As winter comes to an end, snow slowly melts away and the grass begins to grow. The conditions for a perfect soccer pick-up or summer league start to flourish.
But what happens to the soccer fan base and athletes who wish to play the sport year-round? That’s where futsal emerges as an opportunity to enjoy the game, maintain fitness and improve overall performance.
Futsal is a modified form of soccer played with five players per side on a smaller, typically indoor, field.
On March 22 and 23, the St. Thomas University Tommies soccer team hosted the second annual Futsal Challenge Tour featuring 16 men’s and women’s teams from across New Brunswick, including teams from STU, the University of New Brunswick, Université de Moncton and UNB Saint John.
David Itoafa, one of the organizers and STU women’s soccer head coach, said that having teams travel long hours to make it to the tournament shows the “commitment and hunger” the province has.
“Canada is becoming a soccer country, like it or not and it’s affecting futsal as well, where you’re seeing growth in that sport,” he said.
Soccer NB describes futsal as “the secret to developing beautiful soccer,” helping players develop skills by “having more touches and more playing time.”
Likewise, since taking over the STU women’s program, Itoafa’s team has identified futsal as a key component in helping the athletes develop their technical abilities.
“It’s very important for the players’ technical ability development, as their first touch, they’re gonna make a lot more mistakes because of the faster pace. As a coach, you’re able to correct things more quickly than in an 11-a-side game, where someone may not touch the ball as often,” said Itoafa.
Cuilean Hendra, the coach of men’s tournament winner Saint John Shamrocks, said that even though the sport is still at the grassroots phase in the province, it has the potential to attract different regions.
“There need to be leagues and futsal coaches from Futsal Canada coming in and doing workshops with coaches and scouting for national teams,” said Hendra. “Once you start having that type of engagement in the sport, it helps other people to see that it’s a worthwhile pathway for them to continue.”
Two of the major figures responsible for the futsal development in New Brunswick are Volodymyr Levets and the President of the Fredericton District Soccer Association, Robert Saunders.
Levets started working on the development of futsal with the Multicultural Association of Fredericton after he emigrated from Ukraine and noticed that during winter, there was not much activity.
Levets and Saunders said that futsal has come a long way in this past decade.
“We’re getting there with the city … they’d never seen games in Fredericton before, so now they understand that the city is leaning forward to buying futsal equipment for the city itself,” said Saunders.
The main challenge relies on the availability of gymnasiums that can support futsal. As of now, there are only two courts that could be used for futsal, according to Levets.
Itoafa agreed with Hendra, Saunders and Levets that one of the biggest benefits is the accessibility to resources for technique development.
“It’s definitely making soccer more accessible and affordable too, where the gyms are much cheaper than the [UNB] dome to rent, that’s the only other facility that you can use in town [for soccer in winter],” said Itoafa.
“My main point is that, yes, you can go ahead with soccer in the winter, but you will have to come up with your own drills and techniques of development. While for futsal, you just go to fifa.com and there are endless amounts of resources that you can adopt,” said Levets.
