Courtesy: Barre Montpelier Times Argus


Soccer club offers futsal

February 19, 2008

by Jim Higgins

After 10 years, the Capital Soccer Club is tired of being on the road less traveled. Founders George Cook and Peter Kim are launching their 10th anniversary season by choosing the road now traveled by most of the major soccer clubs in Vermont, not to mention some of the greatest sporting organizations in the world.

Like FC Porto, FC Barcelona, and Real Madrid, Capital Soccer is diversifying. They are keeping their outdoor soccer program, but bagging indoor boarded soccer in favor of futsal, what the rest of world plays indoors. Plus, they are adding lacrosse to their program menu.

"We have wanted to run futsal for years," Kim said, "and our 10th anniversary seemed like a good time to make the change. We are getting a lot of positive feedback about the change, but there are still some people who are uncomfortable with change. However, we're confident that they will soon recognize what a fun and exciting game futsal is." (The CSC Web site, capitalsoccer.net, now includes a video of the game, plus a lengthy description of how futsal differs from boarded soccer.) Cook said the numbers are promising. "We're only ten teams short of where we were last year at this time. Instead of 80 teams signed up, we have 70, but there's still a few weeks to go."

For the uninitiated like me, who keep calling it fusbol, the game of futsal is a purer form of soccer, without walls to artificially keep the ball in play. It is also a faster game with more scoring chances, plus it's safer, as it minimizes the collisions with the boards.

As Cook notes, "Capital Soccer has always been, first and foremost, a skill development organization, and we feel futsal is the next step towards developing a higher level of play in Central Vermont.

The rapid growth of lacrosse in Vermont has opened the door for Capital Soccer to add Capital Lacrosse under its banner, in the same way that Real Madrid and PC Barcelona, for example, goes beyond soccer to embrace sports like basketball and handball.

"Capital Soccer," Kim said, "is following this global model for an athletic organization with many sports but one unifying philosophy."

The Vermont sports culture is one that breeds multi-sport athletes, and what Kim and Cook discovered in recent years is the great number of soccer players who are also playing lacrosse. "So we added lacrosse clinics to our educational programming," Kim said, "which gives these athletes a high-quality experience while allowing them to participate in either or both sports."

"With some of Vermont's most knowledgeable lacrosse coaches working with us," Cook said, "we're looking forward to watching as the area's scholastic lacrosse teams begin to have more refined, skilled players entering their programs."

Moving off the road less traveled still incurs some risk and accurate reading of tea leaves. But Cook and Kim express confidence that that both decisions are the right ones."We expect," Kim says, "that futsal will generate the same enthusiasm that boarded soccer did when we first started in 1999, and that it will catch on and surpass boarded soccer in popularity in a very short time."

Adding lacrosse to the CSC menu appears, at first blush, to be a no-brainer. The sport has been demonstrating tremendous staying power and growth since it joined local scholastic programming about 15 years ago. The gamble is this: Will lacrosse players demonstrate the same commitment to improvement that soccer players have demonstrated these past 10 years? Clinics are expensive and time-consuming. We'll see soon enough.





Posted by Luca Ranocchiari --> luca.ranocchiari@futsalplanet.com