NEWS & FALL SEASON

Dear LYS Families:


Greetings LYS Families! I hope that all of you have had a wonderful summer so far.  For those of you who have stayed in the city, we have enjoyed probably the coolest summer in the last 20 years!!!  For those of you who left to see family, get out of the city, or to vacation I hope you have enjoyed your break from our beloved concrete jungle.  I want to write to you to get you up to speed on Loisaida Youth Soccer. 

Mini-Summer Camp
This summer we have initiated the first LYS mini summer camp, and I am happy to say it has been a great success.  We consistently had 15/20 kids with a nice balance of gender and age, and the dynamic among the kids has been awesome. I have had the great fortunate of getting to know your children more and the kids have enjoyed an exciting and dynamic environment of soccer, freestyle, movement and music.  Coach Frankie has brought his freestyle flair and stories from the World Cup, where he performed and assisted the semi-final and final.  Coach Adriana and coach Iliana have contributed face painting, food runs to Whole Foods, assistance of the movement and soccer activities and so much more.  We also had with us a professional hip hop dancer, Franck from Martinique, as well as the North American Top Freestyler Jose Avalos from Canada who is here this week visiting.  If you have not checked it out there are still a one week left and you can always stop by the field Mon or Wed morning at 9am at the Nike Field at Christie and Stanton.

Fall Season
The fall permit has been secured at the Baruch Field just behind Bard High School and Adriana has just put the finishing touches on the fall registration up on the webpage, so do not delay and go tolysyouthsoccer.com to sign up for the fall season.  We are super excited to get going and I am happy to offer we are offering Tues/Thurs and Saturday.  You will have the option of doing one or all of the classes and I am excited to see everyone again.

New Program
This fall we are going to be offering a new program called Family Soccer Hour.  On Saturday only (between the first and second classes) I am going to run a program where parent and child will be able to do soccer related activities together. This will be an all-age group activity and will involve each parent playing movement and soccer-related games with their child in a friendly, structured environment.  In this way we can reinforce the social bonds of family through sport and we can mentor the parents a bit and help them experience the joy and frustration of learning how to control the ball and play soccer.  Although many kids are happy to have their own space to play and prefer the parents on the side, I think many kids would also relish the opportunity to see dad or mom on the field (as I have witnessed in the kids vs parents games), so I have decided to give it a try and I am excited to see how it goes.

Equipment Fundraiser
I do have to report a little bad news.  Last week my car was broken into and a majority of the soccer equipment for LYS was stolen.  While it was an unfortunate incident I am happy to report that 3 LYS families have already come forward and contributed to replace what was stolen. Also we had one of our players, Tana, donate a ball and some of his savings to help us out.  If any of you want to help you can donate cash or a write a check to big apple seeds.  Our goal is $1000 dollars and we already have $250!    I have already made a few purchases and I expect to have everything within the next few days.  These are the things that had to be replaced.

15 soccer balls

2 soccer tennis nets

Duffle bag to carry equipment

3 agility ladders

Cones and agility rings

Small goals

Although the loss of equipment was unfortunate the response by those who found out first has been so generous and sympathetic that I feel proud to be a part of such a great group of families in our soccer program. For the people who stole our soccer equipment I only hope that it makes its way to kids who will use to play soccer.

Thanks for your support and believing in our program.

Coach Vince