Lions looking forward to season 2016-2017!
Lions,
The summers months are nice ! But after a few weeks without Lions games on the weekends you start to miss the games, the goals, the celebrations and just the beers after the games. I can hardly imagine how hard that will be for the Lions who had to move back to their home country !
Looking back at the last season, we can be happy with what we achieved, that’s for sure, winning both the SPL and SIFL is a massive achievement and nobody can take that away from us ! We did struggle however to get enough sponsors interested to help to cover the cost. Luckily St James’s Park introduced by Dani could help to ease the gap a bit but at the end of the season the shortage was quite substantial.
For our next season, we like to change a few things in order to be more cost efficient as well we hope through our cooperation with the Ajisen group that we can tap into a serious sponsorship.
We gave up our training field in Puxi, first of all because they increased the rental price every year and secondly because we saw a low turnout in training attendance, partially because Azzeddine was not able to come on Wednesday… As Simon has left us, it was hard to find anybody willing to lead the trainings at the same spot! Thus, we are going to use the Concordia field full size 11 aside pitch on Tuesdays. The facility is state of the art and one of the best in Shanghai, as all was imported from Germany last year / plenty of space we have our own storage room / clean toilets / washrooms. So we will have both our U19 players and Senior / Legends Lions training so we are assured of more numbers. Az will head the trainings and will be helped by Adam for the youth and Terao will be available as well on Tuesdays for the trainings ! In our view the trainings of Az are the best you can get in Shanghai and players who commit and put their effort to come will improve their game for sure !
We will play this season in the following leagues :
- SIFL league on Saturday
- SPL league on Sunday
- SPL U19 league on Friday
- & finaly SPL Veteran league on Sunday
Our view is that by playing in all competitions its sets us apart from the other teams and gives us this club bonding and club feeling and our objective is to help the young players develop their skills and prepare to become a good senior player.
As we reduce our training field cost we will reduce the membership fee from 3000 lastseason to 2500 rmb this coming season (students fees will be 1500) and can be paid first half and second half of the season. It’s essential that everybody pays the membership fee to support the Club and help to cover league costs / training fields / equipment ! All fees will be collected by myself and due date will be early Sept. at the start of the season !
We hope the recruit some good new players thru our website which we have successfully done for the last several years and the fact that we play in all competitions will give us an edge over the others teams in Shanghai !
We are looking forward to see all the Lions back on the pitch soon ! We will try and organize one boot camp and one beach soccer + bbq (thank your fred !) before the season kicks off ! Of course we are excited to hold our 4th Shanghai Lions Cup on the 4th of September with over 24 teams competing for the Cup. Legends will look to perform well in the masters on the weekend of 3/4 September. The first training is targeted August 23 rd we will give full details once all is confirmed with the school !
Cheers
Happy Freek
