Teams from around the province will be descending on Moose Jaw throughout the winter months, as the Moose Jaw Soccer Association kicks off the inaugural season in their indoor travelling league.

The league will open play this weekend at Yara Centre with round robin action on Saturday and Sunday.

"It made sense for us to start up a league for our competitive teams, it’s becoming a little harder for teams to get tournament games on a regular basis, so we thought that we’d add in some weekend league games around times when tournaments aren’t on," said MJSA technical director Jordan Jeffery.

There will be boys and girls teams in two different age divisions, Under-15 and Under-17/19.

Moose Jaw will be well represented as well with a team in each age division, featuring about 70 local players suiting up in the league.

"We’ve had a lot of interest in the league, we’ve even had some teams trying to come into the league for next year because we had already filled out in some of the groups, so it’s been a really successful first shot at the league," said Jeffery.

"We’d like a couple more teams in the U17/19 area, but we have enough to run it with 3-4 teams in [the girls and boys divisions], but we’d like to get to 5-6 teams in most age groups."

Teams will travel in from around the province and even as far as Alberta for one team in the U15 boys' division. They will play two games per weekend sets, which will happen approximately once per month.

"The games are nine versus nine on the half field at Yara, we wanted to keep it close to the outdoor format of 11v11 on the full field, so we felt this was the best way to keep that going through the indoor," said Jeffery.

"We know indoor is typically tough to get some game time for players because you have a roster of 16 players, but you’re only playing 6v6 games, a lot of kids don’t get the game time in the winter and then get discouraged from signing up, so this is our way to make sure everybody can play, more kids get more minutes, we get more touches on the ball and learn and improve."

The games this weekend will be running from 9-11 a.m. and 12-4 p.m. on Saturday and from 9-12 and 1-4 p.m. on Sunday at Yara Centre.

Also coming up on Sunday is the first of the eight-week session for the Vancouver Whitecaps Prospects Academy here in Moose Jaw.

Jeffery said they’re very excited to get things started up with the Academy, "Very excited, we can’t believe how quickly it rolled around," he said. 

"We created a real buzz with the Academy, we created a potential pathway for players to get to some of the levels that they haven’t got to before, so we’re just super excited to see how it runs."

Jeffery and Whitecaps FC Saskatchewan head coach Jonathan O’Neill will run the sessions, which will be running over the next two months for boys and girls from U8-U18.

"The 8-11-year-old group has been a little tricker in terms of selling it out, but the 11-14 and the 15-18 groups are full, which is fantastic," said Jeffery. 

"The other thing we’re really happy about is the fact that its the majority of Moose Jaw players, coming into it we weren’t sure how much of a buy-in we’d get from our players, we thought that we’d be hosting it, getting some Moose Jaw players and more Regina, but we have 75 percent Moose Jaw kids and then 25 percent from Regina, Swift Current, Weyburn, Yorkton and Stoughton."

The players will be on the field on Sunday afternoon at Yara Centre for the first session of the program. Click here for more details.