A postponed start to the season and missed matches by players caught up in the twists and turns of capricious new software. It was not the digital shift desired by Soccer Quebec, which calls on the province’s 170,000 football players to be patient, the time to correct the situation.
This spring, the Provincial Development League, which brings together teams of players aged 13 and 14 among the best in the province, had to delay its official opening for a few weeks. The software supposed to produce the match schedule was unable to do so. Regional associations have also had to fall back on other methods to schedule their season-opening tournaments. These tournaments are important since they help the associations to collect funds essential to their financing.
To paraphrase in a language that can be published in a newspaper the expressions used by several speakers questioned on this subject by The duty in recent days, the 2023 soccer season in Quebec has started in heavy mud.
“There is a lot of frustration,” says Alex-Raymond Maguisset, sports director of Celtix Haut-Richelieu, the soccer association in the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu region. “The registration of players, the management of the grounds, the assignment of referees, it is very complicated. »
A good part of the problem is that the new software that Soccer Quebec wanted to adopt all of a sudden, the organization that oversees the 18 regional associations and the hundreds of soccer teams in Quebec, was not designed to football. We see in the expressions used that it was thought first and foremost for hockey, says Alex-Raymond Maguisset.
In effect. There is no “pointer” in soccer. Nor a team book. But there is an automatic suspension after an accumulation of yellow cards, and a starting XI must be submitted to the referee in the form of a score sheet which is only signed at the end, not the start of the game. encounter. Ideally, the Spordle platform would have taken all of this into account before lawns across Quebec welcomed their first spiked shoes.
In the Shadow of Hockey
Soccer Quebec admits “to have looked bad this year”, because of the implementation a little too fast of its new software platform, called Spordle.
“We underestimated the scope that such a change could bring,” admits the Duty the general manager of Soccer Quebec, Olivier Plante. In addition to software that is ill-suited to the characteristics of the sport that is the most played in the country, Soccer Quebec has seen several administrators leave the organization in recent months, including the main people responsible for setting it up to replace the previous software, called PTS.
Quebec soccer is also facing an unprecedented shortage of personnel, particularly on the refereeing side, which complicates the organization of major events, such as tournaments. As if that were not enough, the weather and forest fires have also forced the cancellation of nearly a thousand games across Quebec in recent weeks.
“We know that several soccer associations need these tournaments to provide part of their funding,” says Olivier Plante. “We have set up working groups to dissect the various problems. Our goal is that no tournament is cancelled. »
Heaviness and resistance
In the not too distant future, players and their parents, coaches, managers and referees will only need a single application for everything related to their sports activities, be it soccer, but also baseball, hockey, and what more.
This is the idea that led Spordle, the Boisbriand company that created the eponymous platform, to buy the software used until then by Soccer Quebec. Spordle is used by various sports federations elsewhere in Canada.
Recovering the PTS database was to help him create this famous unified platform. “For the first time in our history, we faced a lot of resistance,” admits Spordle boss Lino T. Côté. Soccer is a world of volunteers supervised by only a few permanent employees. The regional associations have a lot more freedom than the central body – that’s quite unique among sport federations in Canada, says Côté.
“Each time we produced a new module, we found a regional association that wanted to do things differently – all that multiplied the delays. »
Objective 2024
The CEO of Spordle persists all the same: because the software used before by Soccer Quebec notably presented significant security risks, the change was more than necessary. The problems encountered by Spordle users will be fixed and its update by 2024 should even include a mobile component thanks to which players, coaches and referees will receive alerts when they have a match coming up.
“It was very difficult, but we’re going in the right direction,” summarizes Lino T. Côté.
At Soccer Québec, the objective is more down to earth. The organization wishes to complete the current season without additional technical fault. We then intend to ensure that everything will be ready for the 2024 season.
Hundreds of employees and volunteers want just as much. Because if Soccer Quebec is recovering rather well from this first misstep, everyone knows very well what happens when you receive a second yellow card during the same game…