Vermont Green FC, a semi-professional soccer club based in Burlington, played the Canadian men’s national team in a pre-FIFA World Cup scrimmage Saturday. 

The game, held in Montreal, served as one of Canada’s final training sessions before competing in this year’s World Cup, which starts Thursday. Canada’s first game of the tournament is set for Friday against Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The tournament, which takes place every four years, is being played this year across 16 cities in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. The final is scheduled for July 19.

It’s not uncommon ahead of the World Cup for national soccer teams to play local clubs as warm-ups for the big stage. These matches, known as “friendlies,” give teams a chance to practice key plays and finalize their tactics in a low-stakes setting.

But for Vermont Green, which is made up largely of college-level players and was founded just five years ago, the match was “an enormous opportunity,” said Adam Pfeifer, the team’s sporting director, in a press release announcing the game.

The match was closed to the public and the team declined to share the result. 

“It was surreal,” said David Ajagbe, a forward for Vermont Green who plays for the University of Portland during the school year. Ajagbe, a junior, is from Vancouver — a fact he said made the weekend’s game take on another level of significance.  

“I want to do whatever I can to help my country be ready for the World Cup,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s like a once in a lifetime opportunity — and it was just a great, great experience.”

Ajagbe said he knew some of the Canadian team’s players personally, including one of its stars: Alphonso Davies, who plays for perennial German league champions FC Bayern Munich. Ajagbe trains with Davies in the winter, he said.

Vermont Green, meanwhile, has a host of other connections to Canada. For the past two seasons, the team has fielded six Canadian players. Several of them, including Ajagbe, played in the national championship game the team won in 2025. 

That league, USL League 2, takes place over the summer and is one of the main competitions for collegiate players to showcase their skills for professional scouts. 

Vermont also plays an annual match, outside the confines of its league, against semi-professional teams from Quebec that it calls the “Maple Cup.” In the cup’s three iterations so far — two featuring its men’s team, and one with its women’s squad — the Green have won every time. 

“What’s sweeter than Vermont maple syrup? Drinking Vermont maple syrup out of the Maple Cup trophy,” the club wrote in a press release about the women’s win last month.

ST. ALBANS, Vt. (WCAX) – Vermont schools are still struggling to get students back in the classroom four years after the pandemic.

Chronic absenteeism is defined by students missing 10% or more of the school year, about 20 days of school. In the 2019-2020 school year, before COVID-19 hit, chronic absenteeism was 18% across the state. The number skyrocketed to 42% in the 2021-22 school year, the first full year that schools were back open after the pandemic. The rate has dropped since, but was still at 25% in 2023-24.

Gov. Phil Scott signed a bill this week aimed at reducing those numbers. It is based on actions being taken by the Maple Run Unified School District in St. Albans.

District Superintendent Bill Kimball says learning is a social experience. “That social learning when you’re learning math, science, language arts for the content, actually cements the learning to a deeper level of knowledge,” he said.

Student absences stem from a number of issues, including transportation, health issues, and family issues. Kimball said that since the pandemic and the reliance on remote learning, the shared community expectation that kids show up for school every day has dropped off. “It’s been hard to pull back from that in the pandemic of that… the community expectation is that your kid should be there every day,” Kimball said.

He said chronic absenteeism is directly linked with education outcomes and test scores.

In the 2023-24 school year, 25 percent of the district’s students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 20 days or more of school. The issue is not just kids cutting class. Half of the chronic absences are excused by parents.

To address the problem, the district now sends staff directly to homes to engage with parents and convince them to bring children back into the educational fold. “It’s social service supports, frankly,” Kimball said.

The new law creates a statewide framework for districts to replicate what is happening at Maple Run. Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders said flagging warning signs and bringing families back into the fold before kids miss too much class is key.

“Focus on prevention and support before it comes to the point of a student becoming chronically absent,” Saunders said. She says truancy enforcement continues to be a tool, but is approached as a last resort. “What we’re signaling here is a more comprehensive approach that’s grounded in best practices to address the root cause of why students are not attending school.”

However, the bill also expands the definition of an excused absence, allowing parents to pull students for more reasons, like vacations or private sports leagues.

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