Soccer 101: School’s In

Two new programs in Delta are designed to allow young elite players to concentrate on the sport they love while staying at home

Elliott Pap , Vancouver Sun

Published: Saturday, May 31, 2008

In their endless quest for more beauty in the beautiful game, the Vancouver Whitecaps are rolling out two new programs to attract elite teenage players in the Lower Mainland.

The Whitecaps’ Delta Prospects Academy and Delta School Academy are both set to begin in September, further enhancing the club’s reach into grassroots soccer.

The aim, of course, is to gather promising players under one schoolhouse roof so they can train together and grow on a daily basis. The Whitecaps already have a residency program in Burnaby for their brightest prospects and the Delta academies will add another layer below.

Vancouver Whitecaps prospects (from left) Rhys Volkanant, Ashley Ankiewicz, Jordan Whitehead, Riley Newport and Harry Lakhan.

It’s all part of the grand plan to make the Whitecaps a better soccer team and Canada a better soccer nation. (We were 62nd in FIFA’s May 8th rankings.)

“Will these programs help Canada internationally someday?” said Whitecaps president Bob Lenarduzzi. “To answer your question, it’s an emphatic ‘yes!’

“If I go back to when I was coaching the national team, one of the things I said — well, I didn’t say it at the time because it would have sounded like sour grapes so I waited a year — anyway, I said it won’t matter who comes in to coach the team, the bottom line is that coach will be, or won’t be, the benefactor of what the system is doing.

“You could bring in the best coach in the world but he’ll still have at his disposal what the system is producing,” Lenarduzzi continued. “The Canadian Soccer Association has tried to do its best but, really, it’s the advent of the pro clubs. So we’re doing it and Montreal and Toronto FC intend to do it, too.”

The Delta Prospects Academy will run out of North Delta Secondary, where 22 hand-picked Grade 11 and 12 boys will commute to class, become a team, and train daily during school hours under Whitecaps coach Bart Choufour.

The School Academy for Grade 8-10 boys, headquartered at Delview Secondary, will be less restrictive and open to any student wishing to hone his soccer skills.

Identical programs for girls will commence in September 2009.

“We feel these programs eliminate one of the big problems right now in youth development with players being pulled in a lot of different directions,” said Dan Lenarduzzi, Bob’s younger brother and the Whitecaps’ director of youth development. “Instead of going to 20 different sessions a week with different clubs, they’ll be with one club and going to school together.”

Delta’s school board was more than happy to accommodate the Whitecaps. The board is already home to a hockey academy based at South Delta Secondary and it also works closely with major junior hockey’s Vancouver Giants, whose high-school aged players attend classes at South Delta high.

It was an easy fit, said long-time Delta school trustee Dale Saip.

“The district has very successfully run our hockey academy for four years so we have a bit of a model,” said Saip, the Giants’ vice-president of business development in his day job. “We also have the model of Milan Lucic and Gilbert Brule [ex-Giants] and others having very successful academic situations her