Iowa Soccer State League (ISL)

State league

The Iowa Soccer State League (also known as ISL) is the highest level of competition for domestic league play in our pathway and league programming pathway and is guided by one overarching focus – player development. As such, all league programming strives to be in full alignment with US Soccer’s Player Development Initiatives (PDI’s). Additionally, given the importance of alignment in programming and competition standards from a player development perspective, Iowa Soccer must ensure teams, players and coaches are following US Youth Soccer rules and policies.

Principles of State League Scheduling

State League matches should be played as scheduled as there are a number of unique and challenging variables that have an impact on creating a schedule.  These include the top three principles that must be balanced in order to create a match-up and then schedule a time/date/field:

• Team availability
• Team blocks
• Field availability

Quite simply

• If two teams that should play each other are not available on a common date and at a common time, then the teams are unable to be scheduled to play each other. It is not unusual for this conflict to arise as a result of:
  • Coaches opting out of league weekend dates, creating fewer common dates.
  • Coaches blocking teams due to coaching assignments, creating fewer common dates and/or available kickoff times and creating additional difficulty to find the fields needed to accommodate.
  • Coaches blocking teams due to the teams sharing players, creating fewer common dates and/or available kickoff times and creating additional difficulty to find the fields needed to accommodate.
  • A combination of the above.
  • Extrapolate this out over hundreds of teams and hundreds of requests and it becomes a tough balancing act to put together good match-ups, and a good schedule.
• Likewise, if two teams are available on a common date, but there is no local and/or available field, it may not be possible to schedule those two teams against each other on the available date - although we do everything we can to find a place to play, even if both teams must get on the road to a neutral site (which then can create dissatisfaction with travel, but the alternative is that the game doesn't get scheduled).

• It is an exception! Sometimes an unavoidable circumstance arises and it is ONLY in that spirit that a reschedule is acceptable.
• The expectation is that clubs/coaches do not go outside the spirit of this narrow allowance and that all your games are played as scheduled.