Saying Goodbye to Wonderful People
This week we are saying farewell to two coaches who have become TSS Rovers legends in their time at our club.
Chelsey Hanneson came to us for our inaugural season in League 1 BC and immediately took the culture of TSS Rovers. With her credentials and experience, she was a natural to head up our women’s team. Listen to her on Footy Prime podcast back in 2022 or in this interview that she did with The Third Sub. She brought her deep belief in the women’s game and the women players to our team and was met by our deep belief in her. When the club rallied all of our resources together for our 2023 Voyageur’s Cup run, Chelsey was right there on the staff as an assistant coach to the men’s team while als0 focusing on assembling the women’s squad for the 2023 campaign. She has been a dedicated servant of the club and Dream, a friend to the supporters, and an inspiration for the players that have run through walls for her. She returns to her full time duties at Langley United and we know that she will be a big part of growing the game in Canada for decades to come. We feel so lucky to have had Chelsey at the helm of this pirate ship for the past two years.
Darren Ruscher (or Griller as he’s is known to us for his barbeque skills) has been a fixture in the TSS Rovers program since the beginning. In the USL days, he was found everywhere all at once such that our song for him – based on Michael Jackson’s Thriller – was “We’ve got Griller, in a Friday night, we don’t know what he does but his barbecue’s alright!” Darren gave us our first league championship to celebrate when his U21s won the Fraser Valley Soccer League U21 division on a sunny day at Empire Stadium on the strength of a John Joseph bicycle kick and tiki-taka tactics that took a team of teen agers to a championship against an opposition of grown men. He was assistant coach in 2023 and promoted to head coach last year and has been such an integral part of our team’s culture, our player development and our success.
We will dearly miss both of these individuals and we thank them for their service to the club. No matter where you go, we’ll always be your army and you are #AlwaysARover.
Welcoming Aboard New Pirates
We are super excited for Kevin and Brendan joining the men’s and women’s teams respectively. Both have been around TSS for some time with Kevin running the women’s program at the academy doing a stellar job and also supporting Chelsea at time during the Rovers women’s seasons. Brendan bring a wealth of experience including being an assistant coach for the Rovers men’s team in 2023.
We are really happy that two wonderful humans are picking up the journey and we can’t wait to see them in action in the new season
