Sassco is a professionally organised 6-a-side League based in Sunderland. The games are played on artificial turf (AstroTurf or Omniturf to be precise) at Downhill Complex in North Sunderland.

5aside and 6aside teams within Sunderland, Newcastle, Washington, Gateshead and Durham, Tyne & Wear are welcome to join our 6-a-side competition. We are quite different to PowerLeague and other outdoor and indoor competitions. The rules are very close to 11-a-side games.

Joining a small sided league (be it 5-a-side or 6-a-side) is always going to be easier than joining an amateur 11-a-side league. With Sassco, we are very strict on kits and teams names. Sassco were founded to take 5-a-side and 6-a-side very seriously. The league is centred around the website and being a very visual league, the teams need to be fully kitted. This makes Sassco an impressive Northeast League. Durham County FA have also made several praising comments about the set up. The league is also regularly featured in the Sunderland Echo.

Recently, the organisers have begun to help teams by advising them to wear white shorts and socks and then receive tops per game. The organisers have stocks of white shorts and socks available in case any team needs spares.

About the site

The original site was a simple holding page created using PageMill in 1999. However, with expansion, it changed into a frame based site, with the contents produced in Word.

Eventually in 2004, the site was converted to Dreamweaver and frames were abandoned. The look and feel of the site was re-designed and the elements remain to this day. The site was also widened to increase to 800px wide and eventually 1000px wide to cater for the new monitors. The last width change was done in 2008.

A radical overhaul was done during the summer of 2009. The site was converted into a content management system website. The core software was the Open Source Joomla software.

The site is now fully automatic with the ability to generate new sections, menus and articles with ease. Also, the results system is now integrated. Prior to 2009, the League Tracker software was used to track results and the exported HTML was pasted into the Dreamweaver site. Now the JoomLeague software within Joomla generates tables based on results and team line ups. The section is very intuitive. For example, clicking on to the team names leads to other options such as team information, results, details of games at the venue and even maps showing the directions.

The archive sections are yet to be changed, but the new seasons on Tuesday, Wednesday as well as the sections on the 11-a-side and it's overseas tours to Malta and Portugal are all in the same format.

Other new facilities on the site include an in-built download section as well as a newer and more easier to use message board. The media section has also been revived with all the current videos available on one single video player.

About Sassco.co.uk

Sassco originally sprung up in the form of the Sunderland Football League back in 1998. I was then playing in a below par football league in Washington, playing against teams called "Craggy Island" and watching them turn up wearing trackies, jeans and god knows what else, anything apart from a decent kit. Only a few teams took it very seriously and my lot, Sunderland Retailers, was one of them. We were also getting charged around £18 a game as well. At the time I was working at Herrenknecht and myself and my colleague, Michael Booth, decided to set up a league ourselves as we were sure we could do much better. Learning modern internet techniques and blitzing the local areas with adverts, we eventually grasped 9 teams and the original Sunderland Football League was ready to go. The first ever game was my team, Herrenknecht, against Brian Gettins' Durham Pine team. It was a cracking game as John Hunt scored in the last minute with a disputed goal to equalise. An ideal start. Another team, Sporting Redhouse, eventually went on to win the league.

The second season saw an expansion and also the introduction of some very well organised teams. By this time, I had clamped down on the kit rule which saw all teams fully kitted without wearing odd coloured socks etc. It was a success. Royal Mail won both the league and cup and completely transformed the way 6-a-side teams prepared themselves, as they were the consumate professionals in an amateur league

Season 3 saw another expansion and also the introduction of Sunderland Select, a team which would dominate for Seasons 3, 4, 5 and 6. They bowed out and declined to enter Season 7, but individual players moved on to other teams. Season 7 was taken by Wearview Elite, while Season 8 saw Sporting Redhouse triumph containing a few key Select players as well as previous Sporting players. Season 9 saw Wearview Elite utterly dominate before retiring and Season 10, by far the most exciting to date, saw Southwick FC leapfrog the two other favourites, Hylton Castle and Redhouse Youth, to take the Title after a League Play Off.

