Canada National Team player Joel Waterman, playing in 2017 for TSS Rovers, the club I co-own with more than 300 community owners.
I want to tell about how I came to own part of a semi-pro soccer team, and how one of the men’s team players who played for us in 2017 is about to step on the field for Canada in the men’s World Cup.
Tonight somewhere in Qatar, a young man from Aldergrove BC is lying down in his bed and hoping he can get some sleep. Joel Waterman was named to the 26 player Canada National Men’s Team squad officially last week, and tomorrow he will dress for Canada in our first men’s World Cup since I was 18, 36 years ago.
I’ve followed football for most of my life, other than a gap between 1982 and about 2004 when, outside of World Cups, it wasn’t that available to watch. I lived in the UK for a few years as a kid, and supported our nearby local team Tottenham Hotspur, who played a few miles down the road from our house. When my son started playing about 2008 at our local club Bowen Island FC, I started playing too, coaching a little, watching Spurs on dodgy internet streams and attending Vancouver Whitecaps matches.
Living in Hertfordshire, it wasn’t unusual to see Tottenham players hanging around the local pool in the off season. I remember one day in 1980 when a bunch of us kids were thrilled to meet Glenn Hoddle at the pool. Local club, local player, even if he did play for England too. Hoddle was us, grew up in Harlow, just down the road, carried the community on his back whether at home at White Hart Lane or away at Arsenal or Argentina.
These days football is celebrity culture. But for us Canadians, the community of soccer clubs and families is small enough, and soccer is still niche enough, that even our global superstars still hold their local roots. People like Alphonso Davies, Jordyn Huitema and Christine Sinclair are synonymous with Edmonton, Chilliwack and Burnaby.
Canada has a weird sports culture. Our major professional teams all play in American leagues: the NHL, MLB, NBA. We have a professional football league for the gridiron version of the game which is different that the NFL version. And after many years of trying we finally have a men’s professional soccer league, the Canadian Premier League and we still don’t have a national women’s professional league. Our Olympic champion Women’s Team (also known as the CanXNT) is made up of players that all play outside of Canada. We never get to watch them here at home for their clubs, because the highest level of play for them is a semi-pro summer league.
Soccer-wise in Canada, the scene is dominated by the three Major League Soccer clubs, franchises of an American company set up in 1996 to develop the US National team. Toronto joined in 2007. Vancouver in 2011 and Montreal in 2012. Canadian players do play on thes eteams, but if you are in the academy with these clubs, there are almost no competitive fixtures. The Vancouver Whitecaps only this year restored a reserve team, and because of a new semi-pro summer league in BC, they now play their U-19 team in that league.
In the last decade three new leagues have sprung up in Canada: League 1 Ontario, PLSQ in Quebec and, this past year League 1 BC. This is an essential level of soccer, being composed of men’s teams featuring the best of the local talent. Many players are playing US or Canada university soccer in the fall and come to these leagues to play in the summer. The establishment of the League 1 structure beneath the Canadian Premier League has set up a development pyramid for Canadian talent, and we are finally starting to see dividends. The majority of our national men’s team players have played atthis level (or in the USL2, an American league with the same structure). These league’s are open, standards-based and semi-professional. The winners of the leagues qualify for the Canadian Chamiopnship and play professional clubs for the Voyageurs Cup.
We have no promotion or relegation in North America, and so we get behind our players. Our players move from one level to another, and ultimately we want to see them move on, playing at the highest possible level. If they have come through our local club, we tend to follow them along, supporting them on their way.
For many this journey ultimately means playing professional football in Europe where many of these guys are now ending up, and representing Canada on the international stage. The development pipeline is growing stronger every year, and it’s the establishment of the lower levels of the development structure that is doing it. No longer to we have to outsource our best talent to a national association that does not have their best interests in mind. Canadians playing for MLS clubs outside of Canada are counted against a team’s quota of international players, and great as he is, Jonathan Osorio is not going to steal an international spot on an American team from an up and coming South American phenom when such spots are coveted currency.
A case in point is going to bed in Qatar right now. Joel Waterman.
Back in 2017 I became involved in a club called TSS Rovers. Started by the owners of a successful private soccer academy in Richmond BC, Rovers was a response to the fact that in 10 years of MLS play, the Vancouver Whitecaps had not developed a BC based player that had made it to the national team. Our founders resolved to mobilize a community behind a club that would do that for both the men’s and women’s teams by fielding teams in the development leagues of, first of all, the US and then this year in League 1 BC. Since then we have become Canada’s first ever supporter-owned club and I’m a proud founding member of the Spirit of the Rovers Supporters’ Trust.
