Most parents who reach out about the academy want to know two things: how much it costs and when the games are. Those are reasonable questions. But they tell you a lot about how youth soccer in Vancouver is generally set up. Training exists to get ready for games. Games are the product. And whether a kid is actually getting better is sort of secondary to whether the team won on Saturday.
That gap, between what looks like development and what actually is development, is why we built South Van FC the way we did.
What most clubs in Vancouver are actually optimizing for
I’ve been around youth soccer in this city long enough to see the pattern. Large training groups, positions locked in early, sessions that basically rehearse the weekend game. The coaches aren’t bad people. A lot of them genuinely care. But the structure they’re working in makes it almost impossible to develop individual players because that’s not really what the structure is for.
When you’ve got 20 kids in a session, the math just doesn’t work. Ball contacts drop, coaching gets spread thin, and the player who struggles most gets the least attention because there are 19 others in the way. The sessions end up shaped around keeping 20 kids organized, which means the whole thing starts looking a lot like Saturday’s game. That’s fine if Saturday is the point. It’s not how you build a player.
What you end up with after a few years of that is kids who are good at following a system. Their team’s system, specifically. Outside of it, they’re lost.
Why small groups change everything
We keep our groups small on purpose. More players in a session sounds like better value. It isn’t.
A player in a small group gets more time on the ball. More decisions to make. More moments where a coach can actually stop them, show them something, and watch them try it again. That repetition is where skill gets built. You can’t replicate it in a 20-player session no matter how good the coach is.
It also means we actually know our players. Not just their names. We know that one kid has been avoiding his left foot for two months. We know another one shuts down after a bad touch instead of resetting. We know who’s ready to be challenged harder and who needs a different kind of push right now. That information shapes every session, and you only get it when the groups are small enough that nobody disappears into the crowd.
We’ll lose a game to teach something
Some parents take a while to get comfortable with this.
We’ll play a kid in a position he’s never played to make him think differently. A session might look disorganized because we’ve built a problem that doesn’t have an easy answer. Some Saturdays we lose because we’re working on something that can’t coexist with playing it safe.
There are clubs in Vancouver that won’t do that. They’ll organize kids into a shape, play them where they’re strongest, and win a lot of U11 games. Some of those players will still be good at 16. Most won’t, because the game got harder and the player didn’t grow with it.
What we actually work on
In every session we’re working on the ball first. First touch, movement, tight spaces, playing with both feet. That’s the base. But we push past just making it look clean in a drill. We want players who can look at a situation and figure it out themselves, so we put them in scenarios where the answer isn’t obvious and coach what we see.
The part most clubs skip is how a player carries a bad moment. A kid gives the ball away, misreads a run, gets taken off and feels embarrassed about it. What happens next? That’s coachable. We work on it the same way we work on a weak foot, by putting players in those moments repeatedly and helping them get better at handling them. It’s not a personality conversation. It’s a skill.
There’s somewhere to go from here
One thing that’s genuinely different about South Van FC is that the youth academy connects to something. Players who come through the programme have a pathway into our VMSL men’s team. That isn’t window dressing. It shapes how we develop players from day one, because we know where they’re going and what they’ll need when they get there.
A lot of academies in Vancouver operate in a bubble. Develop the kid, and then what? We built this club so that question has an answer.
This won’t be the right fit for everyone
There are plenty of good soccer options in Vancouver. If your priority is winning youth tournaments and playing a lot of competitive games, there are clubs better suited to that than us.
What we offer is a specific approach: small groups, individual attention, a real development philosophy, and a programme that’s built around where a player can be at 18, not at 10. If that’s what you’re looking for, the academy evaluation is where it starts.
Harjit Kainth is the founder, head coach, and academy director at South Van FC. He built the club from the ground up in South Vancouver with a focus on long-term player development, and oversees both the youth academy and the VMSL men’s team. If you have questions about the programme or want to talk development, reach out at southvanfc@gmail.com.
South Van FC is a community football club based in South Vancouver, BC. We run a youth development academy and a VMSL Men’s team, built around one philosophy: develop real players, technically sharp, tactically aware, and mentally tough. Learn more at southvanfc.com.