There’s A Ray Of Hope Out There, Folks

By Richard Starnes The Ottawa Citizen

CSA sets new course with firm hand on tiller
New general secretary Peter Montopoli offers soccer the chance to right a program that has been rudderless for years.

It has taken exactly 508 days for the embarrassingly dysfunctional Canadian Soccer Association to find itself someone new to take charge.

It has been a rudderless ship and most of those days have been awash in discontented rumbling and grumbling.

Before I introduce you to a slim ray of hope, let me remind you of some of the most awful moments in the past lurching 18 months.

Colin Linford, for my money the most progressive president the association has ever appointed, quit after all his efforts to chart a better future were shot down by his former friends on the CSA board.

Internationally renowned Brazilian coach Renê Simões was rudely cast aside without even an apology after he had been assured he had landed the job Frank Yallop had abandoned.

The CSA announced Fred Nykamp would be quitting as the highly successful CEO of Basketball Canada to become its new CEO only for the board to ”fire” the man before he had even sat down. No one will tell us how much, but that has cost the CSA a pretty penny under threat of a lawsuit.

Canada continues to win nothing at the international level; and has done so for years and years. It’s embarrassing to admit that a country in which more than 800,000 play the game cannot even qualify for the finals of almost everything it enters.

And discontent wafts over just about everything the association touches. Former internationals are speaking out about how badly run and appallingly funded our national programs are. Letters and e-mails repeatedly reach my desk from despairing coaches, administrators, players and fans from around the country.

The message is loud: Canadian Soccer is a mess. It is viewed as mostly dysfunctional, disorganized and unfocused.

So why, you might ask, would Peter Montopoli decide to thrown himself into this pit?

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