Only Kingston FC saw it coming.
The team that lost 17 of 22 games in their inaugural 2012 season in professional soccer were expected once again to struggle in 2013 to make an impression in the tough Canadian Soccer League.
The early signs last season were not good. Welcome to the CSL and professional soccer said Windsor Stars in one early season visit to the Invista Centre ground in Kingston. The visitors then promptly thumped Kingston FC 5-0.
We’ll see, said co-owners Lorne Abugov, the club’s chairman, and Joe Scanlon, its president, as they embarked upon a quiet but determined campaign during the winter months to put Kingston on the map for reasons other than being one of the more attractive tourist destinations in Canada.
Abugov, a lawyer and Scanlon, a journalist, both with a penchant for communications, decided if they were going to be involved in professional soccer it was important to raise the profile of their club, both in and around Kingston, and throughout the CSL.
They were go-getters – Abugov, a top legal expert in communications, founder of Canada’s Telecommunications Hall of Fame and former senior legal counsel for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), and Scanlon, a seasoned journalist and Professor Emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa who boasts a chronology of impressive lifetime of work in journalism that has brought him a host of awards.
We’ll get it right, promised Abugov to his club and the community looking to have a team in pro sports. We’re going to do it right, he repeated and today, a year later, with Kingston FC perched in a first place tie with Brampton City Utd, the bottle is starting to look more than half full.
“We are not out of the woods yet here in Kingston,” Abugov said recently, “but we have turned the corner this season, and we are making a lot of friends in this community and around the league. Joe and I are pretty proud of what we are building in this city, both on and off the field, and Kingston is showing itself to be a great soccer market full of very knowledgeable soccer folks.
“We’ve worked hard this season to assemble the best soccer team Kingston has ever seen, and our fan base are really getting behind the squad and enjoying an exciting brand of wide-open attack-oriented soccer. We’ll be bidding this weekend to stay on top”
Kingston FC, tied for the top spot in the league table, are at home to a struggling St.Catharines Wolves, tied for a spot at the other end of the league table, but the game at the Queen’s University West Field may still be a test for the home side as St. Catharines show signs of hitting better form.
There are two other First Division games over the weekend, with Astros Vasas FC visiting Waterloo on Friday, while Windsor Stars are at home to the current CSL champions, Toronto Croatia, on Sunday.
