Even though temperatures were below freezing, about 80 Maine-based players participated in Portland Hearts of Pine’s inaugural player evaluations at Falmouth High School, and one of the club’s 5-year visions was realized: Maine players had the opportunity to earn a professional roster spot in Maine to play for a professional Maine club.
Unlike other sports franchises in Maine, Hearts of Pine are an independent club (i.e., not a minor league affiliate), and they compete in a league that lacks a player draft. The club is also part of an international marketplace that features financial resources like training compensation, solidarity payments, and transfer fees.
The lack of a player draft and those financial incentives that are tied to youth player development provide professional clubs around the world with compelling motives to be actively involved in developing youth players in their own backyards, instead of solely relying on other unrelated youth organizations, college programs, and a player draft to prepare their rostered players.
Now, Hearts of Pine is understandably preoccupied with the complicated logistics of putting together a quality first men’s team for an inaugural season that starts in just a few months: Hiring a coach, renovating a stadium, signing players, selling tickets, hawking merch, and all the other thousands of small details that go into building a club from scratch.
Moreover, the club has stated publicly that rostering a women’s team is probably the next project on their horizon, especially with their league’s recent development of women’s leagues like the USL Super League and the USL W League.
But their league also has a youth development structure, and it’s not ridiculous to speculate the club will eventually become involved in that youth development structure–even if the club’s timeline to do so may be measured in years, instead of months.
Which means now is a wicked good time for Maine’s soccer stakeholders to reimagine our state’s soccer ecosystem to build a more connected, accessible, and aspirational developmental pathway within the Pine Tree State to give all of our soccer stakeholders the best opportunities to fulfill their greatest potential and aspirations without speculating about the best pathway, spending as much money for participation fees, and not traveling as far for training sessions and competitions.
Even if you just consider private club programming under the umbrella of Maine's youth and adult state associations, there are multiple silos involved in delivering that programming, and most of those silos have very little interaction with the other silos.
Classic clubs that provide programming for U8-U14 players who live in a particular school district have very few formal connections with so-called premier clubs for 8U-19U players that don't necessarily have any defined geographical boundaries. Moreover, some premier clubs have programming that directly compete with--instead of complement--classic club programming.
And neither classic club programming nor premier club programming are formally connected with our state's Olympic Development Program (ODP), which theoretically should be the program that Maine's best players participate in to gain experience and exposure at the regional and national level.
And our state-based fledgling 23U men's and women's summer programming has no connections with classic clubs, a few connections with premier clubs, and no connections with ODP. Even worse, men's and women's club programming only exists in Maine because a whole other state governing body affiliated with the U.S. Soccer Federation had to be established, creating yet another disconnected silo.
And that's just on the private club side of soccer programming in Maine: We of course also need to factor in municipal-administered recreational programming, middle school soccer, high school soccer, and collegiate soccer when talking about our state's current soccer ecosystem.
Put bluntly, you'd have to try really hard to purposefully create a more disconnected and inefficient soccer ecosystem, especially in a relatively small soccer population state like Maine.
That's the discouraging news.
The encouraging news is that Maine’s diversity of programming means all the puzzle pieces for a more connected, accessible, and aspirational soccer ecosystem already exist. Moreover, all those puzzle pieces play different vital roles that should still be available, even as we reimagine Maine's soccer ecosystem.
The challenge, of course, is the same challenge every puzzle solver faces when presented with the seemingly random scattering of puzzle pieces: How do we make these puzzle pieces connect and fit to form a coherent image?
Glad you asked.
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