Getting ready for the soccer season

Chestermere United FC registration open

Coaches and managers at Chestermere United FC are preparing for another busy season this spring.
“It’s been quite a really successful program,” Chestermere United FC Executive Director Dave Clarke.
The club, which is 10 years old, has seen a lot of growth since it started out, going from a few hundred kids each season to nearly 1000 kids playing each year.
“It’s grown fantastically,” said Clarke.
“We’ve got little kids playing in the house league, older brothers and sisters play in the competitive side and mom and dad have been playing on our adult teams,” he said.
He credits the success of the club to several factors including the promotion of the club and sport and the increase in diversity of the community.
“We’ve done a lot of promotion of the game itself and the club,” said Clarke.
They have run information and skills sessions at the schools in Chestermere.
These soccer tutorials show the kids what he club is all about.
“It’s not about the traditional old school drills,” he said.
“Most of our stuff now on the younger end is all fun games,” said Clarke, “so they learn to play the game through play relay races and lots of fun activities with the ball.”
Soccer, according to Clarke, is the most popular sport in the world. It’s popularity in Canada has been growing steadily.
“I certainly think, the more that Canada and Chestermere particularly has gone multicultural, there’s a lot more kids coming in from different ethnic backgrounds and different cultures that have been part of soccer for such a long time,” said Clarke.
The enthusiasm of those players rubs off on their friends and classmates.
“We’ve tried to build our club into being this real community based organization,” he said.
Chestermere United FC offers several different programs from fun house leagues to competitive soccer.
The house league is for four to eight-year-olds playing once a week at Prairie Waters School.
Their intermediate program, known as the district house league is for eight to 11-year-olds with games twice per week. These teams play against Strathmore and Langdon teams.
The competitive teams play in the Canal Links Soccer district in everything from tier 1 to tier 5 and 6. There are separate boys’ and girls’ teams ranging from U10 to U18.
“We get an opportunity for the teams who are competitive in their leagues…to go to the Alberta soccer provincials,” said Clarke “and over the last few years we’ve sent quite a lot of teams.”
The club also runs various adult’s teams depending on interest from the community.
“We’ve had an over 18 team on the men’s side we’ve had an over 35 team,” said Clarke.
“Currently we don’t have teams at those age groups,” he said.
There are two over 40 ladies’ teams that have been running for several years.
“They’ve been really consistent…and very successful too in the division that they play in,” said Clarke.
The club has opened registration for the upcoming soccer season. With their goal of being family oriented, and community focused, no one who wants to play is turned away unless not enough people register to field a team.
If this happens, refunds are issued and Chestermere United FC will help to find those players spots with other clubs.
The club has a soft registration deadline of March 23 for all teams.
“That’s to ensure a place on a team but we don’t turn anybody away,” said Clarke, “we always try to make room for every player that wants to play here.”
The march deadline is primarily so that they can have a team roster for registration in the competitive leagues.
Registration reopens after this is completed.
Although there are no early bird registration incentives, Clarke said that since the club allows for staged payments to spread out the costs over several months.
The sooner one registers the longer they have to spread out those payments.
The competitive season starts April 22 and the house league programs start May 1.
To register or for more information go to https://chestermereunited.com and follow the registration link on the left of the page.

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In response to Canada's Online News Act and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) removing access to local news from their platforms, Anchor Media Inc encourages you to get your news directly from your trusted source by bookmarking this site and downloading the Rogue Radio App. Send your news tips, story ideas, pictures, and videos to info@anchormedia.ca


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