So I guess by coming to this page you must have some curiosity about who are the minds behind this blog. First off my name is David Rowaan and I started this blog off as something to do with my spare time having finished off my University Studies. I got my Honours BA in history and English from Redeemer University College in 2011 which is where I learned to write. As the starter of the blog I do most of the writing but it is a team effort and my brother plays a big role in keeping our content fresh and up to date. Calvin is still in University at the same school that I graduated from where he is working on a BA in history and political science.
Both of us are in serious relationships, I am engaged and will be getting married in 2012. Both grew up in the Ottawa valley but Calvin was born in the States so lets all hate on him for that. We both played soccer for basically our entire youth reaching a decent level but I like to claim that our development was impaired by living in a rural area where there was a real lack of competition helping drive us to get better. Eventually we both moved into reffing as well and spent around 5 years each doing that until we sort of lost the love for the job. I did enjoy reffing when I started out but by the end it stopped feeling fun as it never seemed like I could do anything right. There was a lack of reward in it as no matter what call or none call you make some player, coach, or even worse a parent took issue with it. I guess Calvin stopped reffing for a better reason then me as he decided to move into coaching and he is now an assistant coach for one of our local rep teams.
For both of us soccer has been a huge part of our identities for pretty much as long as we can remember. A big part of that identity is the fact that we have been life long supporters of the one and only Manchester United. I guess we started supporting the club just after the 1998 for a number of different reasons. The first and foremost was that since we are Dutch background we cheered for the Netherlands in that world cup and we both really like Ruud Van Nistelrooy and his club at the time was United. At first we were very casual followers as lack of tv channels showing games and only having dial up made it hard to keep up with things. But once we moved and got satellite we were able to watch a few more games and the passion only grew. We both have a nice collection of jerseys now and will be United fans until we die. Since I did not watch the 1999 final the high point of my soccer watching life is the moment that Edwin Van der Sar stopped Anelka on that rainy night in Moscow.
So now on to why we are writing the blog. We have recently set out on a quest to embrace local soccer and want to encourage as many people as possible to join us on that quest. We are not asking you to stop supporting your favourite European club or having a soft spot for your ancestral home because we are not hypocrites. We will keep supporting Manchester United and following the Netherlands team but that does not mean that we have room in our hearts for local teams. It has been kind of tricky to decide what we mean when we say support local soccer. We are not going to go out and support the local mens team that play in division 3 here in town but should we start supporting FC London or London City who are both semi-proffessional teams in our area? At this point we are not going to do that since the quality of the games is just so low and it is still an hour of driving to see something only slightly better then what we would get from the aforementioned mens team. Instead we have committed to better support the professional teams in Canada including Toronto FC, Vancouver Whitecaps, Montreal Impact, and FC Edmonton. We will of course be paying special attention to TFC since they are the closest team to us and a trip to BMO Field is actually reasonable. We are also going to do our best to follow and support the National teams. That effort began on June 1, 2011 when we went to the mens national team friendly against Ecuador (read the blog about it!) and will continue through the Gold Cup, the women's world cup and hopefully someday Canada making it into the World Cup.
So there you have it. You have some idea who we are and what we are trying to do here. It may be a lofty goal to try and spread our passion throughout the country but already on our journey we have realized that we are not alone and a lot of passionate folks are trying to do the same thing that we are. So if we can all bring just a few people on board the support for our national teams will continue to grow in number when it is already loud in voice.
