Helping Halifax

The support is there. They just need to win now.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I have a question for any Halifax fans reading this.

What I want to know is this: Do you care that you’re “everyone’s second team?”

That your support is “the envy of the league?”

What about that you have “an atmosphere to die for?”

Are these the things that you dreamed of when you learned that there would be a CanPL team in Halifax, or where you more concerned with goals and wins and watching your team stand in confetti?

I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’re happy that you have great support, but that you’d rather be known for the team’s achievements on the pitch. To that point, you’d probably not be “everyone’s second team” if you were winning, right?

The whole “aren’t you guys cute with your cheering” gets old, fast. I speak from experience. TFC was well known as having great support in MLS in the early years. They were also known for being an easy three points.

Outside of the Island Games, which we can now safely call an outlier of a year in many ways, that’s also what the Wanderers are known for now. Even at home, where the record is better, it’s not what you’d expect from a team with “atmosphere to die for.”

The other thing about crazy atmospheres without great results is that the party doesn’t last forever. Eventually fans move on, sick of the losing. See TFC 2013, for an example.

Halifax management seems to understand this. The removal of Stephen Hart as manager at the end of 2022 was a difficult decision, but likely needed. Patrice Gheisar is unproven at the professional level, but he has shown an ability to win while developing talent.

That’s something Halifax badly needs.

When the CanPL was launched, the new teams that were created did not exist in equal environments. There were certain advantages to a couple markets that allowed the teams there to launch as something close to an established club — think Hamilton and Calgary, where local teams could be drawn upon to give them a base unmatched in the other markets.

On the other end of the spectrum, were the clubs that were more or less created in a vacuum. That’s Winnipeg and, especially, Halifax (the rest of the league fell in between the two extremes).

Those two clubs were handicapped as compared to the rest of the league. It was unrealistic to expect that they could launch anywhere close to as strong as markets where they had existing youth structure to draw upon.

Halifax is the smallest market in the smallest region. The passion is there, yes, but reality on the ground makes their task so much harder than teams in the bigger, talent-rich areas.

Not having local talent they can rely upon to provide depth makes Halifax’s job very difficult. They’ve had to recruit in all the talent. That proved to be too hard a task for Hart and ultimately led to his dismissal. Will Gheisar make out better?

He’s going to have to. It won’t happen overnight though so Halifax fans are going to need to continue to be patient and satisfied with the condescending pats on the head of other CanPL fans.

Just think about how awesome its going to be when you get to make that heel turn though!

League1 Maritimes — As I addressed in last week’s Bits n’ Bites, the weekly notes column that my Patreon and Substack supporters receive each Friday, there are plans to start a League1 in the Maritimes provinces.

There is likely no region that more needs this than the Maritimes. Although there are fans in that region in equal numbers to the rest of the country on a per capita bases (and there might even be more per capita), the infrastructure to produce pro players is non-existent. This would be a step to fixing that.

It would also give Halifax the help it needs to finally, fully take advantage of the great support that it truly does have.

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