As a sign of the strength of the local soccer programming, the Moose Jaw Soccer Association's indoor season had to cap registrations due to how many players they could have on the field at one time.

Moose Jaw technical and executive director Jordan Jeffery said that was unfortunate because they might have been able to see bigger growth, but things are still looking up for the sport.

“The registration went really well,” he said. “We had to open second groups, a few groups due to large numbers for registrations. We’re hoping that this will kind of be the springboard for us to keep building in the future. We’re extremely happy. We had forecasted lower numbers because of the Covid situation. For us to be where we’re sat and being able to book extra field time still is a very good thing for us.”

The Indoor season is expected to start in November.

Meanwhile, the association's first summer with Scottish club Celtic has provided a great opportunity for the organization to learn the curriculum.

“Next year, we plan to add a lot more, but it will kind of depend on how the world is looking then and what capabilities we have as an organization to send players around,” Jeffery said. “And then as soon as it’s safe, Celtic are going to come out here and do a camp, hopefully, a weeklong camp. Lots of stuff with Celtic coming up. We just had to scale a lot of it back, sadly because of the ongoing pandemic right now.”

Jeffery said that through that curriculum that they were able to do over the summer, they created a high-performance stream.

“That stream will see teams travel to Glasgow once the world hopefully restores itself to some form of normality,” he said. “And then we have a team right now of U18 players, from 2003 to 2005 that are training every Sunday twice a day, and then training twice a week with the club as well as doing one fitness session, and then that’s the first set of players we’re looking to send to Glasgow as teams and individuals for training purposes.”

He said they selected 20 for the program, including a pair who moved from Yorkton, one from Swift Current, and a couple of players who have moved from Calgary, with the rest from Regina and Moose Jaw.

“Quite a good team of players we’re looking forward to developing as a group and as individuals and seeing where we can take them,” Jeffery said. “Obviously they’re excited. The fact that they can go to Glasgow and they’ll get to do some training with the Celtic coaches and play some games against local opposition there.”