(We are currently selling shares by the way. You can buy in until December 17 here!)
in our first year in 2017, we bought a franchise in the United Soccer League league 2. We drafted a team full of university players, including Joel Waterman, who played for Trinity Western University and had spent the summer of 2016 at Kitsap Pumas in Washington. Joel came to us as a player that was focused on making a career in the game no matter what. He chose the best opportunities and the best coaches he could and proved himself to them over and over. On May 12 2017 his family showed up at our humble tailgate and Joel took off into the dressing room to get ready for the match. He had one strong season as a defensive midfielder for us in 2017 and then went on to play for Tommy Wheeldon who was coaching another USL team in Calgary, Foothills FC. Foothills would later form the basis for Cavalry FC, the CPL team that began play with the league started in 2019. Joel won a national USL championship with Foothills in 2018 and then was drafted by Cavalry in the inaugural CPL draft. He played a season in the CPL and became the first player transferred from CPL to MLS when Montreal bought him. After one season of pro football, Joel was playing in MLS, under the coaching of Wilmer Cabrera and later Thierry Henry. One of his first matches was in the CONCACAF Champions League for Montreal in February 2020.
Back in TSS Rovers land we followed Joel and amplified his accomplishments in MLS and on the continental stage. We celebrated his call up into national team camps, knowing that he was well down the depth chart even on a team that was ranked in the high double digits in the FIFA rankings.
As the pandemic deepened, it looked like Joel’s ascendancy would be halted. MLS schedules were postponed or delayed, and it playing and training time was curtailed. MLS got the teams into a bubble and the 2020 season resumed. World Cup qualifying appeared and Canada made it through the initial rounds and for the first time in a generation, appeared in the final eight, the Octagonal. This is a round robin competition, with each team playing home and away against the others. The top three qualify for the World Cup and the fourth placed team would qualify for a play-in spot against a team from Asia. That was the spot we had our eyes on. We were never going to top Mexico and the US and Honduras, or even Costa Rica and Jamaica. The Octagonal is brutal.
But we did it. And not only did we qualify, we won the whole tournament. We beat Mexico. We bet Honduras away. We beat the USA. We topped the table and we were the most improved national team in the world, going into the World Cup ranked in the top 40. In march we were ranked 31st overall. In December 2016, the winter Joel signed for us, we were ranked 117th with no pro soccer league and no hope of ever qualifying.
Joel wasn’t a part of the Octagonal, but as the season wore on, injuries to our centre backs meant that he was called into the squad and 10 minutes before a friendly match a couple of weeks ago, veteran Doneil Henry got injured in warm up and Joel got the start in a win against Kuwait. He played the next friendly against Japan as well and last week he was named as the 26th player on the 26 player roster.
Which is why tonight, he is in Doha, laying down to sleep, with the hopes and dreams of 320 community owners of TSS Rovers, the fans of Kitsap Pumas, Foothills FC, Cavalry FC, CF Montreal, Trinity Western University and Aldergrove FC lifting his spirit and wishing him luck.
Joel made his pathway. He did it without being given much of a chance by the elite clubs and big leagues. He chose to play for good coaches in development leagues, took his opportunities and knew that he had the support of thousands and the sole responsibility to achieve. For me he is the quintessential Rover, the quintessential Canadian player. And I think if you get to see him play in the next week, you’ll agree that he’s one of the guys you just want to do well, because he’s us, and we’re all for him.
George Zawadzki, photo from Bowen Island Undercurrent
Every community has larger than life characters and it seems like the smaller the community the larger these characters loom. I live on a small island of just under 5000 people and last week, on November 16, we lost a lion-hearted beauty.
George Zawadzki was probably the biggest man on Bowen Island. He stood at least 6’5″ and was a BIG man. He used to drive a small car around that had a permanent lean to the left. The first time my kids met him, he was coming up the driveway with a friend to do some window cleaning for us, and they came running into the house at the appearance of this veritable bear of a man.
But if George had the biggest body on Bowen Island, he may well have also had the biggest heart. He cared so deeply for this place and he fell in love with all the characters here and he poured himself into creating relationships. He drove a taxi, and was an enduring member of a poker game (and he took a crack at a professional career at the game too), twice ran for Council, and made a famous local film of Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang which included a huge cast of local characters, almost all the children on the Island, everyone with a long beard and with George himself playing the Hooded Fang.
In 2014 when he ran for office, he set up a unique, rolling, all-Candidates meeting on Facebook, and asked me to moderate it. My job was to elicit complex open ended questions from the community and posed them to candidates on Facebook so we could see folks working together in real time. I like to think that initiative helped change the character of Council after a couple of really divisive and toxic terms. We learned a lot and I documented it here.
