Trudy Milne is woven into the fabric of North Toronto Soccer and has provided a first-person account on how the club formed, highlighting the creative ideas and influential people who built the foundations that have continued to thrive into the club’s fifth decade.
My earliest memories of the soccer are that my two friends – Patti Pinfold and Valerie Samuel-Stevens – had sons who played soccer with neighbourhood friends in the Glenview Ravine. A lot of people were asking if their kids could play and decided that perhaps a league could be formed. Patti was not interested in pursuing that, but suggested I would be a good person to approach.
So, in 1980, Valerie and I started the North Toronto Soccer Club. We went up and down Yonge Street to get sponsors, and we got a permit to use the fields at Eglinton Park. Fifty-five kids aged seven to 10 signed up and they picked up their uniforms from our garage on Sheldrake Boulevard.
We needed coaches, so we recruited players’ dads; very few of them knew much about soccer so we got coach instruction booklets for them. The coaches of each team got PVC piping to make goal posts which they brought to every game along with the soccer balls, and we also started the tradition of bringing oranges for a postgame treat.
In these early days, as Valerie and I were creating the club and getting it off the ground, we met in Valerie’s house. She was an integral part of the club’s origin, and it always made me laugh because they had a lot of cats who loved walking through our notes especially when we were collating stuff for the coaches.
The club grew exponentially in the first three years, at which point we decided to form a Board of Directors and my husband, Dave, became the first President. The club became so popular that we had requests to start a younger age group to play, so we got permission to use the field at John Fisher Public School on Erskine Avenue and asked Patti’s husband Terri Pinfold to take on that job.
At one point we were approached by Davisville Soccer wanting to combine the two clubs as they needed more field space, but that was also our problem and we felt combining the clubs would not solve the problem.
In 1983 we had our first year-ending banquet. It was held at Eglinton United Church on Sheldrake Boulevard with food provided by St Honoré Chicken. The players had no idea that we were handing out medals for first and second winners in each age group, and the look on their faces when we presented them was priceless.
It’s nice to see the club’s relationship with the community still exists today and to see how it has evolved into not just introducing new children to the sport, but also having players compete at very high levels.
We always wanted to put the players first, and this still applies today. People were always so receptive to helping with expansion of the club without relinquishing the quality of the children’s experience, and it warms my heart that some of the Canadian National Team players have come through the North Toronto Soccer system.
Our grandchildren played for a few years with our two sons coaching, and it gave me immense pride to watch them play and realize what we started and what the club has become. We started with 55 players and the club now has over 5,000 players, and I hope the next 40 years will be as successful as the last 40 years.
