CNMI soccer games shown online

A screen shot of the live stream game between Kanoa Football Club and MP United FC in the boys U18 division of the 2018 NMIFA Fall Youth at the NMI Soccer Training Center in Koblerville is shown here. (Northern Mariana Islands Football Association)

Missed a game or can’t come to the pitch to watch a match? No problem.

You can still catch the action at the NMI Soccer Training Center, as Northern Mariana Islands Football Club has started live streaming games since early this month.

This latest development was made possible after NMIFA officials and staff members took a seminar on live streaming soccer games through the help of Shoko Tsuji and Nadia Wu—the partner success managers of Mycujoo Asia. Mycujoo, which was founded by Empower Sports AG in 2014, according to its website “is a streaming platform providing live and on-demand broadcast of football matches and highlights from around the world.

CNMI soccer supporters who can’t watch the matches personally, especially those off-island, just need to check on NMIFA’s Facebook page or see www.facebook.com/nmifootball and look for the games being live streamed. They can also check the Mycujoo and search for NMIFA to see videos/live streams related to the association. For those who could not tune in live, they can also check the video or just the highlights, which are displayed on the right hand side of the video, along with the statistics.

“The AFC Live Streaming Assessment Workshop was organized by NMIFA, Asian Football Confederation, and mycujoo in order to get NMIFA to join the mycujoo platform (along with the other 30 AFC member associations already on board) and teach their staff the live streaming operations,” Tsuji said.

“It was a great pleasure to work together with NMIFA and support them with their first live stream. Having witnessed the passion for football (soccer) on the island, we believe there is huge potential and we look forward to building a digital product together with NMIFA,” he added.

NMIFA Executive Committee and MP United Football Club’s Norman Del Rosario, Southern United FC’s Megan Aglipay, Kanoa FC coach Raymond Zapanta, and NMIFA staff Mikky Vargas attended the seminar. NMIFA had its first live streamed game last Sept. 14, featuring the boys U15 division match between Kanoa FC and TanHoldings FC. The group also did a test run on the Kanoa-MP United game in the U18 division last Sept. 15. IT&E was the network provider during the games’ live streaming.

“It was a very insightful seminar. The representatives made it easy for us to understand how the live-streaming platform works and how it can help our growing soccer community in terms of exposure and increasing people’s interest and knowledge in the sport. This platform is focused on soccer, so it has this cool feature that allows viewers to see specific key moments in the game (foul, corner kick, free kick, etc), which are marked for convenient viewing. These highlights can also be very helpful to those who aren’t well versed in the sport,” Aglipay said.

Del Rosario added that the live streaming will be very beneficial to CNMI players who are hoping to play in the collegiate ranks and earn an athletic scholarship.

“This is also very important tool for our aspiring student-athletes who want to continue playing in college. As we all know, our location is very far from the mainland and for our players to get recruited, we will need a lot of videos of the matches and with mycujoo, those videos will help our aspiring players to go beyond the island football,” Del Rosario said.

“In my own experience with my son, we have reach out to different people and dig in to old matches in EAFF just to have a file to begin with in making highlights for the coaches to see. Now, coaches and scouts will have new videos to watch every week and will have better evaluation of the recruits,” the MP United official added.

NMIFA will try to live stream majority of the matches but as a starter, it will only live stream games at the training center’s main pitch.