Black Gold FC celebrates success of inaugural season

Q&A with Jordan Jeffrey

LEDUC -- The future of youth soccer in Leduc is looking bright. 

Black Gold FC, an elite youth soccer program that serves athletes across the Leduc County region, saw several of its teams achieve strong success during their first year of competition. The program's Technical Director Jordan Jeffrey spoke with 93.1 The One about their inaugural year, his optimism about the future of local youth soccer, and more.

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ONE FM: Could you maybe just give me a little bit of background as to how Black Gold FC first came to be?

JEFFREY: Yeah, a lot of us here in Leduc and the Battle River region, which encompasses Millet, Devon, Thorsby, Calmar, Pigeon Lake, Breton, Warburg, and New Sarepta, we felt that there was a missing part of the soccer pathway for the sport to really progress beyond just the local community leagues. Over the last three to four years, we've been trying to figure out the best way to develop the kids to be strong enough to play competitively, and then form something that those kids can filter into. So, what we did was we started off by forming the Black Gold Soccer Academy and what that does is in the chain is provide extra training for players by qualified coaches and provide higher level training. A lot of the kids that went through that have filtered naturally into the Black Gold FC system. This year it has run as a partnership between Battle River, the District Soccer Association, and the Leduc Soccer Association. A lot of the athletes at the moment are from Leduc, but we do have fifteen to twenty per cent from some of our rural district members such as Pigeon Lake, Devon, and Calmar. So, we decided that Black Gold FC would be something that name-wise is very familiar to the area, something that stands alone as a name without having the name location in it but still being identifiable to an area. Black Gold FC was created to provide a competitive pathway for players and coaches alike.

ONE FM: Do you guys just do indoor soccer, or outdoor as well?

JEFFREY: We are a year-round program so we operate from September until the end of July, so we try to give the kids at least August off just to reset and have fun with their friends for the summer. But we are a year-round program at this point, and we do quite a lot of stuff in Leduc, lots of games here, lots of practises here, then our teams travel and play games in Edmonton as well. We're starting to look at doing tournaments in Vancouver or further away in Alberta.

ONE FM: What was the first season like for you guys?

JEFFREY: It surpassed all of our expectations I think. What we did this year was we formed teams based on the individual year of birth from U-8 through to U-13, and the big goal for that was to make sure players are developmentally in age appropriately placed for competition. Our U-8 -- they don't really collect league tables for them -- but they finished in the top four in tier two. Our U-10 won tier two, our U-11's finished second and got silver in tier three, our U-12's finished third and got bronze in tier three, our U-13's played tier two for the first time and finished near the middle of the pack, and our U-15's won tier three undefeated and are heading to provincials in Lethbridge.

ONE FM: I hear that you guys had a ceremony at the Civic Centre, can you maybe talk me through what that looked like?

JEFFREY: We wanted to find a way to really celebrate our athletes and our coaches, and our parents, without the simple format of them just getting the medals and handing them out at practice. We wanted to do something that helped to build and support the club culture and environment that we're trying to build and get everybody together and do this as a collaborative effort. Like I said, we really want to develop that culture and the best way to do that in my opinion is to get everybody together as much as possible. When you have such a historic season, I think it's important that we come together as a unit and really celebrate those together and make sure everybody involved gets an opportunity to have the moment of celebration.

ONE FM: At this point, are you optimistic about the future of local soccer in the Leduc region?

JEFFREY: A million per cent. The nice thing is that our community numbers under the Leduc soccer umbrella continue to grow and our Black Gold FC numbers are continuing to grow. What we did for outdoor is, a lot of our teams in the younger ages go from playing seventy-seven to ninety-nine, so there was an opportunity to recruit some extra bodies for those teams and every team has had a number of kids interested in trying out and progressing up the ladder to the next level. It leaves me with a lot of optimism that we're on the right path. I've been here nearly four years myself, and I think that when I came in there wasn't really much of a pathway. I think a lot of the players involved either reached a certain level and went to play in Edmonton, or reached a certain level and played something else because they didn't want to commit to the driving and additional costs. We really pride ourselves on making sure our competitive program is providing opportunities and not costing the price of the bigger city clubs, so that's something we're always conscious of as well. One of the unique things is that our district is partnered with the Wolverhampton Wanderers of the English Premier League, and we do stuff where our coaches get webinars from their academy staff once a month. They'll send academy staff out once a year and do camps here, they'll do player camps, coach camps, and lots of development opportunities for the area. It's really important whether you're a first-time player just touching the ball for the first time, or somebody that wants to come in and have a bit more competition and a bit more experience with the game. We can provide that through that partnership as well and I think that's a really key feature for us.