Harwich Police Soccer Club Has Kids Having Fun Playing Game They Love

HARWICH – Certain national studies have found that most kids quit organized sports sometime around the ages of 11 to 13.

 The main culprit for why they quit, usually, is that that’s about the time when sports stop being fun, first and foremost.

 A long-running organization in Harwich has worked to push against that trend for more than a decade. The Harwich Police Soccer Club, operating since 2012, brings in more than 200 kids to play futsal — indoor soccer — once a week during the winter inside the 204 Cultural Arts Municipal Building (and about 100 to the parking lot at the town community center for games of street soccer in the summer).

 The program is completely free and open to anyone with a “nexus” to Harwich, whether that be residence, attending a Monomoy school or really any other sort of connection, said the club’s director Bobby Brackett, a detective sergeant in the Harwich Police Department.

 “I like to say we are the best youth sports program in America that nobody knows about,” he said.

 The club is open to players in grades 3 to 12, split up into three age divisions. Coaches are volunteers. The winter futsal season concluded last Saturday with a table of 20-minute games between teams to crown some playoff winners. The bleachers inside the gym were packed with parents and other spectators.

 And with the Harwich Police Soccer Club funded through the Harwich Police Association and a few other donors, participants don’t have to pay a cent. The purpose of the program, Brackett said, is to provide the opportunity for every kid to play soccer, to have something to do during the winter, no financial commitment required. With the casual time commitment once a week, participants can continue with other sports free of any scheduling conflict stress.

 “That way it keeps them playing a game that they love, and without the families having to try to prioritize one thing over the other,” Brackett said.

The primary goal, on top of that purpose, is just to have unstructured fun. There are no schoolnight practices. Kids just show up on Saturdays during the winter and play soccer. 

“We're kind of like organized street ball, like organized playground ball,” Brackett said. “We want the kids to just play, and we want them to try things. We want them to be creative. We want them to do things that they normally wouldn't do if they thought they were going to get yelled at by a coach or something for doing something. We want them to just be able to play.”

Games are co-ed also, and it all goes back to that motivation to simply have fun playing soccer. By the age range when many kids start quitting organized sports, all the standard teams and leagues have already split up into boys and girls. Not so at the Harwich Police Soccer Club.

“Boys have friends that are girls; girls have friends that are boys, but they never get to play [sports] with each other, because everything's either boys or girls,” Brackett said. “So here they have a chance to actually play with and against each other, and they have a blast.”

Brackett serves as the games’ sole ref, not that he’s really ever blowing the whistle often to make a bunch of calls. He gets to the gym Saturdays at six in the morning and doesn’t get out until almost six at night after the full day of futsal. He was a soccer player himself, shaped in part by that experience.

“What got me into doing this was the fact that I had great coaching experiences when I was kid,” he said. “I had a coach through my youth that was phenomenal and made a very big impact on me, and I never forgot that, and when I had the opportunity to give back in the same way, I jumped at it.”

His own kids have played through the program. The club, at its core, is geared towards the players themselves. If a kid wants to do something, maybe change a rule or try something new, they’ll do it. They play music throughout all the games.

“It's really a family program,” Brackett said. “We see generation after generation of kids.”