Chilliwack FC

My son loves soccer

I enrolled my children in the U4/U5 2021 Fall season and after orientation day, I immediately wanted to withdraw my children from the program. First red flag was shortly after seeing a mutual friend, they mentioned U4 2020 was not very good and it happens to be due the same experience I had on Orientation day, which was not well structured at all. I observed coaches distribute different colour pinnies to the kids to create teams. Half the children in a class were standing around, where as the other half were running around chasing the ball. And children from the “same team” were playing against each other. No encouragement or engagement towards the kids standing around with no clue what to do, while the coaches were paying attention to the kids trying to play a game. The coach to child ratio seemed incredibly low as well. What I was seeing didn’t make sense and was rather chaotic. Will not consider CFC for another season and will not recommend. I will be happy to register with Soccer Shots for our 3rd year next season.

I previously criticized Chilliwack FCs pandemic response. It felt sloppy.My main concern and issue with Chilliwack FC is how they are not interested in developing relationships between coaches and participants or between players.For my son's age group they were mixed into random groups with random coaches every week. At the end of the season, my son couldn't name any coaches and could remember two other players'They do not respond to emails and questions.In my two years of experience with Chilliwack FC, they have absolutely ruined soccer for one child and largely ignore the other aside from accepting money for registering.The focus for a soccer program should be healthy exercise and positivite social relationships. This isn't given or even expressed as an interest for Chilliwack FC.

Good club with great programs, the coaches are kind and caring. They always seem to be organized and they try their best to keep the costs low and affordable.

So much more potential!We had our 6 year old girl and 4 year old son registered this fall. As many people have pointed out here, there is room for serious improvement on behalf of the admin team (not to be confused with the volunteers). I was not too concerned about the covid protocol as this is determined by provincial health authorities. Here my points:1. Communication: was rather poor. The club is relying on a (costly? third party?) app/system provider called GotSport. This management system was supposed to provide you with simple, transparent info, e.g. scheduling details for games, practices, scores. Yet, the page is incredibly cumbersome to use and quite useless. A simple, efficient email does the job, as well as a general homepage with scores/lists. No need for complicated log ins and a plethora of tabs and functions that no one understands.Orientation: here too, communication was poor. From finding the entrance, to finding the actual field the kids were supposed to play on. Why not have large SIGNS? At one time, one guy made an improvised welcome speech; no one thought of getting a megaphone/loudspeaker. There were probably 300+ people in attendance. 90% couldn't hear a word. It is simple things like this that make you wonder...2. Pedagogy. This is my most important point. The makeup of both of my kids' teams was sporadic and chaotic. There were no permanent teams, no assigned coaches. Instead, the club opted to keep a large cohort of kids, ca. 30-40 and randomly divide them up, every single time for practice/games, To be fair, I can see advantages with this approach: there are simply too many kids and splitting the kids into smaller regular teams might make things harder on admin; you need more coaches, etc. It seems more efficient if you keep everyone together as a large crowd. But this rationalized, impersonal thinking comes at a cost from someone who is not a teacher and has little pedagogical sensitivity! Here is why:- Over the 4 months, my kids were unable to build a single friendship and make a buddy. They never had a coach to work with, learn from and trust. Instead, twice a week it was a wild mix or players and volunteer coaches. This, obviously, prevented the cohort from running organized practices. Telling the kids" to kick the ball does not do the trick. If every single class has a different coach