Chalk Talk: Last Dance*

Our younger daughter's Gorham Youth Soccer Association (GYSA) U14 Girls team is scheduled to play its first friendly of the 2024 season this afternoon, and the game marks the official kick-off for my last season as a coach or a board member with a Fall Classic club.

The Fall Classic league is administered by Soccer Maine--a member state association associated with the U.S. Soccer Federation and U.S. Youth Soccer--and the league consists of U9-U14 schedules that go from August to November. There are more than forty Fall Classic clubs in the state, and each club's geographical footprint corresponds with a local school district. 

Because of the clubs' connections with school districts, the programs are effective developmental pathways for high school programs, and representing your community from U9-U14 in the Fall Classic league is a rite of passage almost every Maine youth soccer player experiences.

(Because of their distinct geographical boundaries at the local level, they should also serve as the foundation for a coherent and organized developmental pathway for regional and state-wide programming within Maine. But that's another post for another day.)

Anyway, my involvement with Fall Classic clubs goes to back to at least 2011, when I was named the head coach of the Westbrook High School boys' varsity team and was first elected to the board of directors for the Westbrook Soccer League's Fall Classic club. Since then, I've also served as a Board member of Gorham's Fall Classic club and have coached our daughters' Fall Classic teams since 2015. 

The programming's structure is a model for how the rest of Soccer Maine's programming can best be organized, and the year-to-year consistency working with most of the same players and coaches ensures most of our focus can remain on the field. It's especially rewarding when you're able to attend a local high school game, and you're able to see the core group of players you started working with when they were U9 players exhibiting many of the coaching points and principles of play you'd been teaching and emphasizing since they were younger players.

We've had that experience with our older daughter's Class of 2026 teammates, and we look forward to a similar experience with our younger daughter's Class of 2029 teammates. 

* ;)