A local soccer coach, with connections to Canada’s national teams, has been hired as the head scout of the Halifax Wanderers of the fledgling Canadian Premier League.

Victor Mendes, the Royal Military College Paladins men’s soccer head coach, will continue his duties at RMC while scouting Canadian players for the Halifax team, one of seven teams from across Canada playing in the league’s inaugural year this spring.

Teams will also be located in Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, Victoria, Winnipeg and the York region, north of Toronto.

“It’s a proper league with proper budgets,” Mendes said in an interview on Monday.

One fact about the league that Mendes likes is the league will allow U Sports players to play in the league as long as it doesn’t interfere with classes and the athletes’ U Sports commitment.

“If you sign a developmental contract, you can play during the season,” he said. “They are allowed to sign and play in the professional league under the condition, but come Aug. 15, which is when all [U Sports] training camps start, will be released back to the university and be allowed to play in that fall season.”

The CPL will start with training camps in March and run until late October.

Unlike Major League Soccer, in which Toronto FC, the Vancouver Whitecaps FC and Montreal Impact play and which is run by Americans, the CPL is 100 per cent Canadian-run, Mendes, who has also been a scout for the L.A. Galaxy and Chicago Fire of the MLS, said.

“We need our own professional league to develop players, and the ultimate goal is to make sure we have players playing in Canada that can play for [Team] Canada.”

With Canada being a co-host of the 2026 World Cup and having a participating team, it’s important to develop players who could possibly be on the team, Mendes said.

Each team in the CPL will be allowed seven international players, but the majority of players on each team will be Canadian.

Mendes is looking forward to being part of the growth of the league.

“For me personally, it’s great to be on the ground level of pioneering something that’s new and will hopefully be around for the next 50 years,” he said. “I’m really excited about the league itself because of the young players in Canada.”

Mendes was a standout soccer player at Regiopolis-Notre Dame Catholic High School while growing up in Kingston and went on to play for the St. Lawrence Vikings. He was named a college all-Canadian in 1993 and 1994.

He also played soccer in the second and third divisions in Portugal from 1994 to 1996 and finished up playing with the Ottawa Wizards of the Canadian Professional Soccer League in 2000.

He joined RMC as an assistant coach in 1999 and became head coach in 2003.

As well, he’s been a video analyst for Canada’s men’s and women’s teams from 2004 to 2012 watching more than 150 matches. He also performed the same duties for all of Canada’s youth national teams from 2012 to 2016.

Mendes said he tries to bring back his international experiences to his RMC players.

“I’m in a room all the time with the top coaches in the country or the world and my development is better and my knowledge of the game gets better,” he said.

Mendes is hoping that one day Kingston will get a CPL team.

“Obviously your owner has to have deep pockets, but at the end of the day, Kingston would be perfect for a team like that,” he said.

Kingston had a team, Kingston FC, in the professional Canadian Soccer League from 2012 to 2014. It lost the First Division league final in 2013.

Mendes said that with the thousands of registered soccer players from youth to senior men and women in the area, a fan base for the team is already here.

“That would be a goal over the next five years, to bring a team here,” he said.

imacalpine@postmedia.com

twitter.com/IanMacAlpine