Our Story

The story so far

Little Kickers was set up by Christine Stanschus in 2002 in London, England. At the time her family was living there and her son, Lukas (who was 2) loved soccer. She spent every day out in the park with him kicking balls at her, and because there were no suitable soccer classes for him, decided to set up a pilot session at his local nursery. At the time she was working long hours for an Investment Bank, and did not get to spend as much time with him as she wanted to. A couple of months later the pilot had been a huge success and Christine decided to expand LK to other areas of London, and gave up the day job! Two years later she started franchising the business, and there are now close to 100 franchisees operating in the UK, Ireland, S Africa and Australia with classes starting up in Canada in September 2009.

So why Canada? Having holidayed here for the past 5 years with family, and fallen in love with the country, the outdoors way of life and the amazingly friendly people, Christine and her husband and kids decided they wanted to relocate here permanently. So, mid-2009, they made the move. The business is now set up so that Christine can run the UK business from Canada in the early morning and concentrate on setting up LK in other overseas locations later in the day. The time difference enables Little Kickers Head Office to provide an additional 5 hours on the normal UK working day which is great for supporting franchisees in locations as diverse as South Africa and Australia.

Working alongside Christine is Ryan Baker, Director of Coaching for LK in Canada. Ryan got involved with LK because the UK LK team had heard that Laurentian University in Ontario run a fantastic course called “SPAD” – Sports Administration and Management. They approached the course Director to ask whether he could recommend a student to come to the UK to work as Little Kickers’ Director of Coaching, and he recommended Ryan. Ryan worked for LK in this role in the UK for 2 years and did an outstanding job, and returned to Canada in July 2009 to work on setting up the Canadian LK business with Christine.

Christine is confident that Little Kickers will be as successful in Canada as it is in the UK - Canadian interest in soccer is increasing dramatically across all age ranges, however at present there is little opportunity for pre-schoolers to get involved in soccer programs specifically designed for their age group. The LK program was designed by qualified soccer coaches and preschool teachers and in addition to teaching kids basic soccer skills it also provides a valuable introduction to early learning concepts such as colour and number recognition, sharing, listening to instructions etc, and the program is very age-specific. Also, from a personal point of view, Christine and Ryan think it would be great if Canada were able to compete convincingly in some of the bigger international tournaments in the future and if LK plays a small part in providing kids with the introduction to the beautiful game which spurs them on to great things then they’ll be delighted!