Adrian Brijbassi
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Charles Wyatt of Toronto Soccer Community Outreach presents a trophy to a delighted player from Mogadishu soccer club, a newly formed Toronto team based in the Somali community.Adrian - Brijbassi/Toronto Star |
Abirahim Ali-rage knows the power of soccer. He grew up in Somalia surrounded by crime, poverty and violence. Urged on by his siblings, he played the sport almost every day, often in bare feet and 35-degree heat. He credits such devotion to soccer for keeping him out of the kind of trouble that afflicted so many boys in his home country.
Since immigrating to Canada more than 20 years ago, Ali-rage has learned that children in Toronto’s Somali community can also drift. He’s seen several join gangs and fall victim to drug abuse. The community lacked a positive outlet for them, he says. So, last year he started the Mogadishu soccer club to instill the benefits of organized sport into the North Etobicoke-based community.
With the World Cup underway without Canada, people involved with grassroots-level soccer believe the efforts of Ali-rage and others like him can help build the foundation of a stronger national program while also transforming ethnic communities.
“In Toronto, there are thousands and thousands of kids living in at-risk, lower-income neighbourhoods and they don’t get access to the programs available to everyone else,” says Charles Wyatt, founder of Toronto Soccer Community Outreach (TSCO) and president of the Toronto Soccer Association (TSA). “My experience has been that those youth are among the most talented players in the city and probably the country. If we formalize the system for them, you get more talent developed.” Michael Allison, a director at the Ontario Soccer Association, agrees that the talent in Toronto and other Canadian cities exists in the shadows. There are 149 teams and 2,350 players in the TSA, according to that organization’s website, and they may not be the best in the city. Allison says national, provincial and U.S. college scouts start looking at players when they are 12 years old or younger, which often excludes kids whose families can’t afford to have them join a club team.
“They play informally together, and technically they have a lot of skill, but may not have been trained, may not be tactically proficient. That comes with training. But the talent level is quite high and that’s because this is the game they know,” says Allison, who also manages the North York Nitros’ under-15 boys team, which is coached by former Cameroon national player Hermann Kingue.
Some teams, including the Nitros of the Central Soccer League, will fund players from low-income communities like St. James Town, paying their fees and sometimes their travelling expenses. League rules say nine of a team’s 18 roster spots must be filled by players from its district, but the other players can come from elsewhere. Allison’s North York team recently added two kids from low-income neighbourhoods, paying the $1,030 registration fee for each.
“If we feel we need one player to help put us over the top and we hear about a kid from Regent Park who’s a wizard with the ball, we will go and scout that player,” says Allison.
While that approach may keep a few kids from falling through the cracks, it doesn’t help develop communities, which is what Wyatt wants TSCO to do.
“The cohesion that takes place as a team from a young age, that’s important. It also makes it less likely that those players will go to a club outside of their neighbourhood when they’re older,” says Wyatt, who has started an under-11 boys team in St. James Town and has helped Ali-rage’s Mogadishu team get registered and locate playing fields. “A lot of soccer is going on outside of organized soccer. Sure, it may be a lot of fun if the kids are just playing in the park but they’re not going to be identified by people who can move them through the system.”
It may be overly optimistic to think the long-term benefit of such grassroots development would be an appearance in a future World Cup for Canada. As Allison and Wyatt suggest, though, the system isn’t working when the most talented players aren’t involved in it. Smaller countries that also don’t count soccer as their No. 1 sport (Australia and New Zealand, for example) are playing in the World Cup, making Canada’s status as an outsider for the globe’s most-watched sporting event even more embarrassing.
“It couldn’t be worse,” Allison says of the predicament of Toronto’s gifted but unrecognized players. “There’s so much evidence that so many talented players are overlooked. You ask, ‘What if? What if?’”
As Ali-rage says, though, there’s a bigger “what if?” for communities like his. He created the Mogadishu soccer program for the Somali community to provide an avenue for kids to escape crime and drugs. On May 28, the club held its first awards ceremony, and Wyatt and Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford were in attendance to present trophies and medals.
“I have small kids, the oldest is three years. I see in five, six, seven years, other kids are out on the street. Soccer gives me the opportunity to keep them out of that life,” Ali-rage says. “When kids don’t play soccer, they’ll go do something else and maybe not the kind of things that are good for them or the community.
“We see some Somali teenagers doing bad things and we don’t want to see the next generation get lost again.”
This article was first published in Toronto Star