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CTV News
07-07-2025
- Sport
- CTV News
‘Shoes and a ball': Long-running soccer festival trying to bring the sport back to basics for accessibility
Rain did not dampen the spirits of young players at the Top of the City Soccer Festival in Edmonton on Sunday. Thousands of people attended the eighth annual Top of the City Soccer Festival at Blue Quill Park on the weekend, organizers say. The event aims to promote and improve access to soccer through programming and sponsorship. 'Soccer has gotten really, really expensive over the last few years. Some club programs you might be paying upwards of $2,000 just to have your kid play for six months. What we want to see is kids to understand you need shoes and a ball. That's all you need,' said Top of the City Sports Equity Initiative president Mike Dalke on Sunday. Alongside a soccer tournament, the festival offered a petting zoo, kids' activities and local food trucks. Proceeds from the tickets to a kids' zone will be used to help alleviate financial barriers to soccer for families in Edmonton, Dalke said. Over eight years of the festival, he added, parents have been impacted as much as the kids. 'Our soccer communities are somewhat fractured…. They look at this as a business model more than they look at it as something to offer for our kids. We want to show parents the positive way to do sports. And I think what that does is it instills them with the idea of finding clubs that put soccer first, rather than the dollar books.' With files from CTV News Edmonton's Miriam Valdes-Carletti
South China Morning Post
08-06-2025
- Sport
- South China Morning Post
Finally, a London football club for Asian women and non-binary and trans folks
It was 2013 when Kiran Dhingra-Smith decided she'd had enough. Opening the sports cupboard at her local football club, she cast her eyes around for anything the girls' squad she was coaching could practise with. Advertisement For the umpteenth time that season, barely anything remained after the boys' teams had picked it clean. Naturally, they'd been given an earlier slot on the pitches. 'Sometimes I would email and be like, 'Can we at least make sure we have balls?'' she recalls. 'And it would just get ignored.' Baes FC offers a space for women, trans and non-binary people of Asian heritage to play football. Photo: Bella Galliano - Hale The final straw came a few months later, when she was coaching an East London under-15s team. A male coach had been put in charge of bringing the equipment to the pitches but was always late, openly admitting his boys' team took priority, and repeatedly left the girls waiting out in the freezing cold and rain. So Dhingra-Smith flagged it to her boss, who sent the coach an email telling him to do better. The following week, he arrived on time, but immediately took her aside to put her in her place. 'You don't know me,' he said menacingly. 'You don't know what I'm capable of.' 'I was 17 at the time,' she recalls, still incredulous. Advertisement Half Indian, half English, a now 30-year-old Dhingra-Smith laughs as she reflects on the sheer effort she's been forced to expend just trying to exist as a woman in football over the years.
