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  • History has a strange way of repeating itself


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    Legs stretched out, sitting on the pitch under the Friday night lights at Lamport Stadium in downtown Toronto, I was sharing a laugh with a teammate talking about a recent article he’d found at the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame.

    McMahon: Architect of Canadian Success – published by Soccer 100 in 1981 as a special souvenir at the Soccer Bowl - it’s the kind of headline that lends itself to the humour of the self-deprecating types who populate Canadian soccer supporter circles. The idea, that so long ago, a group of soccer loving Canadians – and by extent soccer loving journalists – had concluded that this solution was the one that was going to (or had) put Canada on the path to global success, is as uproarious in its suggestion as it is depressing in its thought.

    Depressing from the sense that so many development models have come and gone since — none have ever brought the picture of soccer success into any closer clarity in the great frozen North.

    Canadian soccer, of course, did not find the holy grail of solutions under McMahon’s vision – one that was to put them on par with the world’s greats. And, in fact, the thrust of the article – about how McMahon was a visionary for seeing the need to add a strong youth soccer base to the pyramid in our Canadian provinces – should draw strong parallels to the ongoing debates of today.

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    Long term player development, high performance leagues and the creation of our own national league are at the centre of our discussions in Canada Soccer version 7.Oh-I’ve-Given-Up-Counting. Each have their proponents and each their detractors. Each have been designed by people far smarter than I and each have had a strip torn off by soccer novices. Each are trying to transform the way we develop players in Canada and each are courting disaster at every turn.

    Those disasters are the same sinkholes that have swallowed every great plan in the past - plans that have been disappeared under the great watering down, allowing adjustments to be made or bending to the will of the latest NIMBY crowd.

    Take the OPDL for example – a high performance league forming in Ontario. Last week, the OSA had to beat back attempts by the head of the OYSL, Bert Lobo, who had been pitching a version of the OPDL, minus some of the stringent coaching requirements, to clubs around the province. The YSLO website says that it was formed after “widespread repeated requests” by organizations to provide competitions for their players. Previously, the OYSL was one of the top levels of youth competition in Ontario. With the advent of the OPDL, the OYSL looks like it will be phased out.

    If you haven’t been following the OPDL debate all that closely, the coaching issue has become one of the most polarizing matters for the high performance league.

    The bar has been rightfully set very high on this front - from that standard of coaching will flow forth all other aspects the OPDL hope to achieve. Some clubs however, have brought up the matter of cost for coaching certification as a deterrent. Albeit those are the same clubs who seem happy to put on lavish year end dinners for themselves at the end of every season – showcasing their successes with faux-gold trophies and participant ribbons. But, asking to put a high coaching standard into place for an opt-in league is suddenly asking too much.

    Enter the YSLO, seeking to provide an alternative. While it doesn’t explicitly say that it intends to compete with the OSA run OPDL, the OSA certainly saw it that way – to the point that OSA president Ron Smalle issued a letter to clubs across the province warning of consequences for participating in unsanctioned leagues.

    It was a strong, firm response to an attempt to water down the standards in a backhanded kind of way.

    Conversely, let's look at the designs for a national league. When was the last time you heard anything about this? Save for a few others, CSN has basically been the only one reporting on this for the last couple years.

    What began as an aspiration for a D2 professional league has been slowly shape shifting ever since. That’s not to say that they haven’t arrived at a solution that can work for Canadian soccer. For the record, the Easton Report’s recommendations for a semi-pro, regionally based, national league are as close to a workable as I’ve seen. But it bears pointing out, that the vision of having our own league, that was once sought, has changed considerably since the outset.

    Where once there was talk of having several D2 professional teams across the country – competing in or against the NASL – there is now plans for a pocketed division three league that may or may not be professional but have some version of senior soccer that has professional standards in place.

    Of course, it’s the standards that matter. And as long as the builders of this new quasi-league hold to that, it really doesn’t matter what the make up of those leagues and national competition look like. But I’m bringing this up now as a reminder because in the past I’ve witnessed the erosion of what was once a bold vision of the few, slowly whittled down to accommodate the naysayers and apologists, who supposedly represent the many.

    _____

    As I was sitting there last week, talking to my buddy, the conversation spawned out into a larger discussion on why these plans, like McMahon’s, never really got anywhere.

    In his words, “It's not that they were bad plans. They were good in fact. But it’s a case of a lot of old white men fighting over their petty need to do things the way they please in their own backyards. Nobody wants to follow. Everybody wants to lead. And as a result, to get anybody going in the same direction, the vision is always scaled back, cut down and made to fit so everybody is comfortable. Best to just keep doing it the way we've always done.”

    OPDL and LTPD appear to be finally starting to turn the corner of popular opinion. People seem to be getting what the vision for development is about and understanding the benefits of not only buying in – but committing to the standards. Now, granted, I still get an email every week from parents telling me of the horrors the OSA is trying force on them. But, by and large, the message is getting out that nothing is being forced on anyone. And, in, fact OPDL is going to lift the community not stifle it.

    The goal of having a national league however - one to call Canada’s own - still finds itself trying to gain popular traction.

    There will always be a need for compromise but to those that are still trying to lay the foundations for this league, a simple warning: be careful of how far you are willing to go to accommodate the naysayers, or risk losing your vision entirely.



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