What was thought to be a lost season for league play, Valley Soccer Association (VSA) ended up scheduling a four week season in a very short amount of time.
With outdoor sports recently moving to Step 1 of the provincial re-open roadmap, VSA decided to go ahead with league play instead of just having the respective soccer clubs in the association take part in training sessions and practices like they originally planned.
It was an ambitious plan but with contributions from the respective communities, VSA made it work as teams began league play on May 31.
After initially telling the respective communities within VSA that the season wasn’t going to consist of league play, it was a mad scramble to put together a schedule because according to president Cam Houle, they weren’t sure how many teams would be participating in each division.
“It was all about phoning these people, emailing them and putting things together; and putting teams together because we told these guys they weren’t going to have games,” he said.
Even though it was a frantic situation putting some sort of league play together, Houle believes that it was important to give the youth an option to play league soccer against other teams.
“As soon as we got “released” to play, there was no doubt in my mind we were going to do whatever we could to offer (league-play),” he said.
It was all hands on deck and Houle said that each soccer club within VSA only had a 24-hour deadline to commit to a season.
The majority of the towns are taking part in this four week season while some opted out, but given the very short notice, Houle is very happy how everything worked out.
“The towns that wanted to participate all put their teams in and we created a schedule in record time,” Houle said.
Houle said it was a challenge to make sure there was a season for every division, especially for the U18 group which only has three teams.
“We combined two towns to make a U18 team so that we could have enough teams to play each other,” said Houle.
Also, Houle mentioned that in order for some towns to have a team in a respective division they had to have youth move up an age group, which had to happen so every division has a league season.
Overall, Houle is glad that the youth have this opportunity to be playing competitive games once again.
“The payoff for these kids I think is tremendous, that they get to get out there and play against other towns,” said Houle. “So the kids are getting back to a normalcy that I think everyone in the province and world is desperate for.”