Feb 28, 2023

For those of you who could not make our AGM, we wanted to send out “The State of the Club” address that I gave to those who were gathered at the Fairfield Inn & Suites in Vadnais Heights.

My name is Jamie Schreiber, and I am serving as the club President.  It was this time last year that I took over the reins from Mike Meloch, who continues to graciously serve as our Vice President.  We have an amazing, dedicated group of people on the board. They serve this community selflessly with their time and talents.  

As a club, NSSA is in a strong, healthy position both financially and competitively. I want to take an opportunity to highlight some of the priorities the NSSA board has been focused on and provide a look at what our goals are in the future.

1. Providing value to our members and community.
We have invested heavily in soccer programming and people, which we believe give us the foundation to grow. Our priority is to create an overall product that is better than other clubs in the area — at a price that’s similar and in many cases less than competing clubs. To do that, we’ve focused on adding content that our members have had to previously go outside of our club to get.

2. Giving players the curriculum, content and coaching they need to develop.
Three years ago, we brought on Joe Voeller as our Director of Coaching. Under his leadership, we’ve seen him implement new ideas and opportunities that have really taken hold in our club. Examples include a consistent training curriculum across all competitive teams, adding Speed and Agility Program, College Recruiting sessions (led by Brady Hicks U14+ director) as well as coach education workshops.  

This season, Joe helped create the PLUS program, which is giving players and teams with an appetite for more training that opportunity.  We also just named a Director of Performance Analytics, Dan Letnes, who will be working closely with Joe, and our Player / Coach Development committees to build out a more robust program leveraging data and video.  This is an exciting differentiator for us as a club that we believe will continue improving club expertise, while setting NSSA up for the future.

3. Providing scholarships and aid to those who need it.
Affordability is an issue and we are seeing that in the numbers in certain communities. We are doing our best to minimize fee increases and maximize financial aid. NSSA wants to invest more in the community. NSSA is committed to giving everyone a place to play; that includes those who are currently going through a financial hardship. In 2022, we gave out over $100,000 scholarships and aid. We forecast similar gifts in 2023 and 2024. That means we’ve been able to give many kids the opportunity to play competitive soccer who otherwise wouldn’t.

4. Delivering for our members at all age levels and skill levels.

Lastly, we want to provide a great soccer experience across all our age levels and skill levels. Having three or four teams at each age, ensures players are competing with peers at a similar skill level, which is essential to growth.  

The club’s competitive registrations, particularly at the younger ages, reflect that families like what they’re seeing. Overall registrations increased by 42 players year/year (total 629, 110 are U9 & U10).  While we have great participation at our younger ages, we are sensitive to ensuring retention of our U15+ players.

On the Junior Academy side, we hired a new Director, Deven Cairns, to partner with Katelynn Fast on the continued development of the strong program with 300+ kids in our summer (largest) program.  

For players who don’t desire the time commitment of competitive soccer, we offered a recreational program with 177 participants (nearly 30 players increase year/year).   A big thank you to Barb Tuominen and Kelsi Shannon who work hundreds of hours behind the scenes to make it all happen from Rec to referees to registration and everything in between

Summary:
NSSA is in a very good place, and I want to thank our board members for volunteering and many of you as well as you fill roles of team managers, carpool coordinators, travel agents for tournaments, etc.  There are many other roles we must continue to fill to be a community-based club. If you would like to volunteer, please submit your name to volunteer@nssasoccer.org and someone will get in touch with you.

Best Regards -
Jamie Schreiber, NSSA President