MISSION

Our mission is to develop every player to their desires. Some players want to play college soccer while others just want to start for their high school. Our role is to guide them on and off the field to be the best player and person they can be through education, training, and competition.

“As a head coach of college soccer programs for 30 years I can promise you that college coaches not only evaluate a player’s skill but how they handle adversity, teammates, coaches, referees, and parents”.

                                                                                                 – Coach Kyzer

PHILOSOPHY

• Individual Player Development
• Development of Team Play
• Training that is relevant and applicable to match play

Our training philosophy centers on understanding and application. Every drill executed comes with an explanation of how it relates to a match and when to use it. Many coaches have great drills that players execute but then lose the application due to lack of explanation.   Most players know how to accomplish specific drills with success, but very few understand how and when to use that skill, so the training becomes ineffective.

Our emphasis is on player and team development, building on successes and relating prior training to matches. We do this by providing match related drills during training and by reviewing them before competition. Players are then able to consolidate all previous training and matches into a resource bank that they can access to answer the following questions:

• Pre-match: What are our successes, liabilities? What do we need to do in this match to be successful?
• Halftime: What do we need to change to be more successful? What are we doing well?
• Post-match: Why were we successful? What percentage of the match were we in control and why? What could we have done to have more success?

Our goal for competing in matches, tournaments, and showcases is competing fairly, individual success, and team success while enjoying each others’ company on and off the field.

Strangely enough we don’t say ‘win’ to our players when talking to them before a match, during halftime, or after a match. Winning should not be the standard by which a team measures success. When a coach tells a youth team they have to win, that becomes the team’s only option for success. Every team wins matches they should lose and loses matches they should win. If the only option is to win, then a match well played but lost may go down as a failure in a player’s mind and a match won may give a false sense of success. We don’t use the word “win” because it detracts from the true goals of a match which are the progression of individual players and of the team as a whole.

Our players and coaches want to win as much as anyone but not at the expense of individual or team progress. If a team is having a high percentage of individual growth, then the team as a whole has a higher chance of success. Our philosophy is that winning is the byproduct of consistent player and team development. If winning was the primary focus before the match it is too late for a coach to redeem the team after a loss by saying “we played well”. There are too many clubs and coaches looking for awards, records, trophies and win notches in their belt at the risk of their players’ development.

“While we don’t use win in our pregame, halftime, and post match communication with teams, all players and coaches work to win matches. There are too many coaches and clubs that only accept winning as success while destroying small increments of individual player and team accomplishments. Our approach is to find these small gains in training and matches, then build on them to add to the total team achievement. A player must be able to feel good about their individual performance or team performance, if applicable, in a match, even in a loss. We have an opportunity to use soccer as an avenue to help players deal with success and failure. It is an organization’s job to teach players how to handle losses with dignity and maturity and wins with humility.”

                                                                                         – Coach Kyzer