Good Morning Coaches. Hopefully, everyone is off to a great start. It is nice to have teams decided and looking ahead to working with your groups over the next few months. For most, actually being able to be outdoors for the first week of the season is a welcome change. I know that isn’t the case for everyone but more than usual!
As we look ahead to the upcoming season, I want to do my best for all coaches to be in the loop for what is happening at the state level for our high school soccer coaches. I have gathered a good percentage of contact information for coaches but not everyone. However, this email is only going out to about 50% of girls coaches. I began creating the list from scratch this past fall to get us the most up to date information. I would like a coaching rep from your league (not your AD rep) to forward this email to all coaches in their league with the hopes that all are informed and are able to join our distribution list. It only takes one minute to fill out and will allow myself and our board to communicate better with everyone.
Coaches – if you received this email from a member of your league and not from me, Please fill out this form.
http://goo.gl/forms/arZIxgEGJG
I will communicate a few times during the season about things like the end of season all state meeting, the all state game in July in Fort Collins, referee voting for playoffs, the new RPI system for next year, etc. Please help us by getting the word out.
We are working with HSSO and CHSAA on making strides with our referees. Please make sure you have an arbiter account and are doing evaluations of your refs. Your AD should be able to get you squared away with an account if you don’t have one. There is some good work being done with some of the assignors around the state and there is also a pretty active ref community that is working with CHSAA on state playoffs referees. Your best input is to evaluate in arbiter and the voting at the end of the season.
I wanted to pass along that we had nearly 25 of our high school coaches at our social at the NSCAA Convention in Baltimore (and over 50 total area and college coaches) in January and I heard over and over again how our coaching community and relationships with one another is growing across leagues and classifications. This is great news and want to encourage you to get to know your colleagues and work together to continue doing great things for our student athletes.
Our High School soccer programs are indeed special and it is important that we continue to give these kids a great experience. As things like birth year and girls development academy come up on the club side of things we will face challenges which we haven’t seen before. I have had many conversations with coaches and former high school athletes that continue to say that there high school soccer experience was incredible and wouldn’t trade it for anything. Continue to do the work you are doing with kids and let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to support you.
Best of luck this season
Dan Watkins
President
Colorado High School Soccer Coaches Association