The Northampton Soccer Club, the town’s travel program, and the Northampton Youth Soccer Association, the recreation league, merged at the board level to create Northampton Soccer.
Both programs will continue to exist, but now they will operate under one umbrella that can provide children and parents with all of their Northampton soccer needs.
About a year ago, Helen Kahn, the new president of Northampton Soccer, made a push to expand the board of NSC to complete the necessary tasks to organize travel soccer. Too much work for the available volunteers in the recreation program led NYSA organizer Hosie Baskin to contact Kahn about a merger.
“I presented the idea to our board, and immediately they were enthusiastic about it because we all recognized as a parent in Northampton it is often confusing to figure out what the Northampton scene is,” Kahn said.
The Northampton Soccer board now consists of 12 volunteers from both sides of the merger. The members make tasks like registering players, communicating with parents, and gathering supplies for teams run more smoothly.
With one organization that has all the details of both leagues, Northampton Soccer also hopes to make soccer decisions easier on parents and children.
Baskin is optimistic that the merger will allow parents to assess the best program for their child based on time commitment, financial means, competitiveness and intensity. The board hopes to eliminate any previous ambiguity and present ample information to the community going forward.
Each league will mostly function the same as before, with one major change to the recreation program. The seventh and eighth grade teams will now play in the travel leagues because of a lack of players in the age group.
“We’ve had falling numbers, I think, because the increasing number of different possibilities in youth sports,” Baskin said.
Another change includes a new home for travel teams at the Florence Recreation Fields at 157 Spring Street, because of traffic issues and over-usage of the old Oxbow fields. The five new fields are entirely organic, presenting a challenge for the Parks and Recreation Department.
“We’re just starting out, so some of the concerns are the average time on the fields, and the number of fields being used,” Parks and Recreation Department director Ann-Marie Moggio said.
As the Parks and Recreation Department reassesses the condition of the fields after the spring season, Moggio and the Northampton Soccer board are optimistic both leagues and more teams will be able to use them in the future.
Northampton Soccer also brought in Smith College’s coach, Mark Platts and Westfield State University’s assistant coach, Jen Simonetti to lead the new coaching board of directors.
Platts and Simonetti will lead one weekly practice with each team, run offseason skills clinics, and provide instructions to both travel and recreational coaches.
Most of the voluntary coaches have other jobs and may not have a soccer background, so the new coaching board hopes to alleviate some of that stress.
NSC kicked off the spring season with its first clinic led by Platts and Simonetti on April 2 to introduce the parents and kids to the new coaches. The board will continue to introduce Platts and Simonetti, as people welcome Northampton Soccer as a single organization.