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Developing love for the beautiful game

Whistler Youth Soccer Club on the map

On a chilly Saturday morning four-year-old Liam Bagnall sat in line on the field at Myrtle Philip School, his mini compatriots lined up beside him, waiting to hear his name called.

Finally.

Liam stood forward, hands outstretched and accepted his first soccer jersey — a shiny black TimBits shirt with white trim, the Whistler Avalanche logo across the front, the number 18 emblazoned on the back.

It was official. Liam was a soccer player.

That first black jersey was rarely off Liam's back after the first week. It came with him camping. It came with him for a visit to his Grandpa's house. It came everywhere.

"I was afraid it was going to be in tatters by the time we had to return it to the club," laughs mom Caroline Bagnall.

It's the same rite of passage for hundreds of Whistler kids over the years, many of whom will don their new uniforms this Saturday at the beginning of soccer season; it's the same rite of passage for thousands of Canadian kids across the country.

From its humble beginnings with just a handful of kids in 1995 to today with more than 420 kids, the Whistler Youth Soccer Club has become a force to be reckoned with, flourishing in a ski and mountain biking town. Its goal is simple: to nurture a lifelong love of the game.

GROWING AND RETAINING

Hearing another kid fall in love with "the beautiful game" is music to the ears of club president PJ O'Heany.

His enthusiasm for the sport and what the club is doing is infectious, as he describes those young kids in their TimBits jerseys taking the field in flashes of silver, purple, teal and black, like a handful of Smarties running around.

"In the Lower Mainland, soccer really is about activity," says O'Heany. "In Whistler we don't even need that. The kids have so much to do. So we realize when kids want to play we want to make sure that they get enough skill — our goal is to retain them to an adult league. If they master skills well enough then they are willing and able to play as an adult. So soccer grows, and that's our goal."

Soccer is growing. And not just in Whistler.

Where other sports are in decline across the country, soccer continues to be a growth sport. According to the Canadian Soccer Association, it's considered the fastest growing sport in the country with the largest participation.

In the next two to three years, it is estimated that the number of registered soccer players in Canada will reach more than one million.

In Whistler the numbers have been steadily climbing just under ten per cent per year — holding their own around the 400 mark, with 200 in Pemberton and 800 in Squamish.

It's not just the growth, however, not just the new players like Liam Bagnall that has O'Heany stoked about the future. The club is finding that it's holding more and more players over the years. This retention has been key to its success. And delivers on one of the club's core values — developing a passion for the sport.

At 13 years old Emily Nakajima, for example, was at a crossroads.

Like so many Whistler kids, the time had come to choose her sport.

She had been figure skating and playing soccer since she was a little girl, excelling at both, but there simply wasn't enough time to keep playing both at the level she wanted to.

Nakajima chose soccer. Life became the Whistler Youth Soccer Club.

That was three years ago and she hasn't looked back since.

Now at 16 Nakajima is playing with the North Shore Girls U17/U18 Metro team. She also trains every week with the European Football School.

"I see myself playing in Europe for teams like Munich and training with top level players," she says. "I want to continue playing soccer after I graduate and long after that."

Soccer, to put it simply, is her life's passion.

It all began on the fields at Myrtle Phillip. Nakajima was back this summer coaching the little kids at the club, giving back to the club that has given her so much.

It's come so far from that handful of kids in 1995, and club founder Andrée Janyk, who still referees every weekend in the season, says it just brings her joy to see the club of today.

"It's a dream come true," she says.

"Sometimes I'm smiling so much I forget to blow the whistle."

THE BEGINNING

Janyk has been told she was the first female soccer player in Canada. That's how it started out for her, hanging around the sidelines beside the goalpost waiting for her chance.

She took the next chance when she was about nine years old.

It was the late 1950's; girls were not playing soccer. And they certainly weren't playing with the boys.

Janyk became the goalie of the Spuraways, she thinks they were called, in an all-boys league.

She broke her nose three times to prove her point — she would do everything she could not to let the ball in the net. And she loved every minute.

Janyk was asked to leave when she turned 13. She took up field hockey — a second choice.

But a lifelong love for the game had developed in those formative years, which never left her.

"I love the game," she says simply.

She came to Whistler full time in 1995, a mother of three kids who had all played soccer. She brought 15 balls with her from West Vancouver. And she began to rally the troops.

It wasn't long before she was teaching parents how to coach.

"We didn't have a lot of games in those days except amongst ourselves," laughs Janyk.

"I had the balls. I had the background of knowledge and I knew how to coach the game and how to develop the coaches as volunteers."

Bob Calladine was one of the first to be recruited for help. Calladine remembers that most kids played hockey at that time. It took some work to convince the kids to play soccer but once a core group committed, it grew from there.

The beauty too was the affordability.

"It's always been a cheap sport," says Calladine, adding that all you need is a pair of shin pads and some soccer cleats.

He remembers when the club was attracting about half the school age population in Whistler — 50 per cent of the kids in town were playing soccer.

The Whistler Youth Soccer Club was holding its own in one of the sportiest towns in the country.

3 V. 3

Critical to those early years was a style of play that still defines the club to this day.

Janyk was insistent that the players learn in small teams — three versus three, as opposed to the traditional 11 aside teams.

It forces every player to be a part of the game she explains; everyone must touch the ball, even those kids more content to hang back.

"Your child, who may be a bit more passive, almost has to touch the ball," she says.

Creating more opportunities to touch the ball fosters the "foot/eye" coordination; something Janyk saw the importance of firsthand while studying for her master's degree in kinesiology at the University of Brussels in her mid twenties.

The European children, she says, had developed unique coordination through time on the soccer field.

