility. We disallow aggressive play such as slide tackling and tend to heap abuse on people who forget this is a recreational game.

Why Nooners-L?

Most of the people playing noon hour soccer are somehow affiliated with Queen’s (student, staff, faculty, or alumni) and generally have e-mail. Thus, for many years, the easiest way to notify players of schedule changes or special events was electronically. In the past, this was largely the responsibility of the Commissioner because he maintained the e-mail distribution list. Occasionally, somebody would mail the Commissioner something along with a request to “please distribute this to the list”. This was not a big problem but clearly inefficient. So the main reason for creating Nooners-L was to let each of you post information directly to all of the current noon hour soccer crowd without going through the Commissioner or maintaining your own mailing list.

Here’s a quick summary of what you need to know to participate in the mailing list.