John Teixeira playing kickball for OUT Sports League. (Photo courtesy John Teixeira)
ORLANDO | OUT Sports League is adding the world’s most popular sport to its next season.
OUT Sports will launch its soccer league April 4 with an eight-week inaugural season. Games will take place every Tuesday from April 4-May 23 at 6:30, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. at Barnett Park Softball Fields.
The first season is limited to six co-ed teams of 15 players each and will be a mix-up season in which all players will be registered as “free agents” and will be assigned to the teams ensuring each team contains players of varying skill levels.
“Soccer came about because players from the other sports kept asking me when I am going to start a soccer league,” says John Teixeira, commissioner and founder of OUT Sports League. “Soccer is a popular professional sport in Orlando and there was a big appetite for it with our league.”
Soccer is one of five sports being offered through OUT Sports League this spring with the others being kickball, played every Saturday; dodgeball, played every Monday; cornhole, played every Wednesday; and beach volleyball, played every Friday during the season.
The league got its start when Teixeira, who originally is from Florida, moved back from New York City.
“I had gotten involved with a lot of gay sports leagues there, one in particular called Big Apple Rec Sports, which was fantastic — kickball, dodgeball, that sort of stuff,” he says. “I just loved it. It was great for me to meet people and be social and everything.”
So when Teixeira’s job brought him back to Central Florida in 2018, he wanted to continue using sports as a way to meet new people. After partnering with an outside organization to get started, Teixeira took over in 2021 officially launching OUT Sports League.
The league was started with the mission to “help LGBTQ Floridians meet and socialize through in-person recreational sports leagues that are affordable, fun and inclusive.” Its first sport, and still its most popular, was kickball.
“When I started the league, I started with kickball because, being selfish, I wanted to play kickball,” Teixeira says, laughing. “That first season we started, like we are starting now with soccer, with 90 players on six teams.”
OUT Sports’ kickball league is now up to 400 players. In total among all its sports, the league has had 1,400 players since September 2021. The league holds three eight-week seasons a year for most of the sports: a winter league that runs January-March, a spring league from April to May and a fall league fro0m October to December.
“We’ll do some stuff in the summer but you know how it is here; it’s raining a lot so it’s hard to do outdoor sports,” Teixeira says. “We’ll do dodgeball in the summer because it’s indoors, but otherwise it’s almost impossible to do the others.”
Each of the sport’s spring season, which is sponsored by Pineapple Healthcare, will start the first week of April except dodgeball: kickball starts on April 1 at Dr. James R. Smith Neighborhood Center Softball Fields, soccer on April 4 at Barnett Park Softball Fields, cornhole on April 5 at Island Time and beach volleyball on April 7 at the Festival Park Sand Volleyball Courts. Dodgeball will begin on May 1 at the Englewood Neighborhood Center. After each game, the teams will continue the socializing with meet ups at District Dive.
For more information on OUT Sports League, visit OUTSportsLeague.com.
