The beautiful game in Okotoks has been given Canada Soccer’s seal of approval.
Okotoks United Soccer Club was one of two clubs nationally and the first in Alberta to be recognized with Canada Soccer’s provisional Quality Soccer Provider licence in the third quarter of 2021.
“It’s a recognition and celebration of all the good work that goes in from our staff, our coaches, our volunteers, our board of directors to provide quality programming for players in our community,” said Matt Lumsden, technical director of Okotoks United Soccer. “And hopefully they will feel the benefit of that, not only now, but for years to come so it’s a recognition of all that.
“It shows people that would like to join our program or players within our program that our club has been evaluated according to quite extreme criteria so they can be confident when they register for Okotoks Soccer that it’s a quality program they’re signing up for with the best interest of children and players at heart.”
The Quality Soccer Provider will be a requirement of membership in Canada Soccer by 2023. The licence ensures clubs in question have met the standards of the association’s safe sport roster. To date, 50 clubs across the country have achieved the licence, requiring somewhere in the realm of 40 criteria to be met ranging from financial and bookkeeping to up-to-date policies, coach education standards and coach-to-athlete ratios.
“There’s a few pieces of the puzzle that have had to go into this across a broad spectrum of club organizations,” Lumsden said.
The highest level licence, the national club level licence, is reserved for teams who compete in national leagues. The next level, quality soccer, is a recognition for clubs that provide good service, are reputable in their community and have those governance pieces yet don’t quite compete in the top divisions.
“In essence, Canada Soccer have gone trough a massive reshuffle and restructure in the past three to four years,” Lumsden said. “And as part of this, they’ve been very keen to implement a standards-based system for club programs.
“Basically to identify for parents or potential players or even for their own governance of clubs and how reputable they are based on governance and player development and alignment to long-term athletic development and safety and protection of children’s lives and things like that.”
Lumsden said he’s been working with both Alberta Soccer and Canada Soccer over the past six months on this licence with a lot of time and effort behind the scenes to get to this point.
“We’ve had a little bit of restructuring and changes to our program over the past six months,” he added. “But it’s been good to add this and be recognized as a leading club within southern Alberta.”
Lumsden, part of the club for nearly eight years, has seen and been a key cog in its evolution with changes felt particularly at the grassroots level.
“The popularity and engagement in the program grew tremendously, we have a wonderful group of U7s, U8s, U9s now that are moving on to our competitive and development programs and it’s really nice to see a solid foundation of players for the future,” he said. “And also, in terms of where our structures have improved and our coaching standards have improved along with that, is the competitiveness of our teams.
“I think only six years ago we never had a Division I team and now over the last five years we’ve had maybe eight or nine of them. It’s good to see the development of our program, the facilities we have in terms of the field house, the development in our outdoor field.
“The quality and standard of our program are always increasing.”
For more information go to okotoksunitedsoccer.ca.
