This year was a record in a lot of areas for NSA. You have heard all the various committee and operational reports. Our paid staff and our outstanding group of dedicated volunteers have again proven that NSA is the best youth soccer association in the southeast, and we thank them all.
Some brief highlights:
1)Our Recreation program continues to thrive. This year GSSA added the U4 age bracket so we moved our young campers into registered players. They are the future.
2)Our boys and girls Jr. & Sr. Select programs made big advances both in number of teams and in the levels. Our team managers and coaches are to be commended.
3)Our volunteer Rec coaches continue to do a great job and working with our trained clinicians we offered a lot of additional free training for players and coaches.
4)We continued to offer regular free clinics to all our select players, including goal keeper clinics by professional keepers.
5)We offered various optional camps for our players all year and our pre-season select team camp was the biggest ever and it helped our players get off to a good start on the season.
6)Our select try-outs were a huge success, attracting many new players to NSA
7)Our program directors, working with our EDOC, stayed focused on player and team development and that remains our top goal.
8)Our EDOC continues to bring in only the highest quality coaching staff and in 2010 we added some outstanding new select coaches to our already fantastic staff
9)We held our first Jr. Nike Cup Tournament in August, which was well received and we plan to repeat and expand it in 2011
10) Our 10th annual Nike Cup Tournament in December set an all-time record with 494 teams, over 8,000 players, played 802 matches at 15 venues, using 430 certified referees
11) Our referee program was enhanced as we increased the pay scales for many of our age brackets in an effort to continue building the best group of officials possible
12) Our biggest project of the year is the new Fury Indoor Complex, housing our corporate offices, a player training room, and an indoor turf field. This facility will operate independently and will host both youth and adult soccer leagues. We will also rent out field time and meeting room time for private events and the field will also serve as an additional practice and rain-out facility for our outdoor select program.
The corporate office will be home to all our paid staff. The grand opening is scheduled for Friday, December 17th at 4:00 PM.
Summary:
NSA is fortunate to have such a terrific group of people all pulling together to offer our kids and all players in the area a wonderful place to play the great game of soccer. While we certainly are not perfect and we do make mistakes, I can assure you we are constantly striving to improve. There is always a tremendous amount of work going on behind the scenes making sure we can practice, play games, host tournaments, wear nice uniforms, officiate correctly, respond timely, etc, and do it all as efficiently as possible. My sincere thanks to every single person involved at NSA. Your dedication and commitment to excellence is what makes us great and I have no doubt that 2011 will bring bigger and better things for our association.
