Long-term plan leads Phoenix club to nationals

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This article was published 30/08/2011 (5452 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For three years they focused on their technique rather than their record — and it all paid off last week when the Phoenix Soccer Club under-14 boys won the MSA Cup.

Phoenix scored a 4-1 win over FC Northwest in the provincial final on Aug. 20 to earn a trip to the Under 14 National Club Championships in Mount Pearl, N.L. from Oct. 5 to 10.

Malcolm Mitchell, the head coach at Phoenix, recognized that he had a talented group of players three years ago, and decided to take a very technical approach to developing their games.

“We practised a long-term approach to it,” Mitchell said. “We didn’t go out at U-11 to win every game. We have a belief that unless you’re technically proficient, winning games at U-10 or U-11 isn’t necessarily good for the long term.”

Not all the players bought into that plan from the outset, but now they can agree that the coaches knew what they were doing.

“It really paid off,” said forward Aaron Hidalgo-Mazzei, a North Kildonan resident who was named player of the game in the final. “At first we didn’t really agree with all the stuff we were doing and not trying harder to win games, but coming into this year we built off all of it.”

Hidalgo-Mazzei, 14, is one of three members of the Phoenix team who will be joining the Regional Training Centre program for elite players at Glenlawn Collegiate in the fall, along with Andre Bailes and Jashandeep Sangha.

After hovering around the .500 mark at the U-10 and U-11 levels, the squad began seeing more success in the standings in U-12.

After losing only one outdoor game all season in U-13 last year, Mitchell decided to move the team up a year and to play against U-15 competition in 2011.

“We haven’t won a lot,” Mitchell said, “but we’ve been competitive with every game. It really helped with our preparation (for the MSA Cup). The physical strength and speed that we’re used to seeing wasn’t there.”

Hidalgo-Mazzei said playing against teams a year older was a key factor in Phoenix’s success against their rivals in the provincial tournament.

“You have to play faster,” he said. “We’ve been working on our strength because they’re stronger, and we’ve been learning how to deal with that.”

A rash of injuries caused the team significant problems throughout the season — on several occasions they were forced to play league games with only 10 players — so Mitchell is hoping the six-week break before nationals will be enough time for all of his players to get healthy.

“We have five or six niggling injuries that we’ll try to rest,” he said. “The fitness level is pretty good, because we don’t go into games with a big bench.”

Despite the stronger competition at nationals, Phoenix won’t be making any changes to its tactics.

“We try to play attacking soccer,” Mitchell said. “We often commit a lot of players forward and other teams get chances. We figure it we score five or six, they need to score six or seven to beat us.”