| Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (May 2004) |
By Joe Cummings
In the early 1990s, Tim Schum and Joe Bean authored “The First 50 Years, 1941-1991: The History of the National Soccer Coaches Association of America.”
The first chapter, entitled “1941 – A Year to Be Remembered,” is a look at the beginnings of the association many of us now consider our extended family. This is the only chapter dedicated to a single year because of its significance to the NSCAA. Subsequent chapters give an overview of a full decade of NSCAA history.
One account of the association’s first meeting, from an article by Howard DeNike entitled “The Origin and Early Development of the National Soccer Coaches Association,” reads as follows:
The actual substructure for the embryonic coaches association was the already-established Intercollegiate Soccer Football Association (ICSFA). This largely Eastern group met annually for the purpose of recognizing the outstanding collegiate team of the particular year. The coaches also discussed rule changes at such meetings, while there was also a general exchange of ideas amongst the gathered soccer brethren. It was at one of the ICSFA meetings that the National Soccer Coaches Association was first mentioned.
At the conclusion of the Intercollegiate Soccer Football Association (ICSFA) meeting on January 13, 1941, at the Harvard Club located on 44th Street in New York City, several college soccer coaches in attendance decided to remain in order to have a discussion of various problems. It was felt by many of us that soccer coaches needed an organization to help further soccer development through various new projects or programs. There followed a lively discussion of various ideas and out of all this it was decided and voted upon to organize our own association.
The NSCAA objectives, as agreed upon by those in attendance, included:
- To encourage the development of the sport of soccer in the secondary schools, colleges and universities.
- To develop mechanisms to better publicize the sport.
- To organize clinics to better teach the sport.
- To evaluate current teaching methods and improve them to make for better teaching of the sport.
- To seek to enroll more soccer coaches in the NSCAA to better achieve the above goals.
A second version of that initial formative meeting, in a Soccer Journal interview of Earl Waters by NSCAA historian Mickey Cochrane, detailed the steps taken to form the NSCAA as an offshoot of the Eastern Intercollegiate Coaches Association (EICA). The first membership drive was initiated as follows:
It was agreed that a list of all soccer coaches should be compiled. A membership recruitment letter was then sent out notifying all coaches of the formation of the NSCAA and what its goals and objectives were. Eighty paid memberships resulted from this initial membership campaign. The fledgling association was not exactly solvent after the influx of new members. One has to remember that while the annual membership had been established at $1, the total amount generated wasn’t enough to pay for all the officers decided to accomplish in 1941.
As noted by Bean and Schum, the remarkable feature of the NSCAA’s first year is that the founding fathers’ initial goals still guide the group’s work.
I would agree, with one exception: membership. The NSCAA presently stands at more than 17,000 members. Although that number is impressive and, as we are fond of saying, represents the largest single-sport organization in the world, what could it be? More importantly, what should it be?
Is 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000 members an unreasonable number? Why would we want that many members anyway? Because every single objective delineated by your founding fathers would be easier achieved with greater representation. Think of our voice if we represented a greater number of coaches. Surely it is easier to spread the word of this sport if more coaches are speaking for and of the NSCAA.
During this year I will introduce to our Board a number of different initiatives to increase membership. We will use education as a way to drive membership and we will use membership as a way to educate the generations of coaches that will follow. Each NSCAA member will have a role in these initiatives. We need you to support these initiatives, for in doing so you will be supporting one of the goals of our first members.
In closing, I turn to a statement from the first issue of the Soccer Journal, simply labeled Letter #1 and published June 7, 1941: “The progress of this organization is even better than we had hoped for in the beginning, and with the encouragement and help of you, the coaches, we are sure that the Association’s contributions to soccer will be far greater than we realize at present.”
The NSCAA’s founding fathers knew then what I am re-emphasizing today: 63 years later we must “seek to enroll more soccer coaches in the NSCAA to better achieve these goals.” |
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