By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Sports Editor
Sitka soccer players wrapped up the spring season over the weekend – and announced a plan to increase soccer opportunities and boost popularity of the sport locally.
Sitka Youth Soccer has joined the Alaska Rush Soccer Club, an umbrella group that links soccer clubs and organizes tournaments.
Longtime Youth Soccer organizer Randy Hitchcock was eager for the chance to offer Sitka kids a chance at out-of-town competition.
Alaska Rush Soccer Club technical director Brian Lux, second from the right, instructs young athletes in Sitka, Sunday at Lower Moller field. Sitka Youth Soccer is now a member of Alaska Rush. (Sentinel photo by James Poulson)
“We’ve kind of felt like just a little group on our own here on a little island. What Rush is going to bring is we’re going to feel like a bigger community. Now we’re going to feel like we have a full Alaska community and beyond, because it’s a national, international program,” Hitchcock told the Sentinel Tuesday. He’s the Sitka Youth Soccer board president and has been involved in local soccer programs for years. The club serves school-age kids from kindergarten through high school.
The merger under the Alaska Rush umbrella, coaching director Brock Vowell said, increases opportunities for players. Eventually, he hopes to build the program to the point of restarting a high school team, which has been defunct for nearly a decade.
“It’s really opening up those opportunities for that next level and really helping with the growth of the program in general,” Vowell said. “So I think one of our goals when I sat down with Randy and Liberty (Siegle, SYS co-administrator) and the whole SYS board was how can we build this program to the point where we can get it back to a high school team? Back to the point where we can get a lot of kids playing at that competitive level?”
Hitchcock expressed this wish as well, though he did not expect a high school soccer squad to reconstitute itself rapidly.
“It would be really nice someday to see a high school team again up there. A women’s team, a men’s team, varsity soccer. We’re not trying to force it. We’re not trying to make it happen too fast,” he said.
Looking back on the spring season of soccer in Sitka, Vowell was pleased with how things went.
“It was really well done. I was a volunteer coach last year and so I’d had a little bit of a glimpse into how things were run then, kind of getting my feet wet, figuring out the scheduling and different things that we’re going to be doing throughout the season,” he said. “And it was really nice, them coming in and being one of the co-administrators this year. For the first year, I thought it went really smooth.”
The SYS spring season ended over the weekend with instructional clinics at Lower Moller Field.
About 150 kids were involved in the finale, a threefold increase from the group’s nadir three years ago, Hitchcock noted.
“We had a lot of new kids. So that’s been our biggest season and we have three seasons in a year, but I would say throughout our three seasons, the total number of kids we’ve had participate in the program is probably around 250 kids,” Hitchcock said.
Sitka now joins Palmer, Juneau and Homer in Alaska Rush. All told, there are about 90 Rush clubs in the United States, with roughly 50 in other countries, Alaska Rush technical director Brian Lux said. He was in Sitka to work with local soccer players for the weekend.
“For the kids here, it opens up opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise, for guest playing or getting into tournaments or traveling or coming up to Anchorage to play with our teams, going to other places in the U.S.,” Lux told the Sentinel.
For Sitka soccer enthusiasts, many daily aspects of club soccer will remain the same as they have been for years when SYS was independent.
“A lot of things are going to stay exactly the same, the general idea of when the sessions are and the number of them and the cost and things like that – none of that changes,” Lux said. “So this is kind of just trying to add another layer to what’s already going on. For the summer, there’s a lot of opportunities, just playing in tournaments and the league that we have in Anchorage and even outside of Alaska. There’s some travel tournaments and stuff that we’ll go to.”
Vowell seconded this, noting that casual soccer players won’t be excluded under the new structure.
“We’re not taking anything away, this is really just adding to what we have. We’re not going to be taking away the ability for those kids – kindergarteners, first graders – they’re still going to be able to play the exact same way that they did this last year,” Vowell said. “Same all the way up through the 12th graders, if they just want to come out on Sundays and have a good time and just play soccer, that experience or that opportunity is still available for them.”
Lux said the merger is a way to elevate opportunities for players.
“As far as the summer program here, I think the plan is to do similar to what they’ve done in the past, you know, a six- or seven-week session, a couple sessions a week and keep that going. And then find out what the next steps are to add on top of that, like Brock was saying for those players that are looking for a little bit more, to keep pushing them to the next level,” he said.
