The North Shore Soccer Dev-elopment Centre (NSSDC) was preparing for the future this week on the Sunshine Coast.
The NSSDC ran its third annual Sunshine Coast Soccer School at Hackett Park. The five-day school ran from 9 a.m. to noon each day and featured more than 87 players aged six to 14.
The school has grown immensely over the years, starting with 40 players in year one, 52 last year and now 87 this year.
"The Sunshine Coast Youth Soccer Association has been great partners with us," said Joe Sawer, director of operations and staff coach for the NSSDC. "They have done a lot to help promote the school."
The school featured seven top-level coaches working with the players on all aspects of the game (shooting, passing and dribbling).
"Each day is a warm-up, two skill sessions and then a short game," said Sawer. "With summer camps you have a wide range of skills from kids who have never kicked a ball to players who are well on their way. It's our job during the week to push those kids into the right areas. During the course of the day, each coach is assigned one group, all in different skill sessions. During the course of the week, each player will go through each coach. We pack a lot into the three hours, but you have to make sure it's quality instruction. That's why each coach has a theme and a specific goal in mind. "It's our hope that each player will take something from each session and put that into their game come September when they start their leagues again."
The NSSDC was founded seven years ago.
"We started off initially training youth once a week in player development classes. Through those classes we started to split out the kids who were ahead of the curve and put them into a high performance group," Sawer said. "The first couple of years this high performance group grew. We went from fall to spring and now the summer camps. We just branched out three years ago to places like Squamish and Sechelt because the NSSDC is a B.C. Soccer Association district development centre. What that means is within the province of B.C. there are 11 regional districts. We're called the Vancouver North region. We go from Deep Cove up to Pemberton, Howe Sound and the Sunshine Coast. It's our responsibility to get around and see players from within the region and see that they're developing properly and eventually we hope to be able to send coaches over on a more regular basis to have a look at the players again and move them along."
Sawer added that part of their responsibility now in year seven is their partnership with the B.C. Soccer Association and the Vancouver Whitecaps.
"The kids we see in our player development programs and high performance programs, it's our job to push them on to the Whitecaps and the provincial teams," said Sawer. "That's our aim with every kid we see. After the regular club season is over, we're responsible to form intra-provincial league teams. So you have provincial teams themselves, below that the Whitecaps Super Y-teams [youth teams] and below that each region in the U12, U13, and U14 boys and girls forms these intra-provincial league teams and we play a series of games against the other 10, 11 regions in the province. The idea behind that is to keep kids developing and keep building up the pool of players and pushing everyone through to the next level.
"It's our pleasure this year to have brought seven Sunshine Coast players into these intra-provincial league teams. It's fantastic. During the course of the season, which runs from mid-April to mid-July, we've pushed on seven players to the Whitecaps. Two have gone on full time and the other five have gone for training and the odd game. The ladder is working. We start with the summer soccer camps, identify the players, bring them in at a young age, develop their skills and when they get to the select level U12 and up, we push them on."
