TORONTO – When James Merriman heard whispers of a Canadian Premier League team forming on the west coast, he thought little of it. He was, after all, comfortably working with the Vancouver Whitecaps as a residency coach.
But when the Vancouver Island native – now assistant coach to Michael Silberbauer at Pacific FC – heard one particular fellow Islander would be involved in bringing a CPL club to the area, he knew he had to join as well. “I was curious, and I admit, I was interested, because I love what the league’s doing,” Merriman told CanPL.ca during the first coaches summit in Toronto. “But when I heard Josh Simpson was going to be involved – and I know who he is, how he is – it was something that I had to be a part of, too. Then when I found out it was going to be on Vancouver Island, obviously, too many things were aligning for me not to become interested in that move.” Josh Simpson, the former Canadian international-turned president of Pacific FC, is a player who Merriman knows quite well. Two years his junior, Merriman grew up chasing in Simpson’s footsteps, as did most of the budding young soccer players on Vancouver Island. “He was the standard,” Merriman said, of Simpson. “He was the one going to play away from the Island, so we were looking up to him. “Same thing with the national training pool, with the youth Canada groups, he was always the one from Victoria that was going and getting called up with the youth national teams, so he was somebody that we were all chasing. “Who Josh is, and what he was able to accomplish as a player and as a person, if he’s going to put his time and build this project, that gave me a lot of confidence in the project.” >
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Pacific FC is accepting membership deposits ahead of the CPL’s inaugural season. Visit PacificFootball.Club for more information and CanPL.ca for the latest CPL news.