Bekker isn’t going anywhere else
Forge FC re-signs its leader and the CPL’s top player for two more years
Through the team’s birth and toddler stages, it has all gone through Kyle Bekker.
And now, as Forge FC vows to mature even more quickly, it will have its captain, midfield anchor and the league’s top player back for another two years. Probably more. He says he’d probably have to crawl off the pitch, or have his coach cut him, to quit playing.
“If you’d said this was how it was going to go when I first signed up here, I wouldn’t have thought it was true,” the 30-year-old Oakville native said Tuesday after agreeing to a new two-year deal. “It’s been a fantastic two years. For me, it was a no-brainer to come back.”
Bekker, a finalist in the inaugural season, won the Canadian Premier League’s 2020 Player of the Year award in the CPL’s delayed and compressed season conducted in a 41-day summer bubble in Charlottetown, P.E.I.
His work there led to interest from a couple of higher-level teams, including the Vancouver Whitecaps of Major League Soccer, the American premier league in which he began his pro career with Toronto FC as the No. 3 pick overall in the 2013 SuperDraft.
But Bekker wasn’t going to leave the team, which has won the only two CPL championships. The club wanted him back and knew he wanted that, too, so this was going to happen.
Since becoming the Forge’s first signed player and captain-designate several months before the team even had a logo and colour scheme, he has been the face of this franchise: Although coach Bobby Smyrniotis’s bushy fir-tree beard might get a few votes.
Bekker scores, sets up teammates, and pushes Hamilton’s relentlessly pressing attack up the middle and, more often, to the outside lanes. Although he’s a confrontational opponent with the grit of coarse sand, he is also calmingly unhurried when the Forge encounters the difficult stretches on the field.
Most importantly, he leads. By example, vocally, in games, in training, in the locker room.
He was joined in that by now retired David Edgar partway through Forge FC’s first season and this year by other players who had grown more confident with Hamilton’s mounting successes.
By winning a round in the 2019 CONCACAF League, two rounds in ’20, and coming within a whisker of promotion to the prestigious Champions League, Bekker’s Forge has made its, and the CPL’s, presence felt in international soccer. Both he and Smyrniotis say that, while being the “CPL’s gold standard” is still the main aim, elevating the team’s game to everyday Champions League calibre is a twin goal. It has already qualified for CONCACAF
League 2021 play and if it beats TFC later in the Canadian championship this spring, the club can still make the ’21 Champions League.
The ’20 team endured one of the most bizarre seasons in soccer history. It was training, went into isolation and quarantine in March, returned for restricted training, then had 24-7 togetherness in P.E.I. — “which taught us a lot of positive things about ourselves” — then played only four games over the next 80 days, in four different countries. Unsure of anything, the club always had to be physical and mentally prepared for a big game on short notice. The staff set the tone for survival, but the players and their leaders had to execute it.
Bekker has played for MLS teams in Toronto, Montreal and Dallas, won an NASL title in San Francisco, played in the USL and has 18 caps for Team Canada. With back-toback great CPL seasons, of course, he was going to attract the attention of other teams.
But, he had come to Forge FC in the first place because he wanted to be closer to friends and family, and carve out a long-term future in the game as a coach or executive, or both — a process which he’s already starting, in the international coaching certification program — and the Forge and CPL offer that.
“To sit down in one of those meetings with another team, I’d have let some people down,” he told The Spectator. “It’s been great and I have a lot more to give here. It would have been really tough to leave here.”
So, he won’t.