Preserving the game: The Saskatoon Soccer Legacy project

A cardboard box sits, forgotten, on a shelf in the corner of a garage.

Inside are old photographs, newspaper clippings, medals, team rosters, tournament programs and a jersey that hasn’t seen a soccer pitch in years. To some, it looks like clutter. But to Saskatchewan’s soccer community, it’s history.

Read more Saskatchewan Stories from Brittany Caffet:

• Nakon’i’a with Kunsi: How a puppet is reviving the Nakoda language
• Hidden talents of the Saskatchewan Roughriders revealed
• Opening doors underground: How one woman is shaping mining culture

The archive spans more than a century of Saskatchewan soccer history. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

For generations, the game’s past wasn’t stored in archives or databases. Instead, it only lived in conversations.

“Whenever you got a group of people from the soccer community — whether they were coaches, whether they were players, whether they were parents — they just start telling stories” said Jodi Blackwell, the chief executive officer for Saskatoon Soccer Centre Inc.

Listen to the story on Behind the Headlines:

But there was a growing concern in the city’s soccer community. The storytellers were getting older.

Items and photos from the archive can be seen on display in Saskatoon’s soccer centres. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

“We were losing people,” said Mark Millard, of the Saskatoon Soccer Legacy committee. “The individuals with the stories and with the history, we were losing them, unfortunately.”

And when those people were gone, what would happen to the stories they carried? What would happen to the photographs tucked into drawers? The scrapbooks hidden in basements? The newspaper clippings documenting championships, tournaments and milestones that once meant everything to the communities that celebrated them?

This photo from the 1930s depicts a football club from the Saskatchewan Penitentiary. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Five years ago, those questions sparked an idea to start an archive. Not simply to collect artifacts, but to save a part of history that was quietly disappearing.

“Even at that point in time, we knew how much we’d lost,” explained committee member Dave Taylor. “It was an immense amount of stuff, because everybody would just sort of throw it out.”

This Concordia Soccer Club blazer, recently donated by a local family, is Dave Taylor’s favourite piece in the collection. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

That realization became the foundation of what is now the Saskatoon Soccer Legacy.

But preserving history is only part of the mission. The real goal is to share it.

Answering the call

Blackwell described the early days of the project as “organized chaos.”

Once word spread that they were looking for artifacts and memorabilia, the response was overwhelming, and people quickly started to arrive, carrying formerly forgotten boxes brimming with history along with them.

“They’re moving, they’re downsizing or they’ve passed on, and their children are left with boxes of things in the garage,” Blackwell said. “They don’t even really realize the value of what is there.”

The archive is growing almost daily, with new items regularly arriving through donation. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

The collections revealed decades of mementos documenting the people and moments that helped shape the game in Saskatchewan.

For the volunteers behind the project, each box felt like opening a time capsule. The team’s role quickly expanded beyond collecting artifacts. They became historians, archivists and treasure hunters all at once.

Many photos from more than 100 years ago can be seen on display in Saskatoon’s soccer centres. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

“If anything is going to be thrown out, we’d like to do it,” Taylor said. “We’ll go through it, we’ll sort through, we’ll do whatever. Give us a whole bunch of boxes and we’ll do it.”

Many of the items now appear in rotating displays at Saskatoon’s soccer centres, where visitors can explore photographs, memorabilia and stories from generations past. Others are carefully catalogued and preserved, ensuring they remain accessible for future generations.

The heart of the game

But while artifacts matter, those involved in the project quickly realized that the true heart of the game lives elsewhere: in the stories.

That’s why the Saskatoon Soccer Legacy Podcast was created.

“The podcast started really in the hopes to kind of capture the oral history,” said project manager Jacob Powell. “There’s a lot of artifacts, there’s a lot of cool memorabilia and what have you, but really the essence of the game is the stories, the narrative that happens within the community.”

And what a community it is.

While many items in the archive are antique, not all donations need to be. Jacob Powell explained that they are looking for memorabilia from all eras of soccer in Saskatchewan. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

On summer evenings across the city, pitches fill with players wearing dozens of different club colours. Parents line the sidelines. Volunteers organize schedules, mark fields and run tournaments. Newcomers find friendships. Children discover a lifelong love of the game.

While hockey often dominates Canada’s sporting identity, soccer has quietly become one of the fastest growing sports.

“There are more kids doing soccer than there are doing hockey in Saskatoon,” Taylor noted. “In a Canadian city, that’s an unusual thing.”

No memento is too small for this archive. The group will accept everything from large posters to tiny buttons and pins. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Across Saskatoon and communities throughout Saskatchewan, soccer fields have become gathering places where generations meet, cultures connect and newcomers find belonging.

“We’ve seen nothing but growth in the numbers,” said Millard. “Because of the new Canadians coming into Saskatoon, their sport is soccer, for the most part. They love the game, and that’s what they want to play.”

It’s a growing community connected by a sport that speaks every language.

And within that community, countless stories are waiting to be told.

The Legacy project has made it a priority to seek them out.

While the Saskatoon Soccer Legacy project is based in Saskatoon, they say they are accepting donations relating to soccer history around the entire province. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

“We’ve been trying to interview not just players, but coaches, parents, builders, officials,” said Millard. “Referees have some of the greatest stories, because they have a tremendous amount of interaction with individuals.” The result, he says, has been “an absolute goldmine.”

Together, those interviews are creating something remarkable: a living history of soccer in Saskatchewan.

Not just the stars. Not just the championship winners. Everyone.

The volunteers. The builders. The parents who drove countless kilometres to tournaments. The referees. The coaches. The people who spent decades quietly helping the game grow.

Mark Millard said properly archiving the hundreds of trophies in the collection was quite a feat. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

One day, the people behind the project hope a grandfather will walk into one of Saskatoon’s soccer facilities with his grandchild.

They’ll stop when they see a display of photographs from teams long past. Maybe he’ll point to a familiar face. Maybe a name will come back to him that he hasn’t said out loud in years. Maybe he’ll tell a story about a championship won decades ago. Or a road trip. Or a teammate who made the game unforgettable in a way that never made it into any record book.

A moment shared across generations. A story brought back to life simply by being remembered.

Maybe that’s what the dusty cardboard box sitting in a garage is really holding.

Not just old papers or forgotten trophies, but a story waiting to be passed on.

Got a box of “junk” in the garage? It might be a piece of Saskatchewan soccer history. A legacy project is collecting forgotten photos, medals and stories before they’re thrown away. Mark Millard, Jodi Blackwell, Dave Taylor and Jacob Powell are some of the people who have helped shape the project. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)