Island Soccer’s Low Bar: Are you a Member of the Lucky 7% Club?
Between the ages of 13 and 17, PEI Soccer offers programming to about 400 lucky players (and that number is generous). Those players get the opportunity to train and develop over a longer period of time. They get coaches that are relatively capable and motivated. And they get competition that is challenging. The remaining 5300 or so registered soccer players get less than that or none of that. That’s 7% of PEI’s total soccer participants getting opportunities that the other 93% don’t. Opportunities that every single PEI Soccer player, regardless of age or ability level, deserves.
The haves and the have-nots
Quality program organisation, capable coaches and appropriate competition. Is that really so much to ask to give anyone, elite or recreational, who signs up to play soccer in PEI?
Unfortunately, it seems to be.
The divide between the players that are part of the lucky 7% and the mass that aren’t, begins in the grassroots programs of the clubs. In those programs, players nine and younger get little support to help them develop actual soccer skills. While most summer grassroots programs run using the format of house league (i.e., they don’t play games outside their club) there is an informal U9 inter-club league. Having seen the players representing other clubs in this league over a few seasons, I can honestly say that by age nine, the gap between the haves and have-nots is already huge.
But that divide only continues to grow at U11 where inter-club league play begins. As there is a higher tier and a lower tier of competition, tryouts also begin. The majority of the U9 players moving up to U11 are not even close to being ready to play in competitive games officiated by a referee, following the most basic of soccer rules. Their clubs haven’t prepared them to be in their grassroots programs. And so, the players that get selected to the higher tier teams are often just more athletic, or physically mature (i.e., stronger, faster) or just more aggressive and competitive.
Those players selected to the higher tier competitive teams usually get better coaching, or at least better organised training and more challenging competition. The rest of the players go to the lower tier teams where the coaching, training and competition is poor at best. So at the beginning of each new season, the haves continue to make the higher level team and the have-nots continue to be placed at the lower level. The gap that started to show signs of appearing at U5, U7 and U9, between the haves and have-nots begins to pick up speed at U11.
While there are kids at the lower level in U11 that should just stay classified as house league (i.e., recreational) players, there are kids within that tier that really do want to get better. But instead of helping them to get pulled up, we let them get pulled down by poor coaching and inadequate program development. Instead of having a strata of options where every player can get something that suits their level of ability and willingness, we create the minority haves and the majority have-nots.
You can’t have an omelette without being willing to break a few eggs
Soccer organisation and leadership on the Island needs a serious injection of courage. There’s the fear of the backlash that will come from making certain changes, even if those changes represent good practice. And then that creates an apathy towards keeping things running the way they are currently. That way there are still complaints but not enough to make PEI Soccer worry.
Why would they? In general, PEI Soccer has trained Islanders to see soccer as a nice little distraction until the next hockey season and when families are not busy enjoying the other activities of summer. I had a reader on here comment that when PEI Hockey brought in half-ice hockey for U9 players, a now well known good practice for player development that soccer has been using since the late 80s, many hockey members in the community were up in arms. 8-year-olds need full ice hockey or else they won’t get better! A few years on, everyone has learned to like it — love it even.
We fight change tooth and nail. But then we learn to live with it and what was new and unwanted becomes the status quo and comfortable. That is until new change comes. Then we fight it tooth and nail. Forgetting that what we are fighting to keep was originally something we were fighting not to have.
Just like you can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs, you can’t expect change without unrest. Still, change is important to counter the this is the way we’ve always done it mentality that seems to thrive here on the Island. The rewards of programming that lives up to its quality design in the long-run requires the guts to take some losses in the short-term.
10 Years Later: An Example from Upper Canada
Soccer in Ontario is huge. Almost 50% of the just over one million registered players in Canada are in Ontario. Ontario Soccer, the provincial governing body for the sport, is the largest provincial sport organisation in Canada.
In 2013, Ontario Soccer was looking to make the biggest omelette you could imagine. They were going to begin mandating changes to the way the game was organised and run at all levels in order to align with Canada Soccer’s Long-Term Player Development ideas. Lots of eggs were going to need to be broken to make it happen.
I was hired by Ontario Soccer, along with one other individual, to help lead that change. We were going out into the various soccer communities and it wasn’t a “What do you think of these ideas,” it was a, “This is going to happen whether you like it or not.”
A major, controversial change was the dismantling and restructuring of the provincial program. At that time, it ran like most other provinces were running their provincial programs and the same way PEI Soccer is still running their high performance programming today. It was also costing Ontario Soccer about one million dollars a year. And so the Chief Technical Officer at the time turned Ontario Soccer’s high performance program from an intensive 10-month program to a series of competition events and camps. Instead of players training 3 or 4 times a week from October through to July, they would get together for a few training sessions over a few days sporadically throughout the year, often revolving around a specific competition.
It was a simple choice to make but a difficult one to implement because everyone involved was used to the way things were. But Ontario Soccer’s Chief Technical Officer was adamant: clubs are responsible for developing players, not the province. The province is responsible for developing the clubs, coaches and officials. And that change was coming because what’s popular isn’t always right.
10 years on, that’s still how things are running in Ontario Soccer’s provincial program. People have moved on. It’s the new status quo and clubs in Ontario are improving their ability to develop a wider cross section of their players because of this change. Heck, the majority of our National Men’s and Women’s team rosters are now consistently 50% or more players from Ontario so the change certainly hasn’t hurt their high performance programming. I’m not certain about the other provinces but I do know that Nova Scotia has also recently switched to a similar model for their provincial program.
TL;DR
I don’t worry about my kids being part of the Lucky 7% Club. I know they both have the athletic ability and proper skill development background to join Island soccer aristocracy. And I don’t worry about the handful of friends they have that play soccer and are similar to them. What I worry about is every other player that has never been and probably never will be part of the upper class.
I remember a former youth national team coach telling me how frustrating it was to coach at that level. This individual said the coaching staff spends most of their time teaching Canada’s best young male players things that should have been taught to them at the provincial level. I’ve never coached at the national level but I have coached provincial teams in three different provinces and I can echo that coach’s lamentations: I found myself spending most of my time teaching provincial level players things they should have learned at the club level.
And so while I know that this problem is not limited to just PEI, we end up being so far behind every other province and are always catching up. I’ve tried very hard to make change at the club level here in PEI over the last half a dozen years. Maybe my experience is similar to being caught in quicksand? The more you struggle, the further down you get pulled into the depths of mediocrity.
