As small as professional soccer in Canada is, the amateur game is vast.
Local clubs are everywhere – a sprawling, competitive business which makes money in tiny towns and mega-metropolises alike.
Where professional coaches struggle to find any jobs at all, pretty much any parent of any young player can find himself prowling the sidelines, coaching his or her local youth team.
It leads to inconsistency. Experts say it’s undermining all of Canada’s national teams.
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Hundreds of thousands of players, most lacking the interest or ability to play competitively – all funding a huge share of the Canadian Soccer Association and all its programs with their annual fees.
We are – and have always been – a house-league nation.
And what happens there affects every footballing ambition this country’s ever had.
“We don’t do a good enough job in this country of teaching players the fundamental skills required to be successful in the game at the highest level,” says Jason de Vos, former captain of Canada and Ipswich Town, now technical director at Oakville, the largest youth soccer club in North America.
“It’s not about focusing all of our resources on just the very few elite players. It’s about giving everyone the basic foundation. It’s like building a house. You don’t build a house on nothing. You build it on a foundation.”
“The game in Canada is very much recreational,” adds Rays Clark, CSA director of player and coaching development.
“Because of that, it’s a house league-driven type of approach. And invariably – and I don’t mean any disrespect to the people coaching there – it’s mainly parent coaches, and I have to say it’s mainly people who don’t really know the game of soccer very well. And house leagues rely on it, because there’s not enough people to be able to coach these teams.”
After Canada’s early elimination from this year’s women’s World Cup, de Vos sounded a profound warning: the lack of clear, focused coaching at the youth level is badly damaging Canada on the international stage.
“Would you send your child to a school where none of the teachers had any qualifications?” he asks. “Right away, the answer’s ‘No.’ Well, would you send you child to a school where there’s no curriculum? Right away, ‘No.’ Well why do we do it in soccer, then? We allow ourselves to be put into a club where there’s no curriculum, there’s no development pathway, there’s no certification of the coaches, there’s no oversight into the teachings that they’re bringing to their players, who are the students of the game.”
After many long years of ineffectual stewardship, the CSA is now bringing in a sweeping blueprint for long-term player development (LTPD). Called Wellness to World Cup, it aims to identify what young players need to learn at every age, and instructs their coaches how to help them, regardless of previous coaching experience.
“We’ve got this huge base of participation, which we’ve got to do a much better job of educating and training,” says Alex Chiet, newly appointed chief technical officer of the Ontario Soccer Association. “If we can get that right – which is going to be hard work – there’s some really positive signs that we’re moving in the right direction.”
Direction! That’s another big issue. Youth rep leagues are highly results-driven. In the most extreme cases, coaches stack their teams, and go looking for weak opposition to trounce. This is inefficient, some experts say.
“We have a multitude of problems in Canada,” de Vos warns. “One of the biggest is our focus on winning over all else. We force kids to be successful too early. We put them in a competitive environment where their future opportunities are determined by the outcome of the game. Not on their ability to execute the fundamentals of the game, which will lead them to success five or ten years down the road, but whether or not they can win a game when they’re ten years old.”
De Vos is calling for an end to promotion and relegation in Canadian youth soccer. He’s far from alone.
“You don’t need promotion and relegation,” Says Ron Davidson, Canadian Soccer League coach of the year with Hamilton Croatia in 2010.
“There’s too much emphasis here on the kids winning, and coaches stacking their teams, and then they fall out with the club and go to another club, and take all those players with them. That’s not developing the game. That’s a selfish decision for the coach. Kids don’t learn by winning 10-0.”
For de Vos, there needs to be a fundamental emphasis – on fun.
“To me, the measure of success is – first and foremost – can we teach that child to fall in love with the game, and play the game for the rest of their life?” he argues. “If we can teach them to fall in love with the game, there’s a very good chance they’re going to put in the hours needed to become successful in the game. The ten-thousand hour rule applies to anything. If you want to be an expert, if you want to be a top-level athlete, if you want to be a concert pianist, if you want to be a musician, if you want to learn multiple languages, you’ve got to be able to put in the hours needed to master those skills. You’re only going to do that if you love what you’re doing.”
“Coaches need guidance,” Ray Clark of the CSA says. “How can we rely on people who have no background in the game and no coaching experience to deliver our program? We have to provide support along the way – physical support, financial support of course. That’s why I think the emphasis has to be on clubs now to step forward and say ‘We need to support these guys, because they have the bulk of the players.’”
Under de Vos, Oakville Soccer Club just made a major hiring of new coaches. It’s a huge financial commitment to boosting training and fun for young players. And it’s one de Vos says clubs much smaller than Oakville can also commit to.
“It’s a question of how you allocate your resources, and what you want to put them to,” he insists. “In a club of four- or five-hundred kids, they’ve got a very significant budget, and they have the resources to be able to hire someone. Maybe not on a full-time basis, but they can certainly hire someone part-time to train their coaches and deliver the curriculum for them, and put in place programs for those kids to teach them how to play the game.”
Ron Davidson agrees.
“In soccer, the ultimate goal for your club should be to develop the player. You’ve had a player in your system that goes to the next level, and let’s say in Southern Ontario the next level is to play for Toronto FC. If you’ve got a 15-year-old who is an excellent prospect, why keep him? Your club is not going to go under if you lose five, six, ten players in a season. That player should be going to the next step – to TFC or to Europe or the U.K., and the ultimate goal is to play for your country.”
When you put it all together – LTPD, new standards for coaching, new emphasis on competitiveness and love of the game, it adds up to a bold attempt to unify the youngest players in your local house league with a bigger, bolder vision for pro soccer and international success. And better, more effective coaching is crucial.
It’s not that amateur coaches are responsible for winning pro games. But a more unified, focused approach at each crucial stage in youth development can’t help but produce more – and better – elite players down the road.
“Just because it’s a recreational game doesn’t mean it can’t have a professional structure,” de Vos concludes. “And the reality is soccer is a recreational game around the world. The amount of players that go on and play at a professional level is miniscule compared to the number that play the game for fun and recreation. The notion that we shouldn’t be a professionally run organization, or we shouldn’t have a professional structure because it’s largely recreational, in my opinion, is wrong.”
Which leads us – fans, players, aspiring coaches alike – to a deeper, more fundamental question:
What, exactly, is standing in our way? That’s Part III – coming next Monday.
Onward!
Also in this series: