It was a week of strangers' voices on the telephone, and long, dark, wandering drives in the snow. Places I wasn’t at, for meetings I didn’t attend, to speak of things it’s yet too soon to speak of.
Stay tuned to this spot, people. It’s way too late to turn back now.
Here’s what I know:
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1) Reform:
From multiple eyewitness accounts, Alberta Soccer Association representatives Scott Chen and Ray Calvin arrived at the CSA meeting in Ottawa last Friday night telling any and everyone they were voting in favour of the main reform package – as instructed by their membership, and as understood by their executive director, Richard Adams.
The next morning, they voted “no,” killing both the main plan and the first compromise.
They then told their baffled membership – in an e-mail CC’d to CSA director-at-large Mike Traficante – that they did it for the good of the country. Whoever put that idea in their naïve, unelected heads, it wasn’t any of the provincial presidents.
So, yes, we got a one-year-delayed version of reform. We also got played.
2) The women’s team:
More opinion here than fact, but aren’t the women essentially launching a reform fight of their own?
This thing has been painted as a contract dispute, but head coach Carolina Morace doesn’t actually seem to be asking for anything more than what she agreed to when she signed on.
The biggest problem seems to be the good old-fashioned Canadian Soccer Association shell game with money. There isn’t much of it, of course, and what little cash there is has been known to slide from budget item to budget item from time to time, making it look like everything’s covered when, in fact, it’s not.
Not corruption, but not exactly professional – which is exactly what the reform movement’s been complaining about for years now.
Morace called shenanigans, but did it in a blunt, brutal way that obscured more issues than it clarified.
It’s been suggested to me of late that if the players knew how much money they’d get before taking the field, and if money promised for program X actually materialized at time Y, we would essentially have problem Z (for Zero).
I don’t have any reason to doubt this – and thanks to everybody who chimed in.
3) The Canadian Soccer League:
A year ago, the CSL was flying. Visionary commissioner and three hugely successful, forward-looking expansion teams.
One of those teams, Milltown FC, which counts leading Canadian soccer rebel Dino Rossi in its braintrust, had a great start to the regular season, actually claiming first place a couple of months in. The other two, Hamilton Croatia and the Brantford Galaxy, won their ways through to the league championship game.
Well, the commissioner’s gone. Bit too forward-thinking for the backroom boys, mayhap. And now both Hamilton and Milltown have washed their hands and decamped, to try to start their own Ontario-Quebec semi-pro Division 3 league.
Another crunching shock to the old guard. Another exciting chance to begin something new.
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Summing up, there is an aching tiredness on multiple fronts that simply will not accept that the ways things are is the way things have to be.
Morace and Milltown are not rebelling against the same people. But the weary old ways of doing business are simply not good enough for ambitious newcomers who don’t want to see their road blocked by people with less vision who have no tangible right to be standing in their way.
Chen and Calvin will be gone. Soon. Whether their voting legacy can be erased is a trickier issue – one upon which a deep silence appears, for now at least, to be settling.
I’m done sending open letters to Alberta. I think it’s pretty clear to everyone what happened there.
The reform fight is everywhere now. It is no longer acceptable, in Canadian soccer, to say we’re going to do anything because it’s the way we always did it before.
Much, much more to follow.
Onward!