Todd Beane is on a mission to change the way we train and develop our youth soccer players in the United States. After working for many years with Johan Cruyff, he has decided to bring the methodology he learned and developed with Cruyff to the United States. Todd founded TOVO Academy Barcelona to do just that!
In this interview we discuss:
- Todd’s personal story as a Dartmouth and Stanford Graduate who landed a job working for Johan Cruyff in Barcelona.
- How Cruyff’s intuitive vision of the game and Todd’s background in education blended into the creation of a methodology for teaching that forces us to rethink the way we train our youth soccer players.
- How we have gotten it all wrong for the past 30 years and are failing our U.S. children when it comes to how we teach them the game.
- Parents need to re-think what they are willing to see and perceive as an acceptable training environment – and rethink what club they have selected if the priority is not about learning.
- What parents of a talented, athletic, thoughtful young players must seek.
- The importance of a variety of soccer experiences and how our club structures make that challenging.
- If we’re going to be true to the child’s learning process, the intelligence has to be on the field and not on the sidelines.
- The speed of the cognitive process on the field and how listening to parents or coaches from the sidelines is impossible.
- Why Parents are the most important part of the talent development process.
AUDIO FILE:
TRANscripｔ:
Skye:
Thanks for joining us at SoccerParenting.com, where our mission is to elevate the game by engaging and educating youth soccer parents. My name is Skye Eddy Bruce. I’m the founder of SoccerParenting.com, and I’m thrilled to be joined here today by Todd Beane. Todd is the founder ofTOVO Academy Barcelona. He’s an American who’s living in Barcelona and been very involved through the Johan Cruyff’s legacy, through his Cruyff’s Institute, through the Cruyff Institute for Sport Studies. Todd, why don’t you start by telling me a story that I’ve never heard before? I want to know how a guy from Connecticut ends up working with Johan Cruyff, marrying his daughter, Chantal, and having this life that you’re living in Barcelona?
Todd:
By luck, I guess, is the best way of saying it. I cannot complain – being over in Barcelona and had a wonderful experience prior to here. It’s a typical American story in the sense of growing up suburbia Connecticut and then finding my way to Dartmouth College to play football up there. A wonderful coach came on board by the name of Bobby Clark, which many listeners may know of. He’s now at Notre Dame, had been at Dartmouth and Stanford. Just a great gentleman, a great family man, but also a wonderful coach. He kind of started opening my eyes about life across the pond, as they say…and then just traveling in various opportunities to take to Costa Rica, I just started opening myself to the possibility of living abroad and taking those opportunities one at a time…and then it is just by chance. I had a good friend who had come over to be at the club, at Barcelona, who lived around the corner from Johan.
They were brainstorming one day just about how he was looking for someone that could maybe come in from the outside of Europe maybe, and bring a little bit of experience from sport and academia. That was something he was looking for , kind of an external, and that was typical of Johan, try to get different ideas into the mix of a traditional football environment. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time and a couple of conversations later, found myself on a plane with not much more than a duffle bag at thirty eight years old giving it a go. I’d promised I’d come for six months and sit down with him and talk about this crazy idea at the time that he had to educated athletes offering them sport management and combining their studies with their sport, which is normal in the United States. That’s what we’ve done if we’ve grown up in the States and played collegiate soccer, but it’s completely not available to athletes in Europe and so there’s that division.
Long story short, I got on the plane and six months turned into fourteen years and several years after arriving in the early 2000, I fell in love with his daughter and added a little job security, I guess. I figured he can’t fire me if I’m in the family. None-the-less, we spent fourteen years together before his passing. And yeah, to the outside world of football – of course is about football – and for us now, within the family, it’s about losing a grandfather and a father. But none-the-less, football is to be shared with the world and he was one of the best minds in football so I have to consider myself a kid in a candy shop even at thirty eight when I arrived.
The rest has just been working under his leadership basically – up until we had made the decision when he was diagnosed with cancer a year ago that I would branch out and create TOVO Academy on my own.
We knew that the Cruyff Institute would carry on, the Cruyff Foundation helping children would carry on, but I really wanted to create a home here in Spain where we could bring in kids who don’t have the opportunity to train at Ajax or train at Barcelona, but still get professional academy. With his blessing and before his death, we launched TOVO Academy and here we are, just kind of driving this initiative forward, really with his vision in our heart and in our mind.
Skye:
That’s great. Tell us a little bit about TOVO Academy, just the different programs that you’re offering because it’s kind of multidisciplinary – so give us a little scoop on that.
Todd:
Basically, we created a training method, I’ll just say a lot of this is based on Johan’s intuitive vision. What I brought to the table maybe was taking a look at the pedagogical background, I have some background and a degree in education. It was a nice blend, I was noticing that a lot of Johan’s intuition about developing talent, about how to create teams, about how to manage people, about how to play the game – came from let’s say his street sense, his street wise. As he said, his swimming diploma was the only academic diploma he earned because he left at fourteen and became a profession at fifteen. We combined kind of that intuitive vision of football and talent development and human management with the pedagogy that I brought to the table and I thought,
“We’re going to create a methodology that really is going to force us to rethink the way that we train youth.”
Part of that came out of the disappointment I had without seeing so much of this pedagogy and the research being applied, and part of that came from the inspiration of Johan – saying, hey, this guy has an idea and proved it at the highest level. We need to get that out to the kids around the world. Selfishly I said to Johan, “I want to bring this home. I want to bring this back to the United States.” TOVO Academy was born with the idea that we would offer different programs for kids, youth players, who are obviously ambitious players, right, ambitious youth players that really love the game. They get a sense of that methodology by either coming to a Barcelona camp here or attending one of our programs in the United States. Or, for coaches who get a chance to also come to Barcelona and enjoy our football methodology, such that every coach that leaves the TOVO Academy with an idea of maybe how to rethink the training process will affect probably at least twenty if not a hundred children.
