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Late last week, as the club’s first team was kicking off their match at the Houston Dynamo, the Vancouver Whitecaps welcomed more than 450 of Canada’s top youth players to British Columbia for their academy center combine.
One of the more unique development initiatives in MLS, the combine
(pictured above) brings the best players from the Whitecaps’ nationwide
system of academy centers together to show their stuff in front of the
team’s main academy staff. The event is an annual culmination of sorts
for the club’s youth development system, which has become the
widest-ranging such setup in all of MLS.
A growing number of MLS clubs have begun recruiting players
to their academies from outside their geographic territory in recent
years, but Vancouver have gone several steps further. The Whitecaps
don’t merely recruit players from different parts of Canada, they’re
rooted across the country. Over the past seven years, the club has
established 22 academy centers in eight of Canada’s 10 provinces. The
centers begin training boys and girls part-time as young as age 8 and
work with their specific provincial soccer association to develop
full-time teams for 13- and 14-year-olds. Players from those teams end
up at the academy center combine. The best then receive invites to move
to Vancouver to join the full Whitecaps academy, where they can better
work toward pro careers.
“The long-term goal here for us as a club is to continue to help
produce players by design,” Whitecaps academy center director and head
coach Marinos Papageorgeopolous told MLSsoccer.com earlier this week.
“We don’t just want them to affect our club, we want them to affect the
national team programs and affect the communities.”
The academy center strategy was borne out of a couple of structural
challenges: Market size and home nation. Vancouver is the fifth-smallest
metropolitan area in MLS. As such, the club has a shallower pool of
local talent to pull into their academy. In order to hang with the
league’s big boys, the ‘Caps have to look beyond Vancouver for youth
players. That problem isn’t specific to them – Sporting Kansas City, Real Salt Lake
and several others deal with the same issue. But Canadian law largely
bars the ‘Caps from recruiting American players to their academy.
Instead of looking for hidden gems in a country of 325 million like
Kansas City or Salt Lake can, they’re searching in a nation with a
population that’s just twice the size of the New York metro area.
In order to overcome those barriers, Vancouver knew they had to do
something different. Their massive Homegrown territory – which covers
all of Canada except Quebec, New Brunswick and the area within a 50-mile
radius of Toronto FC’s headquarters – could level the playing field a bit, but only if the ‘Caps actually capitalized on it.
Enter the academy centers. Vancouver started building the centers in
2011, creating them in further afield regions in British Columbia, all
across Alberta and several sites in Saskatchewan. The club formed
partnerships with provincial soccer associations at every stop, staffing
a coach in each center and beginning to build out the infrastructure
needed to build full-time teams. They eventually made it all the way to
the Atlantic coast, where they founded academy centers in Nova Scotia,
Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, all several thousand
miles from Vancouver.
The centers serve several purposes. First is talent identification.
By putting boots on the ground and working with already established
provincial associations across the country, the ‘Caps can more easily
find the best players in each region. They can get those players into
their development pathway and, if they merit a spot, eventually invite
them to the full academy in Vancouver. The longer-term play is to raise
the overall level of soccer in Canada. The ‘Caps might not get a player
out of a specific center for the first 10 years of its existence, but,
through regular coaching education programs at the local level, better
training sessions in underserved areas and close integration with the
main academy, the club thinks they’ll help raise the standard. Ten years
down the road, that higher level of competition should breed more
talented players who could theoretically move to the main academy, the
first team and perhaps the Canadian national team.
Ricky King now leads the 'Caps U-19s after managing their Alberta academy | Bob Frid / Vancouver Whitecaps
“For me, the goals of the academy center are to run high-performance
programming to make sure that we’re giving opportunities to players from
areas of the country that aren’t attached to an MLS club and bringing
those players here, then also helping to grow the game itself in
Canada,” said Whitecaps U-19 academy head coach Ricky King, who spent a
year managing the club’s Alberta academy center before moving to
Vancouver to take over the U-19s in September. “That’s probably equally
important. It’s not just about the players now. It’s those players in
five, six, seven years that could be the high-performance players, too.”
According to Papageorgeopolous, the first five or so years of the
academy center program were largely devoted to building out
infrastructure. Setting up shop at each site, making hires and
partnering with provincial associations took time. The club now feels
that most of that work is out of the way. Now, the ‘Caps are focused on
enhancing each program and getting more players from these smaller
regions into the academy and first team. If they knock it out of the
park, they might just find and develop the next Alphonso Davies,
who Vancouver sold to Bayern Munich for an MLS record fee in January,
at an academy center in Northern B.C., Manitoba or tiny Prince Edward
Island.
“It’s really important that we start to see more players come in and
make that transition from the academy centers to the academy and then
into the first team,” said King, who, while working for the New York Red Bulls in 2011, helped identify a 12-year-old Tyler Adams
at one of the club’s summer camps. “Obviously the one player for Canada
and the Whitecaps that everybody knows is Alphonso Davies. He was an
Edmonton-based player, and even though he didn’t come from the academy
center network but from our scouting network, he kind of shows the
importance of making sure that we do have these types of programs in
place and that they are successful.”
They’ve already made some significant progress. The club announced on March 7 that they signed 17-year-old goalkeeper Thomas Hasal
to a Homegrown contract. A native of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Hasal is
the first player from a regional academy center to sign an MLS deal with
Vancouver. With Papageorgeopolous sharing that “about 30 percent” of
the players in the club’s full-time academy are from academy centers
across the country, he surely won’t be the last.