Kisling's Tavern
HANGOVER UNITED
Soccer Club
Baltimore, Maryland USA - Est. 1995

The history – it all started at Household Bank in the Fall of 1994, when Steve Smith (brother of founder Greg) was working there with Brandt Ryder and Rob McDavid.  Steve and Rob started an indoor team at Perring Athletic Club and Anthony Menegatti joined them. So the following fall, Steve, Greg, Brandt and Rob figured they had enough to play outdoor so Greg signed up for a team with MMSL, and then they all started recruiting players. Brandt knew a lot of guys through other sports teams he was on and was the epicenter of the initial recruitment effort. Brandt brought in Bert Miller, Jason Rose, Pete Chesner who brought in Chris King and then it grew. The night the team name was born, was at a Mexican bar in Towson, MD. Greg, Steve, and Brandt were talking about the team name and that's when Brandt said "How about Team Hangover?" Another big Brandt Rider contribution to the team. And from there, Chris King came up with renaming us to "Hangover United" and he then designed the logo and then got us the sponsorship at Kislings Tavern.

One of the earliest examples of a game similar to football existed in ancient China. Documents reveal that around 200 BC a game called Tsu Chu (literally ’kick ball’) was played with two 30ft-high bamboo poles acting as goals.

The Greeks, for whom ball games were an essential party of life, played a form of football as early as 4 BC. The game was known as "pheninda" and involved kicking the ball, running with it and handling it.

The Romans followed the Greeks’ example and called their game "hapastum." This was played on a rectangular field, between two teams who defended the lines which marked the ends of the field. The object of the game was to throw the ball from player to player, moving forward all the time, and eventually to throw it beyond the opponents’ ’goal-line’. The defending side was allowed to tackle and kick.

There are other examples of early versions of the game evolving elsewhere around the world. In Japan, records show that around the fifth century AD a game called "Kemari," which involved eight players ceremonially kicking the ball back to one another across a ground 14 metres square.

In Italy a similar game was developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries called "Calcio" (calciare means to kick in Italian) which involved two sides playing in Florence’s town square on the feast day of St John the Baptist, the city’s patron saint.

The evolution of the game in England appears to have its roots in holy days. Written evidence confirms that in the twelfth century a game with a ball was played on Shrove Tuesday in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. On such occasions the whole town would get involved and the game could last for days. The purpose of the game was to gain possession of the ball and deliver it back to the town or parish. In many other places, Shrovetide football lasted until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the centuries English monarchs tried to ban this version of the game but Edward II, III, Richard II, Henry V and Elizabeth I were all unsuccessful in preventing the continued interest. In the eighteenth century, the game was taken up by the public schools (private institutions) who, realising the importance of team sport, invented their own versions of the game. By 1848 the first serious attempts were being made by Cambridge University to set up a common set of laws. Fifteen years later, The Football Association was founded (1863) and Association Football or "soccer" for short, the game that is played around the world today, was born.

The United States was the first British colony to start playing soccer-style games. Some form of football was played in the Colonies as far back as the establishment of the original Jamestown settlement in 1609. The rules are unclear, but they most likely resembled the sprawling Shrovetide games then popular in England. It was soon banned by ordinance as a reputed bad influence, and for the next two centuries appeared only in the least restricted of colonial communities.

The first written accounts of football in the US centered around contests in the major colleges and universities of the Northeast. The Freshman and Sophomore classes at Harvard had instituted an annual intramural football contest in 1827, played on the first Monday of the new school year. These games were evidently quite rowdy as the event was known as "Bloody Monday". Princeton played something known as "ballown" in which the ball was hit with the fist as well as the foot. By the 1840's, they had organized their games into intramural tournaments. Other forms of the game were played at Amherst and Brown. The game probably bore little resemblance to the modern game, and in fact the round (originally rubber) ball was not introduced until the 1850's, and games were either pick-up or special annual events.

The modern form of soccer originated in England in the early 1830's. The sport grew among working-class communities and was seen as a way of keeping young and energetic kids out of trouble at home and in the school; they could let off steam and learn the values of teamwork (rampant individualism was considered a problem at the time). The next major development in the USA was the establishment of a knock-out cup in 1871, based on the house competitions at Harrow School. These knockouts, in which most teams names are placed in a hat, and drawn out in pairs, then leading to a one-game knockout competition similar to the NCAA Championships, which culminates in a Cup trophy.

Organized Club Football