By Jason Pike
St John’s, NL – In its time that the NLSA start regionalization teams and programs? To truly grow soccer the way it needs to here in this province more specifically here on the Avalon Peninsula should they perhaps adopt the same formula that hockey has which is pretty much you have to play within the region you live or where you go to school.
This is done in youth hockey to prevent stacking teams or team jumping from region to region. Thus far it has damaged some programs that so much that now seem to cease to exist. The Fieldiens organization purged the Goulds Metropolitan soccer program and left it in shambles to the point where its now pretty much non-existent.
On the southern Shore as well where some of the top players in boys and girls programs now comprise Paradise Mount Pearl and St John’s on their PYL programs which has easily crippled what would potentially be great competitive teams for the southern Shore. But rather than developing better coaches and training I know for fact that the technical director has directed parents to send their kids elsewhere!
How can you develop a program like that when you’re getting the leftover kids who want to play soccer but end up getting demolished in games because the core of their teams have been donning the uniforms of other clubs.
And it keeps on happening Every year I see the exodus of even more players. It’s not fair to the program and it’s not fair to the kids.
When I once questioned why Southern Shore United didn’t have a PYL team and keep its players at home I was given the answer that you needed a certain class level of coaching to do so and they didn’t have that.
That should tell you right there where the problem lies. Isn’t it time that we take the coaches that you have and get them trained and get those coaching levels up so there would be a better chance of these young athletes staying with their home clubs and growing said clubs.
The same is true for what was a growing Goulds Metropolitan soccer program. The numbers were looking good and it looked like they were headed towards at least a Metro division team, hopefully, eventually would have graduated to Premier Youth League or Championship League. But the technical director at the time, who was also a coach at the Fieldians program, was funnelling players in that direction. A few short years later the program ceased to exist and all those players that were coming up through lost interest and stopped playing or moved on to other programs.
It was left in its current state, non-existent. In all honesty if you’re the technical director in one program and you are a coach in a completely separate program that has got the constitute some type of conflict of interest, if nothing else is ethically wrong.
So, doesn’t it seem like maybe it’s time to adopt a similar formula as hockey. And I know at the suggestion of it people will be taken back but a lot of that has to do with them building their programs on the backs of athletes from different regions. Which has led to them stacking teams. Which in turn has watered down other programs.
I think that for soccer to really truly develop in the proper direction there needs to be a set of rules dedicated to where you can and cannot play because if you’re relegated to your own district it then forces programs and coaches to develop their players in different ways instead of going elsewhere to find their players.
I know that this idea had been suggested in the past but it was never looked at as a priority. There was always a number of other things that took precedence on their agendas. Like anything else when a difficult proposition is put forward excuses will be made. Everything from there’s not enough players to not enough field availability. Which honestly I find utterly ridiculous I know for a fact this past summer, practices got cancelled and field time couldn’t be had because Churchill Park was occupied with a music festival. Yet there are endless grass fields here in the city that have 3 ft of grass on them and not maintained, but heaven forbid we spend a couple hours cutting the grass down to a normal length, painting some goal posts and putting a net on them for the sake of having usable field space.
Iit’s absolutely ridiculous the amount of unused fields here in the city. That will only go on so long until some developer comes along and says, well hey this field isn’t being used, let’s put a subdivision in here. It’s really not that far fetched because similar things have happened already. But the idea of regionalization I feel is key to growth, it will keep more players engaged and allow for better development and camaraderie.
It works for hockey it can work for soccer too
