BEHIND THE PLAY #50

NSL - a demographic breakdown of current rosters

The Northern Super League launches in three months. Because two clubs, Calgary Wild and Ottawa are using stadiums used by CFL teams and that league has an agreement giving them the right to book dates before anyone else, we aren’t sure yet exactly what the schedule will look like and when the first dates of play will be for each team.

What is clear is that all clubs seem to be really ramping up their player signings so it’s maybe a good time to check in and see which ones are clearly taking the premise of this being a league for Canadian players, in particular, emerging Canadian talent, seriously.

I’ve gone through the rosters as posted on the NSL website here and broken them down by nationality, province, how many are U21, U25 and over 30 and how many are current women’s national team players and national team alumni. From what I’ve gathered from league officials, these are the criteria that they are consciously focusing on and I’m in full agreement that the NSL should be a league that is primarily, if not overwhelmingly, for the best young Canadian players augmented by some current (will be rare) and former (more likely) women’s national team players.

Within the notion of having a large number of Canadians it will be interesting to see if clubs make an effort to sign players from their own cities and provinces. I’ve opted to just track by province.

How does it look? Pretty promising really. Here’s what each team’s rosters looked like as of January 19 in the categories I’ve described.

Calgary and Toronto could be a bit higher in the Canadian content side of things but overall if teams end up with 75% or more of their roster being Canadian (and by that I’m using the definition of being eligible to play for Canada internationally) I think it passes the sniff test by those who have been waiting a long time for a domestic professional women’s league here. Four of the six are at or above that number at the moment.

The area that needs work is where young players are concerned. At this point only one player, Florence Belzile of Ottawa Rapid FC, will be U21 when league play starts. Considering 19% of the signed player right now are over 30 years old it’s a bit concerning that less than 2% are under 21.

Still early though and these numbers are really encouraging overall. The marquee value of Quinn in Vancouver, Desiree Scott in Ottawa and Erin McLeod in Halifax is a critical bit of what will determine the league’s success out the gate. More of these would be good but there’s really not many that fit the profile suggested by Scott and McLeod (older well known players who are no longer playing for the national team). Allysha Chapman (35) may fit the category but she has just signed a new two year contract with Houston Dash in the NWSL.

A good growth strategy in terms of getting more Canadian women currently playing overseas to consider joining NSL clubs would be to arrange exhibition series against secondary European league teams. If it can be reasonably demonstrated that the standard of play is similar there’s a very good chance more players would come back and play. As it stands now, two strong young Canadian players have opted out of the NSL to play in Europe. Mia Pante signed with Roma and another will be announced soon. With a $50,000 minimum salary in NSL all that remains is to demonstrate qualitative parity with leagues like Sweden’s Damallsvenskan where players like Canadian international Sura Yekka plays with Djurgårdens IF.

With three months to go and what looks to be about 40% of club roster spots signed, NSL deserves a solid B on their mandate to make this a league strongly populated with Canadian talent. As for the age players getting signed they get a C if you want to see an emphasis on young players getting into this league.

Building the perfect youth club, part 2 - Structure and governance model

The Canadian Soccer Association’s (CSA) National Youth Club License will be referenced a fair bit when I write about how to build a great youth soccer club. There’s lots of excellent criteria in there that most clubs hadn’t even considered before but now need to ascribe to. There’s also elements that are overkill and some that should be there but aren’t but overall the evolving list of boxes you must check (it was around 140 when my club first attained the license in 2019 and it now over 180) is comprehensive and will make any club better.

One of those that helped our club was to mandate that a club’s Board of Directors be a policy and governance Board that stays entirely out of operational issues, including all technical (ie. programming) issues. This has served us well.

The Board, in this model, has responsibility for policy development, approval of budgets and direct oversight of a single club employee - the Executive Director (ED), who in turn is responsible for all other staff, directly in some cases and indirectly in others. This structure codifies a clear chain of command and defines who is and isn’t responsible for every element of running a club.

What I have found works best, but is clearly a function of club size and depth in terms of what ages and levels of play you participate in, is an org chart that looks a lot like this. This would be for a large club (2500+ players).

This in itself is almost too ‘flat’ though. An effective org chart should have good verticality to ensure there’s clear lines of accountability and not have too many positions all reporting to the same person.

What it does do well is make clear who’s who in the zoo and the difference between staff, contractor and volunteer positions.

Note also that there is no Technical Committee. There should be no need for one if you have effectively staffed your technical department with competent coaches who have clear job descriptions around their on-field responsibilities and, in some cases, off-field administrative tasks. This work is then assessed by an Assistant TD (if club size warrants this position) or the Technical Director (TD).

On the administrative side I will start by stressing a top Admin lead, whether they’re called Director of Operations (DO), Operations Manager or anything else is one of the more difficult positions to fill and an excellent one is worth their weight in gold. The TD and the DO both then report to the ED who in turn reports to the Board.

I’ve said this several times to our Board. If you lose our top Admin person the club will feel its effects within a day. If you lose your TD you will feel it in around a month but it could be less depending on the time of year. If you lose your ED, assuming the ED was doing their job well, you won’t feel it for around six months. Operations at the club level is day to day troubleshooting and fire extinguishing. TD work is distributive in that a lot of is curriculum-based work that is done ahead of time and pushed out to staff coaches. Your mid to large size club TD is not on field running sessions. That’s what staff coaches do. The ED, a position I’ve held for six years now after being the TD for 15 years, is forward-looking and much more about strategies being developed and overseeing an entire structure to make sure it functions smoothly. If you have a TD running multiple sessions for all different age groups and levels it’s either performative on their part because they aren’t sure what their job is or you have an ED who has not staffed the club properly and the TD is constantly having to jump in and run sessions because of ED incompetence. If that continues its the ED and not the TD who should be answering to the Board as neither is doing the job they should be doing.

Lastly, note the types of committees that are suggested. These are the areas which a progressive Board should be overseeing. The Executive Committee meets directly with the ED to discuss their progress, listen to what resources might be needed by the ED to accomplish certain goal and assess the overall effectiveness of the ED.

A Nominations Committee is how the Board keeps its own house in order. They plan for their own future by ensuring they have the necessary skill sets present on the Board using a skills matrix and look to recruit new members to cover those necessities. A well-organized Board has already put out a call for new members months ahead of their AGM to replace outgoing Board members. They then interview them and let members know that they recommend the membership support the slate put forward based on the work they have done to secure the skill sets they need.

Having a Finance Committee fulfills a key fiduciary duty of any Board and in particular one for a not for profit society which is what almost all amateur youth clubs in Canada are structured as. The Board needs to have 24/7 access to all financial data and policies in place to ensure there are proper sign-offs on expenditures, particularly ones that may be necessary outside of the budget they are responsible for approving.

Lastly, a Player Safety Committee has become a more recent addition to the responsibilities of the Board as decisions around player safety need to be made above the staff level and in particular above the technical on-field staff level to demonstrate a clear lack of conflict of interest in the event of complaints about the safety of a player or coach conduct (both for volunteer and staff coaches). Clubs are still wrestling with the best way to deal fairly with not just player safety complaints but any and all discipline issues and complaints. They are increasing as parent expectations of clubs increase.

Next week: Effective club communications (the area that most organizations, not just youth soccer clubs, get complaints from members about).

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