During Season 3, the term "Sassco" had appeared, invented by John Hunt it means "Six a side soccer company". We had commenced a league on a Thursday night along with a Wednesday night league. The Thursday league saw a good opening season, but for some reason it didn’t have the staying power and eventually got abandoned after two seasons. The Wednesday league opened in excellent fashion but slowly declined due to John Hunt's lack of interest. The Thursday competition faded away due to work and time commitments, but was revived during the summer of 2006 as a mini experimental tournament. CNSC (as it's called) Season 4 contained four teams playing one hour games each. Hylton Castle took the first title in this one hour edition. The most 2007 edition saw an excellent mini-league with five entrants and Hylton Castle retaining the League while Sassco took the Cup. The 2008 edition saw Hylton retain the League again and Sporting winning in the Cup Final.

Since then, the league has suffered a decline. Stricter kit rules along with the general population being more uninterested in outdoor small sided football and, probably the main reason, the lack of leaders who are there to drive their teams on and off the field, has led to the decline. Nevertheless, despite the lack of teams, the league is still going strong and has expanded into Wednesday, temporarily replacing John Hunt's defunct Wednesday competition.

Summer 2009 saw AA Fabrications triumph in the League, but suprisingly outwitted by Sassco in the Final of the AGUK Cup where they lost on penalties. With only five teams in the cup, the future looked uncertain, but a total of eight teams came in and kicked of Season 14, with three teams coming in just a week before the kick off date.

The league has always had a sponsor. From JDI in Season 4, then AGUK for several seasons before BarPure taking over and currently BunkerUK.com. We also gain a huge amount of support from the Complex attendants, from Amanda Cantle, the overall controller of the complex, with Mark Banks at the start, then Si Williamson and now, Mickey Ames with Peter Newby.

Innovations in the league since 1999 have included a full website which is always updated and is now absolutely huge, containing all the archive records from seasons 1 to present as well as the Thursday leagues and the 11-a-side. Custom 70's styles footballs are also used in the league. We've also produced match video's now with technology available on DVD. Match report sheets, web reports, message boards, all pioneered back in 1999.

An 11-a-side team was a spin off from the six-a-side back in 2002. Made up of players exclusively from the 6-a-side leagues, the team had a difficult first season, dogged by financial worries in an expensive league. But a sponsorship deal with EMS Europe helped the funding and eventually the team levelled out with a core squad of some very loyal players. With two seasons behind us and an enforced break in 2004-2005, the team kicked of in the WCFL in August 2005 with the backing of global recruitment giant, Manpower. For 2006-2007, the new revived side, with sponsorship from Milltech (courtesy of Dave Watson) saw some superb results and a very content side who genuinely enjoyed their football.

In the 2007-2008 Season, the sponsor was MJS Claims (sourced by regular player, Dean Matthews). The team again finished mid-table in the lower division.In the 2008-2009 Season, the sponsor was iKobo. The team also finished in the top half of the table, but ultimately failed in it's goal of challenging for promotion.

Since then, the side has continuted in the WCFL and iKobo has become the first 11-a-side sponsor to renew it's deal with the team. The team also undertook it's first and ambitious overseas tour in Malta in 2008. It was such a success that another tour is well under preparation for Portugal in 2009 and tentative approachs have been made for one in France in 2010.

So, things are always looking up. It's safe to say that everyone is enjoying their involvement in Sassco, from the new teams in the 6-a-side to the regulars in the 11-a-side who've been there since the start.

The 6-a-side league is organised by Davinder Sangha, with assistance from Michael Ames and Peter Newby. Anthony Pearson is also an Assistant and Anthony Mouat is the regular referee.

The 11-a-side team is organised by Davinder Sangha, with key assistance from Marc McDermont, Simon Mulvaney, Anthony Pearson, Dave Gourlay and Mark Muers

Sassco - the name - was invented by John Hunt to encompass the various projects that the league had. Originally there was only the Tuesday football league, known as the Sunderland Football League, but since 1999, there have been leagues played on Wednesday (SNFL and then Red Fox League) and Thursday (CNFL and then CNSC League) evenings and also an 11-a-side team made up of key players in the various 6-a-side teams.

All the teams and leagues are based at the Community Sports Complex, more commonly known as the Downhill astroturf, located in North Sunderland. The overall control of the complex is with Amanda Cantle (based at the Seaburn Centre), but the complex is managed on a day-to-day basis by Peter Newby and Michael Ames.

Davinder Sangha
League Secretary, July 2009