Wanderers, Tides hunt for new coaches
Two disappointing seasons in the books
by Josh Healey
The Wanderers and Tides, Halifax’s men’s and women’s professional soccer clubs, wrapped up their seasons this month under very different circumstances, but both fell short of their goals. Now, they’re on the hunt for coaching options to guide them into 2026, arguably the most important year in Canadian soccer history, given that Canada will host the FIFA World Cup.
WANDERERS HEARTBREAK
The Wanderers entered this year looking to bounce back from a dismal 2024 campaign. They signed important players in midfield (Isaiah Johnston), defence (Thomas Meilleur-Giguère), and in goal (Rayane Yesli) to improve their defence. Head coach Patrice Gheisar, entering his third year at the helm, also wanted to improve his side’s road form and earn a home playoff match.
The season got off to the best start in club history as the Wanderers won five of their first eight matches. They also matched 2024’s points total on the road within the first month of 2025. Following a strong home performance against Atlético Ottawa, a clinical 2-0 victory, they briefly enjoyed sitting top of the table.
But that moment versus Atlético Ottawa proved to be a high-water mark for the Wanderers as they reverted to their old, inconsistent ways and struggled to keep pace with the league leaders. A poor July saw the club go winless in six matches, leading to mounting frustration among the fan base.
Despite their middling form at the end of the year, Gheisar guided his side to a fourth-place finish, which secured the second-ever home playoff match in club history. The squad also set new records for goals scored (41) and road points (15), with U-21 striker Tiago Coimbra hitting his potential as a dangerous No. 9. Many of the club’s objectives set at the beginning of the year were met.
That all changed this past Wednesday as the Wanderers hosted York United FC for one of the most memorable playoff matches in Canadian Premier League (CPL) history. Rain, wind, and two delays due to thunder and lightning set the tone for a thrilling match which went to extra time and then a shootout. The Wanderers, however, gave up the lead twice during the game and ultimately fell to the visitors in the shootout, failing to make a deep playoff run.
Gheisar’s inability to deliver a home playoff win cost him his job as the Wanderers announced they’d not be renewing his contract less than 48 hours after the heartbreaking playoff exit. He leaves having set several club records. Ultimately, the lack of results in big matches has caused the Wanderers to go searching for someone else to take the wheel.
TIDES ON THE EBB
The Tides season began with so much hope and optimism, given it was their first in club history, ushering in a new era of women’s professional sports in Halifax and Canada at large. The Northern Super League (NSL), only a dream 18 months before, had become a reality.
But that optimism quickly faded once the first ball was kicked on April 26 as the Tides struggled out of the gate. Their home opener threatened to become a rout, with the visiting Calgary Wild FC potting three goals in quick succession against Tides keeper and former Canadian international Erin McLeod.
Things went from bad to worse as the Tides lost five of their first six matches. Scoring goals and holding the defensive line were both issues. However, head coach Lewis Page managed to guide the club to their first-ever win on June 10, a 2-1 nail-biter against the Ottawa Rapid.
Page’s joy was short-lived as the club opted to make a coaching change after only eight matches, shuffling the 58-year-old Chester native to establish the Tides academy while bringing in former Canadian men’s national team head coach Stephen Hart on an interim basis.
Hart won his first two matches, with 1-0 wins over the Wild and Montréal Roses, but failed to win another game for the rest of the regular season, with the Tides finishing last on the NSL table with 16 points. McLeod—arguably the Tides’ marquee signing—also retired mid-season due to injury. The Tides finished their inaugural season with a dismal record of 3W-15L-7D. The future of Hart, who struggled to get the most from his offensive players, scoring just 0.68 goals per match, remains unclear.
But there were some bright spots: Keeper Anika Tóth was the Tides’ best player this season and was recognized as the NSL’s goalkeeper of the year. She also signed a contract with the club to keep her in Halifax until 2027.
Now, the club will look to build around Tóth as they make their roster decisions heading into next year. Given they were poor across the board, it’s expected that much of the squad will be new.
