By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Sports Editor
Club soccer players kicked off the spring season with a record number of athletes attending weekly practices at Upper Moller field last month.
As an informal group, Sitka Youth Soccer is aimed at fun, not serious, competition, coach Randy Hitchcock told the Sentinel.
“Our goal with the program is just really to encourage kids to have fun. Soccer in this town, numbers have always been a bit low. We’re just trying to keep it simple and keep it fun,” he said Thursday over the phone.
While local soccer squads have been small in the past, recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the popularity of club soccer in Sitka, despite the lack of a high school team and the disruptions caused by the global pandemic.
Over the summer of 2019, Hitchcock recalled, only 46 kids participated in the program. By the fall, however, that number rose to 63. While the coronavirus pandemic killed the 2020 summer season, in the fall of that year Hitchcock coached 92 young soccer players, from small children to high schoolers.
This spring, the program has grown again. Sitka Youth Soccer is up to 117 athletes, two and a half times more than in 2019.
Despite the large numbers, the coach said his players follow a variety of virus precautions.
“We had to close registration. We’re using the ASAA (virus safety) guidelines, so there is some consistency with youth sports even though we’re not affiliated with the schools… We’re keeping our little teams small, no more than six kids per team, though we have a few teams with seven,” Hitchcock said. “We don’t have any more than 12 kids together at any one time and we could keep signing kids up if we had more volunteers.”
Looking forward, he said, the rapid growth of the program is a good sign.
“It’s a really good sign for the program and the future of the sport here to see in two years our number go from 46 to 117,” he said.
Though the program has grown, teams remain small this year, which Hitchcock said contributes to a feeling of more serious soccer.
“The small size of teams and makes the games feel like real games. The kids get real uniforms and the games are treated as real games, they’re not just treated as a scrimmage,” the coach said.
To help coordinate the program and keep individual soccer squads small, Hitchcock relies on 30 volunteers this season, 24 of whom coach. While the program has existed in recent years beneath different umbrellas, this year Hitchcock incorporated Sitka Youth Soccer as a not-for-profit.
Looking forward, the coach hopes to see travel soccer return to Sitka.
“We kind of see Sitka Youth Soccer as the go-to place for any soccer related activity in Sitka… What I’d like to see are opportunities, the kids don’t get to travel and play. They’re playing against one another… eventually it would be great if they could do what the other sports are doing and go to Juneau and go to Ketchikan,” Hitchcock said.
The coach sees soccer as a way to foster friendships across Southeast.
“The main thing is for kids to build a bigger community of friendships across Southeast… They see basketball players and baseball players, all these other sports traveling and competing, and if soccer is your favorite sport, you want to do that too,” he said.
