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- BEHIND THE PLAY #53
Snow days
Snow has closed all our fields for a week now. We play and train on artificial turf and have a field use agreement with UBC. They warn us not to try to clear the snow off fields because it can damage them depending on how its done. We tell our players that.
UBC called us, irate, that their staff had just had to kick some boys off one of the fields who said they were from our club. They’d been pushing snow off to get a patch to play on. We sent a finger wagging email reminder out that this could lead to us losing our ability to use those fields which would be devastating to the club.
Deep down though I was thinking (and still am)…good for you guys, we need more of that.
Safe Sport
We bring in speakers two or three times a year to speak with our players on various topics. Sometimes it’s targeted to specific ages and levels; sometimes its open to all our divisional players.
Last week we had Allison Forsyth, founder of GenSafe and the Canadian Soccer Association’s Safe Sport Officer, give a presentation to our U14 to U18 players. Despite it being a cold night with lots of snow on the ground we had just under 300 players and parents in attendance.
And Allison had them all in rapt attention from first minute to last. No staring at phones, no whispering and giggling. I was keen to see what their interest level would be and it was full focus.
Even afterwards when I was talking with parents they were truly taken aback by the quality of the content and delivery. I just had a Board member who was there email myself and the rest of the Board saying, “that was an amazing presentation by Allison on Wednesday.”
So where does Safe Sport fit into this ongoing “Perfect FC” notion/feature/pipe dream that I concocted a few issues ago? Heavily. Allison speaks from the point of view of being an elite athlete (two-time Olympian in Grand Slalom skier) who experienced horrible abuse first-hand from a coach. It’s raw and authentic but she’s quick to shift the focus to what she is seeing as the main concern in safe sport recently: peer to peer abuse on teams.
I’ve talked in the past in these newsletters of understanding and respecting that we are providing an important platform for young people to experience the world in real time, face to face encounters with peers in both co-operative (teammates) and competitive (other teams) environments and to grow through those experiences. It’s become rarer that kids have these kinds of opportunities and what’s replaced face to face dispute resolution, which is generally more nuanced and empathetic, is online abuse. The examples that Allison has dealt with in her work were shocking and a clear commonality in the worst examples she’s dealt with was how genuinely shocked that parents were that their child had participated in the abuse.
If your club does not have Player, Coach and Parent Codes of Conduct and clear processes for reporting concerns of abuse then you need to get on it. Being content with Criminal Record Checks (even if they include Vulnerable Sector Checks) is just not enough. Not even close.
There’s much, much more to the concept of safe sport and the application needed to make players feel and actually be safe when they’re on teams. I don’t feel equipped to provide a blueprint as I’m still on a learning curve myself but the first step is to recognize the importance and throw yourself into learning so you can make the landscape better.
My ask of the players at the end of the night to the players once Allison had finished was to try to find 10-15 minutes in the following 24 hours to sit with themselves and reflect on what was said and how it can help them become a better teammate and, in the process, person.
Allison Forsyth speaking at the Hollywood Theatre to Vancouver United FC players and parents.
Plymouth Rock (Liverpool)
Liverpool are in danger of running away with the EPL title this season. They finished first of 36 teams in the new Champions League ‘table’ format. They are already in the final of the English League Cup Final.
Plymouth Argyle are far from all of these accomplishments.
Last in the Championship and destined for a real dogfight to avoid relegation to League 1. Yet today in the FA Cup 4th round Plymouth became headline makers around the world and beat Liverpool 1-0 to put them out of the competition.
Yes, more people will be interested in the Super Bowl today but narratives like this will always interest me far more than anything that happens in leagues protected from competition by barriers to entry.
Here’s the Guardian’s game report. Here’s my favourite bit:
But what Muslic gets – and what his predecessor Wayne Rooney largely did not – is that a club getting trampled on by bigger, richer rivals needs an idea. An ideal. A simple message that binds and inspires. There is so much here worth fighting for: a town and a region that lives for this club, that still fills Home Park most weeks to watch the worst football in the division. Muslic’s mission has been to recast Plymouth as a kind of last stand, a besieged turf to be defended at all costs.
In footballing terms, this means resolve, long balls, physicality, balls on the line. The new centre-half Maksym Talovyerov roared as he bodied Díaz and won a goal-kick. Nikola Katic, another new defender brought in from Zurich, lost a tooth in an early collision with a teammate. When informed about this on the touchline, Muslic laughed heartily.
This is sport. This is true competition. A knockout tournament open to all clubs, professional and amateur, in England. Premier League teams don’t get to opt out as American MLS teams tried last year in the US Open Cup. In classic North American, asset-protection, pro sport nonsense they didn’t want to face the potential ignominy that Liverpool had to face today. They didn’t want to compete. They wanted to hide from anything that could diminish ‘the franchise.’
Well done Plymouth. Well done to all countries, including Canada (though our open Cup could be made even more open) who understand sport and that occasional upsets are not something to be embarrassed by but an element that reinforces what sport was always intended to be: unpredictable, human, magical.
It’s gotten weird in our world recently. Looking to buy Canadian and/or support Canadian-owned businesses? Here’s a couple links:
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