Halifax successfully achieves record high road deaths in 2025
By Matt Stickland
On Thursday, October 23, 2025, Halifax’s Transportation Standing Committee got an update on the first year of the city’s new Road Safety Strategy. This year, Halifax has killed over 20 people, which is more than any previous year since Halifax started trying to prevent road deaths back in 2016.
Chair of the meeting, councillor Sam Austin, was concerned because “It is now a four-year trend line going in the wrong direction for where we want it to be.” He wanted to know if city staff needed more resources, asking, “Is money helpful?”
The city’s director of parking and traffic management, Roddy MacIntyre, replied that, “Sure, money is always helpful,” going on to say that his department would use the money to pay “staff and/or to pay for things.” Thanks to a few generations of suburban development, the city is hemorrhaging money due to massive fiscal unsustainability, worsened by the past decade of city councillors keeping taxes low. As a result, even if the city does want to spend money on road safety “things” like ineffective flashing lights that don’t prevent drivers from killing pedestrians, the city doesn’t have the “staff” to put up these ineffective countermeasures called for by our new Road Safety Strategy.
Councillor Laura White, who should have fought harder to be on the Transportation Standing Committee but seems to have realized her mistake and now comes to all the TSC meetings, asked staff if they had considered any public education campaigns that focused on the fact that if you are driving a car, the person most likely to kill you is you. Or as councillor White said, when it comes to road safety, the “responsibility is ultimately with people driving. Why don’t we put more emphasis on communicating that?”
The reason, according to the staff presentation, is that Halifax’s official policy in the Road Safety Strategy is that all road users—licensed adults speeding their two-tonne weapons through residential streets and three-year-old children playing soccer—are equally responsible for road safety, a principle formally known as “shared responsibility.”
Councillor Patty Cuttell wanted to know if collisions with bikes or scooters and pedestrians would be captured in the city’s road safety data. MacIntyre told the committee that if they resulted in an injury or fatality, they would be, but since there were none, none appear in the data.
So even though the city’s data says one type of road user, drivers, is involved in every collision, and even though it is patently absurd to say Maverick Brown, the three-year-old playing soccer, is equally responsible for being vehicularly murdered as the adult driving the pickup truck, our city’s official Road Safety Strategy says three-year-old Brown was responsible for his own death. The good news is that even though education is a critical pillar of Halifax’s safety strategy, the director of public works Lucas Pitts, told TSC there is no funding for it at the moment.
Halifax’s enforcement pillar is faring no better: the 10-person traffic team currently has only three members, so even though tickets are trending up, the cops are still 10,000 tickets shy of 2016’s ticket numbers.
Councillors White and Trish Purdy wanted to know, respectively, whether we learn from other cities and, if so, what Ottawa is doing to reduce road deaths.
Halifax’s supervisor of road safety and transportation, Sam Trask, said that yes, they do learn from other cities and said they looked at Ottawa’s plan, and they’re basically the same, so maybe Ottawa just did more education?
There are some other differences in the plans. Whereas Ottawa and Halifax both recognize aggressive driving as an issue, Ottawa has broken aggressive driving into specific dangerous behaviours, like speeding and tailgating, and then analyzed which pillars can be used to prevent each behaviour and how. Then they came up with six pages of specific engineering and policy interventions from rumble strips on rural roads to bollards on the yellow line in the middle of local roads, to actually mitigate, isolate, and prevent specifically the dangerous actions of drivers in accordance with their safety strategy. Then those interventions are assigned to specific departments, along with timelines for implementation and for comparing expected and actual outcomes.
Meanwhile, in Halifax, we ask volunteer groups to pay for flags for children to hold when crossing the road and through mealy-mouths we “Promote and model a shared culture of road safety,” as a record number of people die very preventable, publicly funded deaths.
The Other Stuff
Hate reading? In this economy? I don’t blame ya, you can catch up with city hall on the go in our weekly podcast. Stay tuned to this feed, Grand Parade is doing a Halloween collab with HFX by Bike. Also, if after reading that second story, you want to see a few good road safety strategies, you can find them in this week’s show notes.
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