Roman Harapyn is striving to a continue a legacy at the Islington Rangers youth soccer club that his late father Michael, who died in March of last year, helped start.
"My father originally started the club with three other gentlemen," said Harapyn, in a recent interview. "It started with four teams, and it grew to the point where we’re probably over 90 teams right now."
Those teams are split roughly between 20 rep and 70 house league. The league could offer more teams, he said, but is growing slowly to ensure consistent skills training among its volunteer coaches and also to ensure local field availability.
The split between boys and girls, he added, is also nudging its way to equal numbers having cracked the 60/40 barrier.
Taking over the reins from his late father marks a full circle for Harapyn, a native of Etobicoke who attended Etobicoke’s Bishop Allen Academy.
"I grew up playing at Islington Rangers," he said.
He also grew up playing hockey in the winter, starting out in the Humber Valley Hockey Association house league program and eventually earning a short stint at the top triple-A level.
Eventually, however, as is typical for many elite athletes, he had to make choice, with soccer easily winning out. At 15 he joined the youth program of the Toronto Blizzard and then into the Canadian national U-19 development program.
A goaltender, he turned down U.S. college sponsorship offers and, instead, spent nearly a decade in the game playing for a number of pro and semi-pro clubs on both sides of the Atlantic.
The many contacts he forged as a player have now come in handy as the league concentrates not just on the increased quantity of players but also striving to continually increase the quality of coaches both in its rep and house league programs.
Towards that goal, he said, the league is moving "to a system where every rep team is now assigned a technical coach." And these coaches, he said, are also "going to filter through the house league."
Some rep clubs have already organized tours to Europe and the plan, he said, is to have more teams pursue that option.
The club is happy to be playing outdoors after wrapping up a successful indoor season, including "a lot of training sessions at Lakeshore Collegiate", which for the second year in a row featured a dome over its turfed field for the winter.
"It’s been a phenomenal help to the club and I think to all the neighbourhood clubs in that it actually gives us somewhere to train all year ‘round," he said.