The Web Howes Weaves: How one man works to advocate soccer in BC

September 2, 2008 on 7:13 pm | In Lucas Teodoro da Silva, Print Edition |

By Lucas Teodoro da Silva

For soccer aficionados in British Columbia who need somewhere to turn for the latest in soccer news, the BC Soccer Web (bcsoccerweb.com) is a well-laid out website which has been around since the early days of the web in the mid-1990s.

Soccer enthusiast Martin Rose, who is probably best known for naming Canada’s soccer supporter’s club – “The Voyageurs”, created the BC Soccer Web site in 1996 and ran it until he moved to England in 2005.

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Richard Howes, a volunteer who joined Rose in running the site in the mid-90s, is now the sole proprietor of the venture, with the help of a few collaborators.

Howes, a common fixture at Whitecaps games and local tournaments, always brings his long-lens camera to shoot photos, which he later puts up on his website. He is out at some soccer game almost every weekend, and has been for several years now. Soccer fans in British Columbia will recognize Howes by his white goatee and his fun assortment of hats.

What inspires Richard Howes to do all this work?

“Soccer’s like an addiction to tobacco I suppose. Kind of odd,” he says.

THE PAST
Soccer wasn’t always an addiction for Howes. In fact, he has never played the sport himself.
A former rugby player and national champion high hurdler while growing up in Durban, South Africa, Howes was introduced to soccer in Canada the way many parents are – by his children.
After immigrating to Ontario with his wife and young family from South Africa in 1980, Howes worked as a corporate executive – the president and CEO of the Canadian subsidiary of a British multi-national electronics company. Weekends, Howes spent watching his children play soccer.
Despite his South African roots, Howes sees himself as an unhyphenated Canadian. When asked if he’s excited that South Africa will be hosting the World Cup in 2010, Howes responds, “I think it’s good that finally an African country is getting to host the World Cup, but I am a Canadian, not a South African, and have been for a long time. Despite the accent.”

In 1994, his family moved to British Columbia. His eldest son quit playing soccer and took up refereeing. His daughter had fallen in love with competitive dance and had given up playing soccer as well.

However, his youngest son was being scouted by the Canadian national team and was added to its player pool as a carded athlete at age 16.

“It was a beautiful place…a wonderful place to bring up young children,” Howes says of living in Ottawa. “We don’t regret our time in Ottawa in the slightest, but it was a long commute to bring our youngest son to Toronto for the all-star program for the weekends, which we did for several years.”

Having a son who has risen through the Canadian soccer system has given Howes the privilege of seeing soccer at several different levels. He has been involved with girl’s soccer, as well as boy’s and men’s soccer from the all-star levels in Ontario and British Columbia, to the inter-district leagues and the national team from U-17, U-20 and U-23 levels.

“I’ve pretty much seen it all,” says Howes.

Unlike some who have been involved with the Canadian Soccer Association (CSA), Howes had nothing but good experiences with the CSA staff. Speaking of Bruce Tolley and Chris Bennett of Canada’s youth program, Howes said, “those two gentlemen did an outstanding job with the resources that they had available to them. They could create out of their own initiative. To be honest, my own direct experience with the CSA development programs has been reasonably favourable. It could always be better, and I don’t know what it’s been like since my son is no longer involved in the program….”

His youngest son, Struan Howes, eventually quit soccer because he realized that he was born too young to qualify for one Olympic tournament and too old to be chosen for another. After playing his way onto SFU’s soccer team, Struan Howes realized that he had the brains and that he could make more money as a chartered accountant, which is the career he ultimately chose.

THE PRESENT
With three children out of soccer, most parents would move on. Howes didn’t.

“I’d been trailing after my kids and been involved in running and operating their clubs from the time they were five years old. It gets into your system,” said Howes. “And by then, of course, I had gotten involved in the Pacific Coast Soccer League because my youngest son played for the Vancouver Explorers when they were part of the league. I enjoyed my involvement with the Pacific Coast Soccer League…I think it’s a great league, a very well run league, if I may say so myself. And that’s the opinion of the players who let us know, not an opinion that I’m creating myself. After that, I just continued,” he adds.

His wife, apparently, does not mind his addiction to the beautiful game. A former field hockey, badminton and squash athlete, she obviously realizes the value of sports. Plus, Howes adds, “she loves it because it gives me something to do.”

Besides keeping BC Soccer Web running, Howes also likes to get discussion started around soccer in Canada. His strong opinions have gotten him into trouble on a few occasions.
“I love controversy and I like yanking people’s chains,” Howes admits. “It’s probably on the web where I have ruffled the most feathers. I am pretty outspoken, and I always have been. It’s got me in trouble in the past as well, outside of soccer. But that’s the way I am and that’s what I think and there will always be people who disagree.”

The way Howes sees it, a bit of controversy is good for the game. “You can be a shrinking violet and never say anything, but the advantage of expressing an opinion and engaging people in an exchange and discussion on the subject is that it stimulates you to think more about the subject, and it stimulates the other person to think a little bit more, and it even stimulates the lurkers to think about the discussion.

“Of course, I have to admit that sometimes I am a bit mischievous but that is fun,” Howes adds, laughing.

One controversial position that Howes discusses is his belief that a national Canadian soccer league is an impossibility – something that some Canadian fans don’t like to admit.
“I think the way to go is to have regional leagues, because the country’s too big to do it any other way,” Howes explains. He cites hockey’s division into the Ontario, Quebec and Western hockey leagues as an example, saying that if hockey is the most popular sport in Canada and that if hockey can’t even pull off a national league, how do soccer fanatics think they can do it? “Hockey came to that conclusion. It’s the way to go with soccer as well,” thinks Howes.

