U.S. Soccer brings innovative “Training Center” sessions to Northern Virginia

By Charles Boehm

U.S. Soccer’s youth scouting department will be holding three of its “Training Center” sessions in conjunction with Loudoun Soccer later this month, offering an invaluable experience for area coaches wondering what the step up from excellence at the elite club level to youth national team selection looks like – and whether their top players can make that leap.

Designed to provide U.S. Soccer scouts with a means to evaluate players in an environment intended to replicate the tempo and intensity of a national team practice, Training Centers feature the top talent in a given region and age group, with area youth and college coaches encouraged to sit in and learn more about the player identification process as well as national team training methods. All are free of charge for invited players and any coaches who wish to watch.

Loudoun Soccer will host a session for girls born in 1997 and 1998 on Monday, Sept. 26, one for ‘97-‘99 boys on Tuesday, Sept. 27 and one for ’94-’96 girls on Wednesday, Sept. 28, all at the new Philip Bolen Park facility in Leesburg, Va.

“Training centers put us in touch with all the constituents, all affiliations. It’s an opportunity to get to know the players we’ve scouted even better, because we’re on the field coaching those sessions, running those sessions,” explained Tony Lepore, U.S. Soccer’s director of scouting, to Potomac Soccer Wire this week.

“It’s a big jump from being a [Development] Academy standout to going into the youth national team camps. So we just felt like this was another step in the process where we could get a better picture. So now we put a player that we’ve gotten to know through scouting and evaluation with a few other guys, and we can get him into a training center where we can get another evaluation. Really, it helps to make decisions and to know when to invite a player into a national team camp.”

Ahead of each Training Session, Lepore and his staff solicit player recommendations from leading clubs, state directors, ODP staff and a network of part-time U.S. scouts that he calls “adjunct faculty,” which for the Washington, D.C. region includes U.S. Soccer technical advisor Chris Brewer and George Mason men’s coach Greg Andrulis. The duo will also lead the actual training sessions at Philip Bolen, with the help of a top coach from the host club.

"Loudoun Soccer is delighted to host three US Soccer Training Centers at Bolen Park,” Mark Ryan, the director of Loudoun’s travel program, told PSW via email. “We are excited that Chris Brewer, U.S. Soccer Technical Advisor, is going to invite some of the area's top players to train at our facilities as these players attempt to advance themselves to the next level of play.

“In addition, it is also a great opportunity for our technical staff and coaches to observe the sessions, and it continues to advance the name and reputation of Loudoun Soccer both locally and regionally.”

U.S. Soccer Training Centers have grown explosively since launching as a pilot program during the 2008-09 season. What began with a few sessions in some of the nation’s largest metropolitan regions proved to be a useful tool, and quickly expanded to some 400 sessions in 35 markets around the country last season.

Beyond providing another stepping stone for aspiring youth national team players, Training Centers have also enabled Lepore and his scouting staff – which has itself more than doubled in size over the past few years – to connect with hundreds of coaches and deliver the federation’s key priorities.

“We also have a chance to do some messaging, and coaching development,” noted Lepore. “We open it up to coaches, we encourage them to come, we have a dialogue with them, we make enough copies of the schematics. We’ll share the session with them, we have the lesson plan that we share with them…At the end, we save time to meet with the coaches after we meet with the players, so there’s all those other benefits. We also open it up to college coaches, right now for the 93s, 94s, 95s.

“It also helps give them a gauge of what a national-pool player looks like, and that’s been one of the challenges. We often get too many recommendations – for the most part it’s just not knowing what the gauge is, knowing that you have a player that you think highly of with your club and has an impact on games, but is maybe not quite a national-pool player yet.”

Lepore also emphasizes one final note for players and their family members.

“The eyes that are not watching at training centers are parents',” he said. “We think that’s an important part of the process, too, and that can be hard right now in our culture. But we’re trying to use training centers as another means to educate parents.

“We think it’s healthier if they don’t watch training, and allow their players to develop independently, just like when they go to school…We want to make sure there’s players ready to be independent. It’s also just to minimize distractions, because the sessions are demanding and intense, and when players are stretched, it really requires focus.”

[ +Read more about the Training Centers program at ussoccer.org ]

[ +Click here for more information about Loudoun Soccer ]

[ +Read our Q&A with Tony Lepore, Director of Scouting for the U.S. Soccer Development Academy ]