2 April update
Kia ora koutou junior grades,
Welcome to the 2026 season, and many thanks for getting your registrations in early! This helps us to work out overall numbers in each grade, and get a handle on the number and make-up of the teams, especially with the WOF 2.0 changes coming this year.
This email is the first of a number that you’ll be receiving, to give you an update on key dates between now and our season start, on the weekend of 1-2 May. We will be keeping our grade information updated on the website as we get closer to the season starting as well. This includes playing days, times and formats. Note all in-house games take place at Keith Hay Park, on either the northern fields (5th-9th grade) or the southern fields (10th-12th grade). Note also that 8th and 9th grades play on Friday evenings, other games are on Saturday mornings.
Once you’ve registered, our amazing grade coordinator team will be managing allocation of players into teams. We can only allocate players who have registered and paid via the AUFC website (https://www.aucklandunitedfc.org.nz/junior-registrations). If you know of some of your friends from last year who haven’t yet registered, please ensure you remind them! Especially if you want to keep past teammates together - we do our best to match up friends and past teams, but again this can only be done with registered players, and is first-come first-served, until we hit team capacity. We do have maximum numbers of players in each team, to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance to play on pitch. We will include enough for substitutes, as inevitably teams will have absences over the course of the season.
Our grade coordinators will be using the next couple of weeks to compile teams. We’ll be sending out team announcement emails around mid-April. Each team will get a team list, and a team whatsapp group to coordinate your communications. Each team (6th-12th grade) will need a team manager to help coordinate, and game day leaders (6th-9th grade) and/or team coaches (10th-12th grade).
In late April we will be holding an information evening at the AUFC clubhouse, for managers, coaches and game day leaders. We will go through expectations for the season, how each week is managed, and we will provide each team with an AUFC-issued gear bag, with coaches pack, game day ball, cones etc. This will need to be signed out, and back in at the end of the season. More information on this will be sent out in mid April with your team information. At this stage we are targeting Tuesday 28th April, with specific times to be confirmed.
Note that each player should have their own ball - guidance on the ball size for each grade can be found in the grade information on the website.
If you have any other questions in the meantime then please feel free to email me, or your grade coordinator (contact email in the grade information page). We are one of the largest junior programs in the country - already we have over 500 in-house registrations, and generally end up with around 800 by the time we start the season! Our grade coordinator team are all volunteers, so please give us a bit of time to answer any questions you might have.
Thanks, and look forward to seeing you at Keith Hay Park very soon!
Ngā mihi,
Stephen & the Junior Grade Coordinator team
