Storing The Gear
Here in Canada, soccer is often considered a summer sport. In some areas of the country we can start in the spring and end in the fall, but only in British Columbia is playing outdoors during winter a possibility. Even then, it isn’t really possible beyond the southern cities. As a result, gear needs to be packed up every fall and prepped for a new season once the snow finally departs. This is true for most sports.
Far too often, I’ve walked into a sports storage shed and found poorly stored equipment: wet, dirty, fully-inflated, next to heaters or windows, lying on concrete or in dirt... While that might be fine for overnight or even a week’s storage between sessions, it’s pretty bad for the equipment. Cold weather makes it brittle, heat makes it pliable, water & dirt rot & etch. By the time a new season comes around, a lot of the equipment is no longer usable, especially if it was low-budget quality.
When my season this year came to an end, I put a call-out to other coaches that didn’t plan to return and gathered up their equipment. This means I have a lot of extra equipment to store, so I’ve taken the time to go through it all, wipe it clean and dry, drain the air from the soccer balls, hang the nets, and wash the child-size pinnies.
In the process, I disposed of almost 20 soccer balls that were damaged and nearly 30 disc cones that had split. Few of the traffic-style cones survived the summer, but thankfully I have quite a few from my prior coaching. I also have hurdles & fitness ladders stored in the big black trunk-box alongside whistles, captain arm-bands, scoreboards, timers, and other small equipment.
While I now have 8 Summer FC nets (plus a corner-net & my three 8-footers), only 2 of them don’t have any rips or tears. The others, while still serviceable, won’t last long into next season. All the nets were wet when I received them, so I had to pop them open and hang them to dry. Air pumps were also taken out & tested, with only 3 of 4 surviving the summer. I also have 2 older pumps that I’m now storing alongside everything else. While I’ve a couple dozen pegs now dirt-free, none of them are original to these nets, as they were all badly bent out of shape.
You’ll note from the image that nothing is on the floor. The nets are hung up & all the equipment is sorted on a shelf that is now dedicated soles to soccer supplies. The only thing missing is clothing, shin pads & cleats. Ideally, I would have a place to hang jerseys & shorts and shoe boxes to store the cleats, however, the provided uniform was such low quality that it did not survive the season.
There’s a backpack in the image where I keep the family’s shin guards & keeper mitts, and our cleats fit nicely in the trunk-box with some other odds & ends (whistles, captain arm bands, timers, etc).
Am I fully satisfied with my storage setup? Of course not, but there's always a limit to the amount of space that can be "donated" to store equipment during off-season.
The final clean-up & sorting process ate up about 2-hours of my time. If I had just shoved things away at end of season without properly drying, cleaning, sorting, and disposing, there would be some pretty nasty consequences. More money would need to be spent to replace equipment, more equipment would need replacing (due to dirt & water-damage), and significantly more time would be lost doing all the sorting & cleaning when trying to piece things together for a new season.
The spring comes quickly enough, no coach or team manager wants to spend the last couple weeks before kick-off discovering their equipment is no longer usable. Store it clean, dry, and drained to ensure your next season starts a little smoother.