“How it gets implemented is another matter. CSL [in Ontario and Quebec] has tried one model; PCSL has another model. Canada has divergent seasons, which makes it difficult. The CSL purports to be professional, the PCSL doesn’t. So I don’t know how one would figure something out. We’ve seen CSL games and there’s not a material difference between CSL games and most PCSL games, so the level is competitive.”

Meanwhile, Howes wants professional Canadian teams to continue joining American leagues like the MLS and USL-1, even if it means it will be difficult to attract Canadian professionals back into Canada.

“I am a proponent of continental leagues in North America, because it’s not practical really to have a national domestic Canadian league…not until we have a big enough base of people. We couldn’t sustain a national hockey league by ourselves…we only just managed to sustain a football league…what makes us think we can sustain a national soccer league? The next best thing is for us to participate in the American leagues. The fact that we have been able to sustain three (and now two) USL-1 teams is telling, we probably would do okay with three Major Soccer League teams but that would be about it. I just don’t think there’s the interest in the game.”

In the next few years, Howes would ideally like his site to be the portal through which the story of growth in Canadian soccer unfolds. Howes would love to see the Whitecaps playing downtown in their own Waterfront Stadium, but thinks BC Place is a good second-choice venue. Howes doesn’t mind the move to artificial turf for Vancouver’s soccer team, saying that most people only love grass because of “sentiment,” not because of any scientific proof that grass is better.
Howes would love to see more Canadian soccer players attracted back to Canada to play, but says that such a development won’t happen for many years. Howes explains, “I think that would be a huge step forward, but it’s going to take a while for Canadian-based MLS teams [which would eventually include Vancouver and Montreal, according to Howes,] to be in a position to attract those players back to Canada, because even the U.S. has not managed to pull that one off yet. The players that [the Americans] are attracting back to the MLS, and there are exceptions of course, seem to be youth players who haven’t quite made the grade back in Europe, or veteran players that are at the end of their careers, like [Brian] McBride.”

Concerning the local team, Howes thinks that the Whitecaps are doing a fine job in Vancouver. “There’s been a lot of criticism on the web about how the Whitecaps organization runs now, and I think that’s a bit unfair because they are a USL-1 team, not a Major League Soccer team,” Howes argues. “I have no doubt that an appropriate front office would be created by the owners once they have a Major League franchise, and will be every bit as good as MLSE does in Toronto. I can’t see the principals allowing it to be any other way.”

THE FUTURE
Howes has no plans to leave BC Soccer Web any time soon. He continues to spend two hours a day running the site – more if you count the fact that he goes back throughout the day to tweak and fix links. The site is all hand-coded by Howes himself, using HTML, a code he taught himself.
Howes admits that if he were to add up the money made by ad revenue, and divide it by the time he spends on the site daily, he wouldn’t be making much money from his venture. However, Howes sees the project as a hobby that pays for itself. “It’s like a hungry lion in that you have to feed it every day,” he admits.

Howes tries to avoid missed updates whenever possible, but admits that occasionally he does miss days – for example, when his son got married.

“When my youngest son was getting married, I was out of town in Tofino, and I didn’t realize that where we were going there wasn’t Internet access,” he says.

“Probably my wife kept that information from me deliberately, because she made the booking. The world didn’t stop turning and I didn’t lose visitors so it wasn’t a big deal,” Howes concluded.
When he is finished with the site, Howes has full confidence that some other soccer enthusiast will take up the reigns, saying he already has people contributing to the project.

Soccer is a sport that has the highest rate of youth participation in Canada – higher than hockey and football and baseball. However, Canadian youth seem to let the game leave their lives when they stop playing it themselves. For some reason, soccer doesn’t stay embedded in people’s souls into adulthood.

Howes thinks that in the future, this will change. He sees the culture of soccer changing in this country. “The evidence is there,” Howes points out, citing Toronto FC’s rabid fan base. “It’s even happening in Montreal with the USL team,” Howes adds, “because they’re getting nine to ten thousand people out to watch the Impact even though they’re languishing at the bottom of the table. You’ve got to have the right product out there.”

Howes has high hopes for Vancouver, but argues that soccer culture here will only change when Vancouverites have a proper club to cheer for, playing in a proper soccer stadium. “The Swangard venue, as beautiful as it is at the corner of Central Park [in Burnaby], just doesn’t have it. I think BC Place will work much better, because of where it is,” Howes says.

“I missed the Empire Stadium days, but there was a different demographic in the city back then, from what I understand. But BC Place, down in Yaletown…they don’t have trouble filling GM Place for hockey games, even though the Canucks have performed abysmally. Even the Lions draw good crowds to BC Place. If the Lions were playing at their practice field out in Surrey, you wouldn’t see a tenth of the people out there. If you took the USL Whitecaps and put them in a Waterfront Stadium, they’d sell out. It’s all perception in the minds of people,” Howes thinks.
For now, Howes will continue to maintain the BC Soccer Web as an independent entity.
He relishes his independence because he can say whatever he wants on the site. And he will continue to keep speaking out, and keep sneaking out to whatever games he can, camera in hand.

Rain or shine.

Take a look – next time you’re out at a VMSL or PCSL game – and you might see Richard Howes, standing on the sidelines with his camera in hand. He’ll be there with a smile on his face – most of the time.

Are there some days, when he’s watching a bad game in the mud, when he asks himself why he is standing there when he could be inside a warm house with a good book?

“There are many days like that,” Howes responds. “But there’s always residual enjoyment going to watch a game. It provides opportunities to socialize and to network with other people involved in the business of the game, and it provides me with material for my website. I know that people enjoy my pictures because they write and tell me. If a certain percentage of the visitors come to my site because they enjoy looking at my photos, then it makes it worth doing.”