Important Changes to VSC 2025 Travel Season
Hello VSC Families,
I wanted to take a moment to communicate some significant changes coming to the Victor Soccer Club (VSC) for the 2025 season. Our club’s goal is to promote soccer in our community by teaching soccer skills, team play and sportsmanship through a variety of programs. Additionally, we try to provide the best experience for our players and parents at an affordable price so that all can participate in the program.
As you will recall, in January 2024 Pinnacle began charging a ‘spectator fee’ of $5. As a club, we spent a lot of time and effort working with Pinnacle management to eliminate this fee, but they refused. Our families want to be able to watch their child(ren) practice, and this fee and their oversight made this difficult and frustrating. Not to mention the safety aspect of not being to monitor your child while they are practicing. Last month Pinnacle advised the VSC that they were going to require every child in our club to be a member of Pinnacle. They advised that they were going to begin charging every child in our child $65 per month for the duration of time that we train at Pinnacle. Additionally, if parents wanted to come in and watch, they would have had to purchase a family membership, which currently costs $140 a month. Because we understand that there are benefits and conveniences with staying at Pinnacle we attempted to negotiate in good faith with Pinnacle, making an offer that we felt the club (and our membership) could work with…but Pinnacle said no to our offer(s). They wished us luck and thanked us for our business since 2016.
As I am sure you understand, this left us in a very challenging and time-sensitive situation. Very quickly we had to identify a new venue that could accommodate a club of our size. In our immediate area, the options at this time of year are limited. With that said, we decided to move our indoor training for soccer to the Athletic Campus. This was not an easy decision but based on recent experiences at Pinnacle and their demands on raising our prices drastically, we felt this is the best move for the club at this time.
To provide some context on how this proposed increase from Pinnacle would have affected our player registration fees, here is some insight into the 2024 season expenses that the club covers from player registrations.
Indoor fields (Pinnacle) – 58%
Uniforms – 17%
Outdoor fields – 9%
Coaches’ discounts – 7%
Equipment – 2%
Scholarships – 2%
Administrative / Misc. fees – 5%
Our club currently charges each player $525 plus a $30 registration fee. This fee is very much in line with other organizations in our area and we have done what we can as a club to keep those fees consistent even when our costs have increased.
This proposal from Pinnacle would have increased our per player cost by roughly 40% with a final fee of $775 per player. We could not, and would not have, asked our parents to pay that amount of money for travel soccer. Although we are disappointed by being forced out of Pinnacle, a facility that we have called home since 2016, the move to the Athletic Campus gives us many great benefits we did not have at Pinnacle.
Some of these benefits include:
No restrictions for parents to watch your child(s) practices
The Athletic Campus has recently undergone numerous renovations, and they plan for more
New turf on the East field
Bathroom’s renovated
HVAC system replacement
Additional clinics and personalized training
Winter skills for our micro and recreation soccer participants
Indoor scrimmages against other organizations in our area
So, what does this all mean for our members? Our indoor training will take place starting October 1st and will run until the end of April. Most teams will practice on Friday nights as we have the entire facility booked on Friday evenings. We will then use Sunday afternoons for schedule conflicts with Fridays, our clinics and other club activities.
Lastly, because we will be starting practices in October, we have moved travel soccer evaluations to Saturday 8/3 & Sunday 8/4. Please add those dates to your calendar; we will follow up with specifics later.