His insatiable curiosity about the people and place here caused him to start a local TV channel on YouTube in 2008, back in the day when you could only upload 10 minute segments. As a Toronto boy of a similar vintage to me, it was instantly recognizable that he was inspired by the 1980s and early 1990s videographers of CityTV – a crew of journalists who carried cameras around the city interviewing regular folks and covering interesting neighbourhood happenings from BEHIND the camera rather than in front of it.
So while the island was going through a very interesting set of changes, George started uploading video to the Bowen TV channel on YouTube where it lives to this day.
Bowen TV captures a moment in time when things were changing in all kinds of ways. Artisan Square and Village Square were well established, giving a new shape to our village. Bowen traditions like the polar bear swim, Light up the Cove and Hallowe’en were still solid community fixtures, political debates raged around development, environmental preservation and planning, and affordable housing. There had been a period from the 1960-1990s which was post-Union Steamship company-town era and the island was still a small and quiet place. Starting about the early 2000s that changed, and lots of new folks (me included) arrived bringing all kinds of changes with us. Some good, some bad, as usual.
Bowen TV captured that era when that general shift was in full swing and his videos span that time, introducing newcomers and featuring old timers. It is a rich historical legacy of a moment in our history lovingly curated by a man that adored this place and was curious about where it was going. He considered it the most important work of his life.
We are going to miss George around here. A larger than life hole has been left in our collective community heart.
It’s been a fair few interesting weeks. A heavy work schedule with some important in person facilitations, combined with steady online work and teaching and an extended family health emergency is stretching our resources around here. So here’s a little news.
Social media rethink
On the social media front I’m still active on Twitter, and just waiting to see what happens there. But I have also opened a Mastodon account and I like it better. Twitter was created in an era where the speed and interaction and brevity of text messaging met blogging. Mastodon feels much more like blogging in that we all have accounts that hosted in different places and you can follow each other. it’s like Twitter meets blogging plus an RSS feed. Consider your friends’ Mastodon accounts as mini blogs rather than twitter accounts. At its best, Twitter is great for banter and conversation and has a feel of a transparent text conversation. But it’s under the control of a single unstable genius at the moment and demonstrating why we should not trust critical infrastructure to single individuals or companies. Musk is messing with Twitter as if someone got hold of the power grid and decided to create a whole new type of power generation by firing all the hydro dam technicians and trying to find nuclear scientists to keep the old system going and also get a new one up and running right away.
Twitter was robust. Robust things fail catastrophically. Musk is in danger of taking the compancecy dive into chaos from which return is neight guaranteed nor cheap.
So just stay here by subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed or subscribing by email over there on the right sidebar, or add me at Mastodon @chriscorrigan@mastdn.ca. I’m still on Facebook and LinkedIn but I don’t interact much in those places.
What I’m doing besides work
I might start sharing some different content here, and probably will do so as well at Mastodon too, so in addition to posts here on complexity and facilitation and working with groups, you might start seeing some stuff relating to other passions I am interested in. That includes building Canada’s first ever supporter owned semi-pro soccer team, TSS Rovers, who won a men’s championship in our fourth season and are on our way to play pro-teams in Canada’s national championship for the Voyageur’s Cup. If you are in Canada you can buy a share here and be a part of history. Our teams play in the third level of men’s soccer in Canada and the highest level of women’s soccer.
You may know I am a long time amateur musician and I sing and play liturgical music, folks songs, Irish music and popular music and I have started expanding my guitar chops by studying and learning jazz guitar over the past few years. That has married two passions – jazz and guitar – that I have kept separate for most of my life because the thought of getting them together was overwhelming. But I’m having the time of my life playing this music. Enjoy what I am enjoying. Here’s a Canadian guitarist I am studying, Reg Schwager and legendary bassist Don Thompson playing Everything Happens To Me.
So those are a couple of things that might seem to pop up here out of the blue.
Some cool stuff to share
Finally, I continue to read and earn about my professional craft and lately I have come across some hight quality recourses that I HAVE to share with you all:
- A snapshot of REOS’s scenario planning methodology recently used in Australia and Aotearoa to address future wildfire issues. With thanks to my mate Geoff Brown, a member of that team. It’s so good I’ve added it to the Facilitation Resources page.
- A toolkit for starting up communities of practice from my friend Nancy White, who is just the best there is at this stuff.
- A reader-focussed report assessment tool from Fresh Spectrum that will help you keep your audience in mind so that the reports you are writing get used. This is a great harvesting tool.
- A nice six step process for strategic planning from my Aussie Art of Hosting mates at the Jeder Institute.
- A for you theory-heads, a paper by Albert Linderman on Sense-making Methodologies and Ethnography published at the Spryng.io website. I’ve started in on some of Dervin’s work on this. It’s heavy going in a good way.
So there you go. What have you been up to?
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