That skill is of critical importance, not just in soccer, but also because it transfers to other sport.

"Like skiing," laughs Janyk, an avid skier, and mother to two Olympians in alpine sport.

This small style of play continues to this day at the WYSC, helping with another club core value — enhancing player self-esteem.

By touching the ball as often as possible, kids can learn the skills of having the ball at their feet and not losing it as soon as someone comes up to them.

"If they can get around two or three people then they feel very confident," O'Heany explains.

And that keeps them coming back for more. It's especially important in a place like Whistler where the kids are not as immersed in soccer as other places around the world. Here, soccer competes with other sports. It's critical, then, to broaden its appeal by creating opportunities for everyone.

"If it gets into the old realm where we put the best player in the back, the second best player at the front, he shoots to him, he scores, then two players on the team do well," explains O'Heany.

"The other nine are 'also-rans' — they just watch."

This year the club has created the first U14 girls and boys rep teams that will join the Vancouver rep teams.

O'Heany is conscious that the club is grassroots with a house league background. He does not want that to change as elite teams are formed.

"We hope we've created the representative teams in a way that enhances the club rather than taking away (from it)," he says. "We've found in a lot of clubs, most resources and orientation goes to that upper elite group and we have seen the "soul" go out of the club before, so we want to maintain our roots."

So while the elite teams will have a session with the club's technical director, every other team has that opportunity too.

As the skill develops with time on the ball, then the opportunities grow to learn more technical skills.

"I learned so much through WYSC," says Nakajima. "Because I grew up playing at this club I learned all the important basic techniques required in soccer. I learned how to kick a ball properly, use different parts of my body to control and receive a ball, and how to know what to do in different situations."

Nakajima has a natural instinct to know where to be on the field. She credits that to the coaching at WYSC.

"They are the ones who trained me to be that kind of player," she says.

She credits coaches like Bernard Messeguer and Stefano Baradel who taught her things like the "offside trap." That's a play where all four of the defenders line up and when the ball is played to the opponent forward players, the defenders step up to put them off side.

"This technique I used every game and it worked 90 per cent of the time," says Nakajima. "WYSC taught me so much, I wouldn't be where I am without it."

THE SECRET TO SUCCESS

Still, it's not easy being a soccer player in Whistler.

Harrison Shrimpton, 20, knows that all too well.

It's not just that there are so many other easy choices — skiing, mountain biking, hockey, dance, gymnastics, skating.

There's also the added challenge of playing in a mountain town, where seasons are short.

The soccer season, particularly when Shrimpton was moving up through the ranks of the club, is so limited. Now there are indoor leagues in the winter to extend the season and keep soccer top of mind.

When he was 13 years old Shrimpton began trying out for teams on the North Shore. He made it. That stint was followed with time in leagues in West Vancouver.

Shrimpton now plays for the UBCO Heat, the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, in Kelowna's team. Soccer scholarship pays for about 75 per cent of his tuition.

"It just brings me happiness," says Shrimpton, who is a centre-fullback. "Every day I look forward to going out and training on the pitch.

"It's what I love to do."

It was that happiness, that sheer love and enjoyment of the game that was developed at the local club. He brought that love back to the club this summer, coaching the little kids.

It would be easy to dismiss the success of soccer in Whistler to simply the fact that it's a cheap sport that everyone can play, only natural that it would be successful here too.

But would it have thrived without the thousands of volunteer hours and parent involvement over the years?

O'Heany doesn't believe so.

"We have such a great active community, so I think the parents of these kids are still very active, they're still very involved," says O'Heany. "The 75 parent coaches that we have are as fit as any group of 75 people you could probably put down on a map."

They're active coaches, not barking orders from the sidelines, Alex Ferguson style, he says, referring to the Manchester United's long-standing coach.

"That's a real secret," he says. "The energy that Bob and Andrée put in at the beginning was all about being involved, not just from the sidelines."

The other key to the success in the recent years was the so-called "professionalization" of the club, adding more structure with things like a paid administrator.

"That's something that has allowed us to cope with the growth over the last five or six years," he says.

That came under the leadership of Peter Shrimpton and Dave Demers. At the time they noticed the synergies that could be developed with the sister clubs in Squamish and Pemberton and worked to create a corridor-wide team that went on to win gold in B.C.

"We brought it up from the 'little club that could' to the 'bigger club that did'," says Shrimpton.

Just last year the WYSC had its first gala dinner — 450 people, families from all walks of Whistler life poured into the conference centre.

"This is really something that brings this community together," says O'Heany.

And it helps too having former club members like Harrison Shrimpton and Emily Nakajima come back to coach at the local level, showing the kids where soccer can take you.

Shrimpton's team the UBCO Heat is moving up to a higher league in the next year — Canadian University Sport.

He'll be playing better teams from further afield. There will be more people watching, perhaps even scouting from the States.

"I'm hoping that one day that could be me," says Shrimpton, of the chance to move on to play soccer at another level.

"And if not, then I will continue to love the game, play the game wherever that may be and I look forward to continuing to coach and help other people with the game, and hopefully continue to help in Whistler coach the new meat!"

When he looks around at the ten, eleven and twelve year old kids playing for WYSC now, Peter Shrimpton can't help but marvel at the growing talent. They are, he says, better than the kids that came up through the ranks a decade ago. Those kids like his son Harrison, and Cam Baker, Will Robson and Kyle Kirkegaard, who all took the talent learned in Whistler and went on to use it for bigger and better things.

"I see the continuing success and the continuing development of the club so long as we never lose that perspective in making sure it's fun for everyone," says Shrimpton.

"The talent is certainly there and the future is very, very bright."



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