Prairie Soccer Club (PSC), based in Yelm, is gearing up for a fall season that may feature more students than usual.
The club, which has served the Yelm community for nearly 40 years, has extended its fall registration deadline to July 25, one week after the Yelm Community Schools (YCS) Board of Directors are expected to vote on the future of the district’s athletics and facility usage by local sports leagues on July 18.
PSC has 27 teams that are sorted by age groups and include at least two coaches each. Overall, the club serves about 400 student athletes in the Nisqually Valley region and competes against teams in the Thurston County Youth Soccer Association. Seasons run for 12 weeks and feature eight games against clubs from Olympia, Lacey, Rochester, Tenino, Tumwater and Black Hills, among others.
YCS does not offer a soccer program for student athletes until they reach middle school, while PSC has teams with student athletes as young as 4 years old. After the double failure of the district’s educational programs and operations levy this spring, the school board will soon decide how to reduce athletic offerings in order to save money.
The board has also discussed and shown support for raising facility usage fees for local sports leagues, including PSC, to use district fields, such as at Yelm Middle School, where PSC often has games and practices.
“We feed the school’s programs. We’re the training ground for all the kids to play middle school and high school soccer,” Michael Brackett, PSC board president, said. “Moving forward with the levy, clubs like PSC that are external to the schools are going to be critical with keeping these kids actually still playing the games if they’re not able to in school.”
In the past, PSC has competed with other athletic programs in Yelm for field space to practice and compete because the club does not have space of its own. In fact, some of the younger age groups have competed in Rainier because PSC doesn’t have enough room for all of the kids in Yelm.
“The biggest growth that PSC needs is field space. We’re in constant competition with the other sports in Yelm for what little field space we have. The city is awesome with getting field space, but there just isn’t that much field space from the city for soccer fields,” Brackett said. “That’s our biggest hindrance as far as growth.”
Brackett said that the PSC board decided to deliberately keep fall registration open for a few more weeks so that parents can decide based on how the school board votes. If the school board opts not to keep its fall soccer programs, more students will look to clubs like PSC for competition. Registration will run through July 25 or until teams are full.
“We have players that sometimes would play for the school in the fall and then they play for us in the spring. So, if they decide not to have a fall program at the school, those players wouldn’t have anywhere to go if we had closed registration,” he said. “It’ll be an interesting couple of years with the levy.”
To learn more about PSC and to register, visit https://yelmpsc.org/home.
