Gaetano Mauro earns lifetime Prince George Youth Soccer membership recognition
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This article has been sourced from the Prince George Citizen Newspaper.
On Dec. 7, Gaetano Mauro became a lifetime member of the Prince George Youth Soccer Association, an exclusive club of only five people.
For 64 of his 79 years, Mauro has been involved in soccer in Prince George.
Mauro moved to Prince George with his parents from Italy in 1960 when he was 14, and he and John DaSilva were co-founders of the PGYSA. They started with two teams and within five years, 600 kids were playing in the Prince George Soccer League.
In a 40-year playing career in PG, he was one of the best soccer goaltenders the city has ever produced, and he was a key figure in the North Cariboo Senior Soccer League as a coach, referee and administrator. With Mauro guarding the goal, Labatt’s United, a team he formed in 1967, won multiple NCCSL championships and provincial tournament titles.
“He has diligently served as the director for all soccer organizations in Prince George and in my opinion he’s a very worthy candidate for this prestigious award,” said Shafeed Rahman, who shares the lifetime membership honour with Mauro, Gale Russell, Mike Labonte and Ben Shelest.
“Gaetano’s spent over 60 years in a sport he loves and cares about, the development of it all, and that’s admirable. He was very outspoken, but at the same time played a critical role in the development of soccer at all levels.”
Two years ago, Mauro helped mend the rift that brought Northern United Football Club back into the PGYSA fold to bind the city’s youth soccer community together again under one umbrella organization.
“It’s Gaetano’s longevity and commitment to the game — he’s been involved in soccer in various capacities in Prince George for decades,” said PGYSA president Ryan Beer. “That’s pretty significant. You don’t see that a lot. You often see people involved in building the game as long as they’re in the game or their kids are in the game, but he’s made it part of his life.
“He was part of the early days of Rotary Field when they started out. Then he was part of referee development, goalkeeper development and coaching, and so many different aspects, and he made a huge impact.”
Recognizing the need to develop officials on the field, Mauro co-founded the Prince George Referees Association and was part of that for 50 years. He oversaw the development of Alain Ruch, who achieved his national certification, and Carly Shaw-MacLaren, now a FIFA-certified referee based in Ottawa.
“I had Carly since she was 12 years old and she had a big smile on her face. She was like a sponge and I could see she was going to become somebody,” said Mauro.
Mauro is also a strong advocate for school soccer and was a key figure in organizing the Blackburn Cup girls soccer tournament and the Terry Wilson Memorial Cup Catholic elementary school tournament.
For years, he collected used soccer equipment in Prince George and sent it to Mexico, then the African nation Burundi, where he continues to send soccer donations for a friend who runs a school there. He remembered what it was like to have nothing, and it took him back to the gravel parking lots in Margone, a small Italian village where he spent most of his youth.
So what is it that drives him to stay involved in such a big way in soccer for so long?
“Being able to teach them and being able to see the improvement that they make, not just in the soccer world, but when I coached and was involved with kids and taught the officiating part, it’s the big smiles on their faces because they’re enjoying what they’re doing. To me, it’s satisfaction,” Mauro said.
“It brings me back memories of my childhood, because I was involved in the game since I was five years old. I was playing in the streets and on real bad fields. A lot of people were asking, how can you play on cobblestone roads? But it improves your ability to play. We couldn’t afford a soccer ball so you played with a rubber ball that was always bouncing up and down or sideways, so you really had to improve your skills catching that type of ball.”
He played for Columbus FC in the Pacific Coast League and also played in the Vancouver Metro League and Okanagan all-star league.
Mauro’s connections with the Lenarduzzi family led to exhibition games that brought the Vancouver Whitecaps (twice) and Vancouver 86ers (once) to Prince George. He was in his mid-20s, in the prime of his career, and played in all three of those games as part of local all-star teams, and he shut them out.
“The Whitecaps didn’t bring their reserves, they brought their first-stringers and they were a good team,” Mauro said. “I played against them three times and they didn’t score on me. I would play 55 or 60 minutes of the 90. But because it was a showcase, Jimmy Briggs, our coach, would pull me for the second half because our other guy was dying to get in the game, and they filled the net up.”
From 2004-22, Mauro was the PGYSA’s goalkeeping technical instructor, and he took coaching courses offered by Gordon Banks, England’s World Cup-winning goalie in 1966, and Tony Waiters, a goalie for the English national team in the ’60s, who went on to manage the Whitecaps the year they won the NASL championship in 1979 and Canada’s national team that played in the 1986 World Cup.
“Waiters said I had the softest hands he’d ever experienced in his life, because I don’t have big hands and nothing dropped on me. I could catch it and hold, and there’s a technique to it,” Mauro said. “A lot of goalies attack the ball, and I absorbed the ball. You catch and you move backwards with your hands so you absorb the shot.”
Mauro played competitive soccer until he was 28, when he broke his leg in a game.
“If I had stayed in Italy and not come over here, I think I would have played pro,” Mauro said. “I’m glad I did come here. The country has been great to me. The game has been great to me.”
Mauro got back into coaching in 2004, and for the next 12 years he was the coach of select teams of 14- to 16-year-olds he took to tournaments in BC and Alberta, also serving as goalie coach for Pro-Touch Academy, which put on goalie clinics for local players and sent Prince George teams to tournaments in the U.S.
Mauro, who worked as a welder and tradesman for Finning Tractor, helped make soccer a four-season sport in the city through his involvement as a coach and referee and director for the men’s and women’s BC Indoor Soccer League.
“Even today I see parents of kids I taught. They say, ‘Thanks Gaetano for what you did for my kid,’ and then I put it together. It’s not just soccer and teaching the skills of the game,” he said. “It’s teaching the skills of life. I believed in respect and I believed in punctuality, lifetime skills. Sometimes kids don’t listen to parents, they listen to a stranger or somebody else who’s not related.”
Before a leg ailment forced him to give it up, he worked closely with PGYSA’s top goalies, some of whom became varsity team starters with the UNBC Timberwolves, including Kyle Flannigan, Mitch MacFarlane and Jordan Hall, and Prince George was known as one of the hotbeds for producing provincial-calibre goalies.
Mauro was one of the founders of Northern United, a second youth soccer organization that formed in 2017 as a result of philosophical differences between the PGYSA and how it was being run at the time, and the split turned a lot of kids and their parents off soccer.
“PGYSA went from 3,200 kids to 2,250. They made some big mistakes and kids didn’t want to play and it dropped to not even 500,” said Mauro. “Northern United had 600, but I could see the problem and I was all in favour of amalgamating to bring it back to the standard it should be.
“I would not be involved now if the board was not going in the right direction. I’m pleased the board has made some big decisions and they’re on the right track. Neil Sedgwick makes a big difference, as well as the technical director. I have a lot of respect for Neil.”
Mauro’s lack of mobility limits what he can do on the field, but PGYSA supplies him with a cart so he can still get out to evaluate referees. He’s also part of the North Cariboo disciplinary committee and remains the head referee for the BC Indoor Soccer League.