Growth continues in developing players within the Pinnacles Football Club Excelsior program.
The ultimate goal for the elite program is to help players reach their dream of playing post-secondary soccer. The most recent players to accomplish that are Marisa Mendonca, with Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, and James Fraser, who is set to attend Simon Fraser University.
“We’re getting more and more players going off to university,” said PFC executive director and head coach Ezra Cremers.
The program resumed its training after B.C. Day on Aug. 3. Cremers said their competitive players need to train one to four times a week if they want to reach the next level. The players also get 30 to 40 competitive games as the club travels for tournaments. Cremers said that is new for this region in the last five years. Currently PFC Excelsior, which has a partnership with the Excelsior Rotterdam professional team in Holland, has 200 players on eight to 10 teams and by September, it’s expected to reach 400 players like last year. When the program started three years ago, they had more than 100 players.
Cremers said they pride the program on is its flexible schedule that allows the athletes to compete in other school sports if that is what they want to do.
“We don’t want them to look back when they are 25 and say ‘I wish I had played basketball. I wish I played soccer.’ We want them to choose on their own,” said Cremers.
With competition getting better, players can’t train for only three months and expect to make university teams rosters. The work they are doing has already resulted in several players going to college or university soccer and the coaching staff foresee three to five making it next year. It is believed players in the eight to 12-year-old age group, what Cremers called the ‘golden era of development’, will graduate anywhere from five to 10 players onto a higher level.
“In my opinion it’s unbelievable,” said Cremers.
To add to what the program has achieved, former UBC Thunderbirds women’s coach Andrea Neil is doing some consulting work in Penticton. Cremers said she was impressed with what she saw when coming here a couple of years ago. She was in Penticton during the Peach City Classic. While in Penticton, she focused on watching the team preparation and how Cremers runs the program.
“She wants to be surrounded by positive people. There is a lot that is just positive and going in the right direction here,” said Cremers.
Prior to the tournament starting, Neil said the soccer people she is associated with in the Lower Mainland are aware of what Pinnacles FC is doing and are impressed.
“You can just see the support of the player trying to develop skill,” said Neil. “Certainly it’s showing on the field. We had a Penticton Pinnacles player as part of our program in Alex Varchol. It was just tremendous to have her and expose her to a big university. She has been a great ambassador of Penticton.”
