Starting with the top tier of LIWSA soccer: Premier! There where a few changes at Premier this season, gone was the VI Wave u18 team and new was the Campbell River team. Prospect Lake continued the form of the past few seasons but had a challenger for top spot from Lakehill! Lakehill was (for all intent) a rebranding of the Wave and Highlanders teams of the past few years mainly consisting of EPIC recruited talented players wearing the Lakehill badge!
Stellar inaugural season winning the league and the Terry Price Cup!
Div 1 once again say a very dominant season display by the Bays United team followed 3 wins back by the aging (but still very good!) VicWest FC team. The returning Lakehill Reds coached by Paul Rai had a very good season featuring a few new faces but a returning Kelsey and Kimmie that gave the team defensive strength and forward going abilities! Lakehill had an excellent post season run and won the Doug Day Trophy AND qualified for Provincial post season play! Well done! At the bottom of the table where the two JDF teams and just above them the Gorge team which improved over last year and features two former Lakehill youth players! Changes expected next season include the Bays United team moving up to Premier!
Which creates a promo spot from Div 2!
Div 2 has been a Lakehill v SFFC battle the last few years! This season saw a strong top 3 battle between those two and division winners Castaways! Surprisingly none of those teams won the Shergold Cup with Lakehill losing to Gorge in the Semi-final and SFFC losing in the Final! None of the top 3 are expected to accept promotion to Div1 because their clubs already occupy a spot there! Which under LIWSA bylaws would give Nanaimo the ability to promote to D1, we are not expecting anyone to be relegated from D1 but maybe JDF will merge their two teams into one strong team thereby freeing up a spot in D1?
We'll have to wait and see.
Which brings us to Div 3 . This was the second season in D3 for our Lakehill team. The team went through some changes over the 2016/17 season with 5 departures and 7 new players joining. Yet due to player commitments it was often a challenge getting a good turn out. The Lakehill/Gorge u18s provided us with a few capable permit players when asked and we are thankful to them! We did have some new players join us that brought a lot of skill. Our two new players from the West Shore really helped make up for some defensive and midfield departures. We lost one Lakehill developed midfielder and picked up another to keep our claim of having more Lakehill developed youth playing on our team (than at any other club seniors team) intact! A big thanks to all! Especially our amazing goaltender. The standings show us slipping over all to 6th but in reality we tied for 4th and had we managed to get our make up game in we likely would have tied for 3rd this season! Not bad at all!
The highlight was our post season performance going 5W and 1L in Leversedge Cup play! The Loss was hard to accept but we have to acknowledge that Saltspring is a Div2 or even a Div1 calibre team and we are not there yet! Despite that you had some great results this season! One are for improvement (well a few actually) is we need to get a goal scorer for next season! We scored half the goals of the top 2 teams! Defensively we did great but gave up one or two we'd like to pull back including a famous off the "off the butt" own goal!
One thing that we can all be proud of is that you always played positive football and not the defensive negative style that we say by the team that registered 9 draws in league play. How depressing was that to watch!
Maybe next season we will crack that nut and score a few more goals while staying strong in our end!
Thank you to all our players ! We want you all back next season! And bring us a few new recruits please! We hope to stay with Friday home games but likely move to a weekly Tuesday (mandatory) and Thursday (optional) practice! Stay close to your emails for details!
