Some members of a local soccer league think it's a royal pain that a soccer camp based in Guelph, Ontario is setting up shop nearby this summer using a similar name to their own. The newly arrived Royal Soccer Club, an organization that offers soccer-themed day camps to children aged 5-13, have been sending out advertising flyers to local schools and it has the non-profit Royal City Youth Soccer Club (RCYSC) crying foul.

"It's the name overlap and the confusion that's the problem," said RCYSC club manager Karen Murray. "I don't want to put them down, but we don't know yet if they are a good organization or a bad organization and it is our name that will be affected."

In Ontario, where they've been operating since 1993, and now Alberta as well, the day camp is actually called the "Royal City Soccer Camp" and at first the group asked RYSC for permission to keep the word "city" in their name when they expanded their operation into B.C. "The request was rejected by the executive due to the possibility of confusion and our opinion was made known to the B.C. Registrar's office," said Murray.

As it turns out, the oldest city in British Columbia isn't the only municipality in Canada known as the Royal City. While New West earned its own august alias after being named by none other than Queen Victoria herself, the city of Guelph (founded 31 years earlier) was specifically designed to resemble a European city centre and is named after the German ancestral family of the reigning monarch of the time, King George IV.

"I don't understand why they are so upset because we don't even operate in New Westminster," said spokesperson Jeff Byers. "In the interest of trying to keep good relations, we asked permission from them. We want to retain a similiar sounding name and this one is legally deemed different. It would have been much easier and less expensive for us to continue using our non-profit name of Royal City Soccer Club, however, we paid the expense to create a less confusing name."

While the newcomers won't be operating within New West boundaries, the group will nonetheless be offering nearly a dozen summer camps in neighbouring Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, Coquitlam and Vancouver. And even though RCYSC is a longstanding local league that only operate September to March, Murray says this is already causing a lot of unnecessary confusion for local residents. (The Record itself, for example, is guilty of accidentally sending an invoice to RCYSC for a newspaper ad taken out by the Ontario organization.)

"We are a club, which in my mind means something you join, while they are more of a day care that offer soccer in the mornings and swimming in the afternoons," she said. "We've put in a request with the Registrar to have the name revoked. If they want to call themselves something like Royal Summer Club, we won't have a problem."