FC Edmonton coach Colin Miller feels this has been the most promising off-season in the club’s history.

Last November, after he’d wrapped up his NCAA season as the No. 1 shot stopped at Florida Gulf Coast University, the Canadian keeper got a call from FC Edmonton goalkeeping coach Darren Woloshen. Ingham learned that the NASL club had a lot of interest in signing the him — but the team had to know ASAP if the feeling was mutual. The Eddies wanted to get their roster sorted sooner rather than later.

At the end of the season, he said the players were told that they should go out and try to find new teams — but, if things changed, they could get a call back to come to Atlanta. So, Porter headed home to the Toronto area, where he worked out with a group of Canadian players who had dubbed themselves “Free Agent FC:” that group included former FC Edmonton players John Smits and Alex Semenets, retired MLS great Dwayne De Rosario and defender Nana Attakora.

Nik Ledgerwood felt the time was right to come back home.

So, it feels like Calgary Foothills, which began PDL play last season, is swimming against the tide, at least when it comes to developmental soccer in Canada.

The USL’s Austin Aztex announced that the club would not play in 2016 because of issues securing a suitable soccer stadium that the team could call its own. That left Aztex coach Paul Dalglish looking for work rather than preparing his squad for the upcoming season. But, timing is everything; as Dalglish hit the job market, the Ottawa Fury confirmed that coach Marc Dos Santos would not be back in 2016. Dalglish got MDS’s old job — but, will it be a marriage made in heaven?

On Monday, NASL announced that Atlanta — which was funded by owners in 2015 — would not return in 2016. Had the owners opted to fund the Silverbacks for another year, the burden would have been especially tough on the Ottawa Fury and FC Edmonton. The Canadian dollar is currently worth just a little over 70 cents US, so the exchange rate on funding an American team would have been brutal.

The Canadian dollar is trading well below 72 cents US. Canadian clubs in MLS and NASL take in most of their revenue in domestic currency, but pay out a lot of expenses in U.S. dollars. But, for NASL teams, the currency gap is widened because they pay out contracts in Canadian dollars. How is our weakening currency changing the soccer landscape?

Nana Attakora and Drew Beckie prove a point: That if a Canadian player is able to count as a domestic player on the roster of an U.S.-based NASL team, he'll get a shot.

A trade offer was made by the Carolina RailHawks during the 2015 season, but a deal couldn’t be finalized. But, after his Ottawa contract expired at the end of the campaign, Beckie finally made the move to North Carolina. The team announced Beckie’s arrival on Thursday.