00:00but tell me about the one that you are trying to fix because i feel like it's very interesting
00:04you have support from mls clubs new york city football club you have uh access to one of the
00:10strong like you said one of the strongest football cultures in the united states is in the east coast
00:15is in the new york area the tri-state area has been famous for developing some of the best players
00:19of
00:19the national team and not only that some of the oldest clubs in existence in the united states
00:24in the united states come from that area so tell me about your journey and what are you guys doing
00:29in the day-to-day so we have two sides of the program one is development focused which is
00:36training kids supplemental works uh mentorship and then the second one which has really picked
00:41up steam recently and probably is put us more in the spotlight and kind of in this fulcrum position
00:46of hey like this is one way that we can counter pay to play he's built this brand backed player
00:53discovery model where we can we have everything is built through social media discovery so we have
00:58let's say 2 000 players applied to our boys showcase and we can pick you know we picked 70 players
01:0568
01:06players to showcase themselves in front of coaches from national teams from mls academies and from
01:12colleges so you bring in all these scouts and it's supported by brands so nike powers most of our
01:19showcase series and what happens now is like again someone has to pay for it but it's a matter of
01:25the
01:25brand sees this as a very impactful thing for the community but also it's great brand marketing because
01:31we tell good stories and and and each success story from these showcases become a nike success story or
01:39whatever brand you're working with it becomes their success story and so we've done that and we're doing
01:44our part in that at the end of the day like we want to continue to scale that and create
01:47access for
01:48players who wouldn't really have it otherwise of course we do have mls next and you see no players
01:53at these showcases but you know we try to reserve a certain amount of spots for players who might have
01:58never played in front of college the rung of the ladder that you're working on is so critical because
02:0317 18 your junior year of high school is so intense the pressure around you to get recruited to to
02:11to get something in place to make something out of the career that your family has invested so much
02:16it's so hard for the kids you feel like it's only a period of 10 months that you have to
02:21make it
02:22happen so the more opportunity that we can provide for them to expand that scope and change and i think
02:28that you know it's going to be changing a little by little because as we shift away from college being
02:33the main objective and target from most of the youth you know kids that are graduating from the youth
02:38system used to be like okay i need to get recruited by college but now there's there's opportunities
02:42because it's a little more professional
Comments