Girls under 13 tried out for the Ottawa Fury’s Ontario Player Development League earlier this month.
The Ottawa Fury FC will be facing top competition next year as the soccer organization begins its role in a new, elite player-development league. The semi-professional soccer club will be included in a plan to build the skills of talented young players throughout Ontario.
The Ontario Soccer Association recently announced the formation of the Ontario Player Development League. The OSA says this will be a standards-based league that will provide high-quality coaching catered to high-performance athletes.
In April, the Fury’s U-13 (age 13 and under) male and female teams will begin their 28-game season with the league. The U-14 divisions will join the league in 2015.
Four Ottawa teams — the Ottawa Fury, West Ottawa Soccer, Ottawa South United and Nepean Hotspurs — are included in the province’s 18-team OPDL.
Kwame Telemaque and Audra Sherman are the head coaches for the U-13 girls team. Telamaque says this will allow him to grow as a coach, “I think the big difference is we now have to make certain that our level is appropriate for the players, in order to lift their level as players we’re going to lift our level as coaches.”
The Fury teams will practise at both the Algonquin College Soccer Complex and the Carleton University High Performance Centre. Home games will be at the new Frank Clair Stadium at Lansdowne Park when it's completed.
Phillip Dos Santos, the technical director of the Fury, and staff coach Jimmy Zito will be leading the boys’ team. Dos Santos says the organization is excited to build upon their existing foundation, “We have already established a good structure, we have quality people and a very clear identity and philosophy.”
Thirteen-year-old Morgan Fedosiewich used to play goalkeeper for the Ottawa Internationals, however she felt that the OPDL gave the fury an upper hand this year: “The Internationals applied for an OPDL team but they didn’t get one, they also had three goalies on the team… I wanted to try out [for the Fury] to get some more play time.”
According to OSA president Ron Smale, an independent committee carried out an extensive research process to choose the successful clubs from across the province. The selection standards were primarily based on organizational structure, finances and coaching capability.
Smale says clubs within the league will have a much different season than they’re used to. The OPDL will shift the hosting responsibilities from the clubs to the league organizers. This will allow individual teams to focus fully on their training regimes, says Smale.
Both Zito and Dos Santos had mixed feelings about the strong representation from Ottawa within the league.
Zito says he is disappointed to hear that four Ottawa teams were selected. He says it will be challenging to gather enough talent to fill four teams at such a high standard. “Ottawa just doesn’t have that level of population.”
Dos Santos says that, in the short term, the selection of players might be “somewhat diluted.” However, he adds that, in the long term, players will have better competitive conditions in Ottawa.
Five days prior to the announcement of the successful teams, a statement from Smale was posted on the OSA website addressing some of the criticisms the organization has been facing.
Smale re-assured clubs that the new OPDL is only a small component of what the association offers. He encouraged those clubs that did not meet the league standards and were thus left out of the OPDL to remain positive. “I genuinely hope clubs will react in a thoughtful way even if they are not part of the OPDL in the league’s first year of operation.”
Smale says he sees this as the first step of many more to come. “We’re really excited, we see this as a pathway to the national level… We can’t wait to get started.”
Zito says the Fury will be running tryouts and finalizing teams this month to begin training in November for the pioneering season ahead.