Soccer, meet The Monitor. Monitor, meet soccer.

NDG Soccer is one of the biggest associations of its kind in Montreal with hundreds of kids playing on dozens of teams all across the community.

Coverage of soccer in this area has been fairly low in recent years, however, and in a recent online edition of The Monitor, we called out NDG Soccer for their lack of communication.

Without going after them too hard again, the gist of the column was to say that the smaller sporting associations – from hockey to baseball, to gymnastics, volleyball and tennis – have all made a strong effort to get information out there for us to pick up and report on.

NDG Soccer had not been holding up its end of the bargain. Well, things have apparently changed and now I would like to be the first to applaud NDG Soccer and the GM of its recreational division, Cate Gregory.

Less than 48 hours after we ran the column criticizing her organization, Gregory made the effort to make contact with us and give us a little information.

In addition to providing us with schedules, she added on a bit of info on what’s going on in NDG now. "We have been providing to our teams technical support through our technical director, Gustavo Echevarria, who is also our NDGSA Summer Soccer Camp Director," she explained in an email. "All divisions are offered these opportunities throughout the summer as the NDGSA strongly supports the technical development of both our players and coaches. "We pay for all training courses taken by our coaches and this is another initiative to support and continue the technical support and growth of our players and parent volunteer coaches."

Well, that was news to us!

A couple of years ago when the association began its technical direction program, someone mentioned it to us casually and we followed up on it with some coverage.

But the last email or phone call from them to us was in 2006.

Now that the NDGSA has made contact, you, the readers of The Monitor – the same people who have kids playing soccer or are playing soccer yourselves – can expect to get some coverage.

It’s not like we don’t know who we are… we’re a relatively small weekly that is read by a relatively small community.

We do, however, believe that as the paper of record for the West End, we have a duty to you, the readers, and that is to cover the news, activities, and events that are important to you.

Soccer is clearly important to you.

Well, then it’s important to us as well. Thank you NDG Soccer and Cate Gregory for giving us a hand.

We’ll be sure to pay you back for your efforts. Check here next week for a preview of the NDG International Tournament which runs from Aug. 16-17.