The Portage Collegiate Institute soccer teams are getting set for their upcoming season... if you can call it a season.

The West Winnipeg Athletic Conference Tier 2 league has officially been shut down, along with every other high school soccer league in Manitoba. The Winnipeg leagues aren't able to stretch their reffing staff to accommodate both their youth association and the high school league, so the high school leagues suffer. Both the PCI Saints and Trojans soccer teams are ready to go after a couple of weeks of training despite the bad news.

Saints' head coach Heather Schindel says they've got some exhibition games with other teams looking for action.

"We've been very lucky as we have two tournaments coming up. One is in Winnipeg on May 5th and 6th, and another in Kenora on the 12th and 13th. I'm also finding a lot of teams in Winnipeg are also very frustrated with the situation so a lot of them are agreeing to exhibition games as well. So we're all trying to make the best of a bad situation."

The clubs won't have any regular season games this year, but they are hosting the Provincial Championships later this spring at Rotary Republic Park.

"That is kind of the goal of our team," says Trojans Coach Chad Green. "We'll find some exhibition games if we can but people have been talking about trying to get a qualifying tournament to figure out who can go to provincials, so if they have that we'll play in that. Other than that we'll practice hard and our goal will be to show well or win provincials. We're pretty lucky though because 90 per cent of our guys are playing soccer, whether they're in PYSA, or playing on our Men's team (Portage Cobras)."

The Trojans won the Tier 2 Championship last season. The Saints have two exhibition games scheduled for Monday against Vincent Massey Brandon's varsity and junior varsity teams.