If you have a nomination for a Meet the Member feature, please send their name, contact information, and a brief description of their involvement to Ally Ferguson at
[email protected].
Kicking off Meet the Member for May 2023 is Ed Quini, president and founder of the Soccer Association for Youth of San Antonio. Founded in 2002, Soccer Association for Youth of San Antonio is the largest recreational soccer league in the San Antonio area. Ed and his vice president, Trevor Brown, have been involved since the league’s inception. Ed discusses some highlights, a few challenges mixed with excitement, and some advice for other members of SAY that he has garnered through his years of involvement below:
What are the highlights of your current involvement – either from an organization perspective or individual perspective – what’s something you are excited about right now?
The highlight of my involvement was starting the league and contacting Doug Wood to have our league affiliated with SAY. Our league has been with SAY since 2002, and has been very successful in the San Antonio area because of Doug’s guidance and assistance. We have several projects we are currently working on that we are excited about.
What is a challenge that you’ve seen in your organization, and what tactics have you implemented to find a solution?
Our biggest challenge right now is finding a venue that can accommodate our entire league. We are currently playing at two different venues. We are working with Northeast Lakeview College, a local junior college, to develop a soccer complex on their campus. It will be a multi-phased project occurring over several years, so it will not address our immediate needs. Our short-term goal is to transition our entire league to Futsal until the soccer complex is completed. We will still be, and continue to be, under the SAY banner during our transition to Futsal and beyond.
What advice would you have for other parents, community members, etc. looking to be involved with SAY soccer?
We started our league at the grassroots level in 2002. At the time, we were not satisfied with the services being provided by a local organization under a different umbrella in our area, so we started looking for an organization that better fit our vision that we wanted to be affiliated with. During our research, we found SAY was easy to work with and their insurance fees for registering players were reasonable. The most important factor was Doug guiding us on how to get our league quickly off the ground. It was a painless process, and the rest is history. In addition, one of the most important things for our league is finding good and reliable volunteers to help run our organization. Volunteers will make or break your organization and we have been lucky over the years to find individuals who are passionate about helping our league.
SAY National extends a sincere “thank-you” to Ed for his dedication and passion to youth soccer and SAY. It’s members like him that make the organization what it is today. Thank you, Ed!