Giuseppe Politi is far and away the most accredited soccer coach in Sudbury. It would be foolhardy to believe that there is little to be garnered from the accumulation of all of that knowledge.

"All of the education over the years, it does make a difference," suggested Politi, not all that long after being recognized as 2025 Ontario League1 Championship Coach of the Year.

And yet, for as much as he would put the tactical skills at the top of his list of personal development benefits, Politi also acknowledged that there were many pragmatic realities to Ontario League1 play that also created some challenges.

"A big part of our team success was just keeping people healthy, "managing periodization", as well call it, the work to rest ratio," he said. "There was a lot of soccer in a short amount of time."

"A lot of guys were logging a lot of minutes in those mid-week games and the travel schedule was tough."

Through it all, the Sudbury Cyclones earned their second consecutive promotion, anxiously awaiting their participation in the Premier Division next summer, an accomplishment that helped separate coach Politi from the remaining two finalists: Donovan Taffe (Unionville Milliken SC); Ramin Mohammadi (Whitby FC).

"We stuck to our strengths and kept our formation and identity and shape from day one and carried it throughout the season - and it all worked out," said Politi, a man who prides himself as much on his overall administrative awareness as his pure soccer coaching abilities.

"The organizational aspect I bring really helped our team get over the line," he said. "We were very, very organized in terms of having a rigid schedule and holding a standard and expectations of players."

"But it was also about being realistic."

In fact, Politi is the first to admit that the game that he so loves in a never-changing entity.

"You go through the courses and try and digest what they are preaching - but you also have to make it your own," stressed the full-time secondary school teacher at St Benedict Catholic Secondary School.

"Over the last 20 years, there has been a push towards playing a more attractive brand of soccer: play out of the back, more indirect soccer with short passes. But there are more effective tactics that are now starting to take over from the more attractive tactics."

"Attractive tactics can lead to more errors," Politi added. "I think it went so far one way, but now it's coming back to more efficiency and simplicity; just getting the ball in the box off the corner kick."

"Honestly, we did a lot of all of that this year."

The results, it seems, speak for themselves.