Local players ready for Alberta Summer Games

The Olympics aren’t the only games of interest to St. Albertans this summer. The Alberta Summer Games are right around the corner.

This year Lethbridge will host the bi-annual sporting event for Alberta youth ages 11 to 17, July 26-29. More than 3,000 athletes representing eight zones across Alberta will compete in 15 different sports.

“This is the same as the Olympics for them,” said Kevin Jones, head coach of the Zone 5 boys’ soccer team.

Zone 5 covers the area roughly from Leduc north to Calling Lake and west to Grande Cache and includes St. Albert, Athabasca, Drayton Valley, Jasper and Sherwood Park, but excludes Edmonton.

Jones has been coaching soccer in St. Albert for more than 20 years, most recently with the St. Albert Impact U12 boys’ team. This will be his third time coaching an Alberta Summer Games team, having taken teams to the Games in 2004 and 2008.

The father-and-son team of Dave and Connor MacEachran, both of St. Albert, are Jones’ assistant coaches. Connor played on the 2004 Alberta Summer Games team.

Another longtime St. Albert coach guiding a Zone 5 team to Lethbridge is Dave Maguire. Maguire has been coaching local baseball since 1993 and currently heads up the bantam AAA Cardinals.

Six of Maguire’s Zone 5 players (ages 13-15) are from St. Albert and also play on the Cardinals team. Evaluators from Baseball Alberta and the Alberta Amateur Baseball Council conducted the initial player assessments at the Zone 5 tryouts.

“We are second in the league, we’ve got a lot of strong players,” said Maguire. “I encouraged my players to go and try out because I think it’s an important part of any athlete’s development to be exposed to what their peers can do and what they need to do to improve themselves.”

Jones’ Zone 5 soccer team also boasts a St. Albert contingent with nine local players. He said that when selecting players for their 13-and-under team, they looked for, “Technical ability first and position second. You can take good players and work with them for different positions.”

Maguire said that selection for the short-term team was difficult because there isn’t enough time to really get to know a player’s character and personality.

“Unfortunately, you don’t get a lot of time to get to know them, “ he said. “A lot of it is based on what the raw physical data tells you, like how fast they can run and how far they can throw.”

Both teams are trying to fit in Zone 5 practice time around the players’ regular team schedules, which isn’t always easy.

Maguire and his assistant coaches Jim Runyon and Kevin Watamaniuk made the best of a rained out practice last Sunday. “We had a team meeting and shared a bunch of information like what our expectations are as coaches in terms of the players representing themselves and the zone.”

The ball team has another practice scheduled on June 25 as well as an exhibition game that night against the Zone 6 team at Legion Memorial Park.

MacEachran said the Zone 5 soccer team has been managing to squeeze in some practice time. “We played two U14 Tier 1 teams in exhibition games and won them both, which is very good accolades for our boys because they’re outsized by a lot to the bigger boys. We won 3-1 and 5-3 so they did really well.”

Third-timer Jones said that having previous coaching experience at the event is an advantage. “Anticipating challenges from the past lets us know what questions to ask and what to plan out.”

He said that one of the biggest challenges at the Games will be off the field. This will be the first trip without their parents for many of the young players and the coaches will have to deal with “managing them being away from home, getting enough rest, proper nutrition.”

He said the potential is there for the team to do well at the competition despite it being a relatively young team. “They’re 12, which is young,’ he said. “There have been years with more 13-year-olds.”

For many of the Zone 5 team soccer players, it will be their first time playing on a full sized field with 11 on each side. But Jones said that if they can meet the challenges on the field, the team can be successful. “There’s great depth at all positions in this team.”

Maguire said that the Zone 5 baseball squad will approach the Games like any other tournament, trying to clinch a win off the bat. “It’s important to win the first game,” Maguire said. “It sets the stage and gives you a little more manoeuvrability.”

This is Maguire’s first time leading an Alberta Summer Games team. But having coached his former midget AAA team to a silver medal at the Canadian championship, he knows what it feels like to compete to that level. He wants his players to be able to experience that in Lethbridge. “It’s all about the experience and giving these kids some memories for down the road.”