Lakeshore struggling to adjust to AAA level

As most observant followers of the Lac St. Louis Lakers boys’ and girls’ AAA soccer clubs know, the landscape recently changed, and there’s no looking back.

By 2012, the Quebec Elite Soccer League will have a completely new look. Existing regional teams will have been replaced by a promotion-relegation system of AA clubs. On a local level, that means all Lac St. Louis Lakers boys’ and girls’ teams will be extinct in four years. The relegation part of the system will see the last-place team in the revamped Quebec AAA league move back down to AA, only to be replaced by a promoted club.

The changes will be phased in on a yearly basis, with the first major change having taken place this season at the under-14 level, where the Lakeshore Soccer Association’s girls’ and boys’ have earned the right to experience what life is like in the wild and highly competitive AAA league. The adjustment seems to have been hard on both sides. Each has struggled up to this point of the campaign.

Despite Lakeshore’s u-14’s hardships on the pitch, and criticism by other soccer associations of the decision to go from a regional to a club system - one of the problems observers foresaw from the new system was larger, more privileged AA clubs like Lakeshore that were promoted would be able to attract better coaches, perhaps through monetary means, and as a consequence, the best players – Lakeshore people remain adamant the federation’s move was a right one.

“By making this change, the federation wanted local clubs like Lakeshore to get closer to what the club system is like outside of Canada, in places like Europe and South America,” said Phillip Dos Santos, technical director of Lakeshore soccer and present head coach of the u-16 Lakers’ boys. “If clubs have the infrastructure, staff and players, well they should think about becoming elite clubs. They should be forced to put together good technical programs for players and education programs for coaches.”

To that extent, Lakeshore has already started its soccer academy, where it identifies young players at the u-9 levels and up, and works with them over the winter, helping them develop their skills until they can play at the AAA level.

As far as those detractors who worry about bigger clubs taking over at the elite level through monetary means, Dos Santos said such is the fact of life in soccer hotbeds overseas as well.

“Listen, you will always have secondary clubs,” he said. “Unless there’s a lot of work being done, financial help, those clubs will have a very hard time growing. They must simply try to be the best within their reality.”