Whitehorse Daily Star

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REPRESENTING THE YUKON – The U15 Yukon Selects girl’s team finished 11th in the national championships beating the Northwest Territories 2-0 in their final game.

Yukon soccer clubs represent on the national stage

Three teams represented the Yukon in the Canadian soccer club championships over Thanksgiving weekend.

By Dustin Cook on October 11, 2017

Three teams represented the Yukon in the Canadian soccer club championships over Thanksgiving weekend.

The Yukon Selects FC U15 boy’s, U15 girl’s and men’s teams played in the national championships, the most teams representing Yukon at the event.

Selects FC technical director and assistant coach of the girl’s team Spencer Rich said the performances from the teams were excellent in facing the challenge of going up against teams who play a high-level weekly.

“You can tell that our kids don’t play that level week in and week out,” he said. “That’s the biggest difference by far.”

In the seeding phase of the tournament, both the boy’s and girl’s teams won a game, finishing in 11th out of 12 teams.

“For Yukon teams to win any games at nationals is phenomenal,” Rich said of the victories.

In their final game of the tournament, the girl’s team played the Northwest Territories, their rival, Rich said.

The Selects won the game 2-0 with Abby Rich scoring both goals.

“That was an amazing feeling,” Spencer Rich said of the win. “N.W.T in that age group won the last Arctic Games.”

On the boy’s U15 side, the team won a seeding game against a team from New Brunswick to also finish in 11th out of the 12 competing teams.

The men’s team were unable to come away with a victory finishing in 10th place.

Rich said they measured success against the highly-competitive teams by awarding points based on their own system.

They gave themselves points for four consecutive passes, holding their opponents without a goal for five consecutive minutes and a save made by the goalie.

Next the focus for the teams will move to futsal with the boy’s and girl’s teams preparing for the Arctic Winter Games and the men’s team hoping to participate in the national tournament.

Comments (1)

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Charlene on Oct 13, 2017 at 3:28 pm

N.W.T and Y.T. have been rivals for sometime. Usually Y.T. gets the W in outdoor as N.W.T. struggle with having a place to practice outside and they struggle with numbers (players on team that have to travel in from communities) N.W.T. usually gets the W when playing indoor because they have a long indoor season. It would be great for Y.T. to play against N.W.T. in both types so that indoor/outdoor competition becomes more of a competition. Then perhaps both teams would produce better numbers against the provinces...

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