If we start to multiply that back home, maybe in these various pockets, Virginia and others, we can have influence on the way the United States develops it’s common teacher. It sounds ambitious, you know? It sounds crazy that a small initiative can do that, but really it’s about spreading the word about how to rethink our training environment and then giving kids and coaches the opportunity to experience that through our academy and that’s what we’re trying to do.
Skye:
Explain that a little bit, rethink our training environment? When you compare what you’ve often seen in the United States, a typical training environment, versus what you bring through the TOVO methodology, explain the differences so we can grasp it a little bit more?
Todd:
Yeah, I mean … What I’ve noticed and I’ve been around back to the States a lot recently and then connecting with colleagues, I have to say that we’re really focused on pure development, that’s hard to do.
I’ll explain that a little bit. I know for coaches listening and for parents listening, that’s hard to do in a hyper competitive American market where the under twelve trophy has to be won and traveling teams have to be made and the pressure to get into Harvard or to Barcelona is so high. What I notice is that’s not congruent (the pressure to win) with sound pedagogical practices in terms of pure talent development.
What Johan often spoke about was enjoying, even at the highest level, enjoying the process of learning and all of the frivolity that comes with it, all of the camaraderie that comes with it, and all of the failure that comes with it. But it isn’t just about being able to kick a ball. I remember him speaking about it, he said, “Listen, there’s so many kids and even very talented players worldwide that can kick a ball,” so it can’t just be about the technical component of the game. It has to be about the cognitive component of the game, the decision making, the vision, the perception, the conception and the assessment of the game in flow that makes the difference between great players and average players.
And so thinking that and saying, “What happens if we didn’t make it a technical-centric program, where we put them in lines and taught them to pass and then taught them to shoot and then hopefully when they’re teens they’ll figure out how to play the game?” No. We said, “What if we started with concepts and started with what kids can learn conceptually and then used the skills to solve those issues?” Right? What is dribbling? Dribbling of itself is just running with the ball, it’s meaningless unless it’s in the context of what you want to accomplish, dribbling by someone, or dribbling down the wing, or dribbling to goal….
Skye:
Not dribbling around a cone or dribbling to a cone and back.
Todd:
Yeah, if I had played against cones, I probably would’ve been a National Team player, right? I didn’t quite make it that far because we’re playing against-
Skye:
Is that one of the key components? What I hear from you a lot is you’re actually training within the game, so you’re training the thought, the decision making. Even at a young level within the game itself, is this applicable to a seven, eight, nine year old just like it’s applicable to a fifteen year old?
Todd:
Even more so.
This is why I think we’re failing our U.S. children if I’m blunt about it.
Kids here in Spain, and I’ve got two of them, two boys playing, and two older boys that have played, and two younger girls that are probably going to play and dance and do everything else…Here, the game is always part of your training. Whether it’s on, I call it “patio” here or recess or playground in school, where it switches off in practice here, or whether it’s in the training environment at my club’s training, it is about the game and how we play the game. Those decisions are constant. It’s about small-sided games, it’s about numbers up games, it’s about position play, it’s about rondos and spacial relationships. It’s all about that. Then skills are the tools you use to accomplish your objectives. When you think about it, when I say rethinking it, it’s completely, no, it sounds simple, well, it’s all the same, it’s not.
We’re actually finding out through more and more research that the only effective way to develop players capable of encompassing all that the game presents is to get them (thinking the game) at younger ages. What have we done in the United States for the last thirty years? Well, that’s too complex, that maybe too chaotic, so let’s line them up, put them on cones, isolate a skill, and then practice that skill.What happens in that is, guess what? You actually see an improvement in that skill as long as the drill, come Saturday, is to pass the ball back and forth. Every parent, every coach is like, “I taught them to pass and now on Saturday what happened,” right?
It’s because you’re literally using another portion of your brain. When you are using your cognitive skills another portion of your brain is being engaged than when you’re just doing static drill exercises. When you transition from static drill exercises, they’re not applicable to the demands of the game, so that isolation, while well intended, it can show improvement in isolation, doesn’t actually give our kids the capacity to solve problems in real time in a match under the circumstances that they face. It’s not cognitively faithful to what they will be demanded of during the weekend.
To be honest, I’m being blunt about this, we’ve got it all wrong for the last thirty years and anybody that’ll listen to it, I’m willing to explain. It’s not just me. If we apply good, sound pedagogical practices to football we’re going to have much more talented kids.
Actually, if you do these games in a dynamic way when they’re younger, we won’t lose seventy five percent of our kids at thirteen who are dropping out of the game because they’re not having fun. They tell us they’re not having fun, not only through the surveys that are out there, but also by the fact that when they’re fourteen they don’t sign up for soccer anymore. There’s something wrong if seventy five percent of our kids in the United States are leaving a game which is designed to be fun and engaging and fruitful, right? I think we missed something here.
Skye:
I wrote about my son earlier this week, he’s an average player and because he’s an average player, he’s thirteen years old, he doesn’t want to stand in a line. That’s just so boring to him (and not enjoyable to focus on something you’re not as good at than on just playing), to have somebody try to teach you, all he wants to do, and what’s going to keep him playing,is to play..is to go to practice and have fun and just be engaged in the environment. Not to have a coach trying to teach him more technical stuff in a very rote way. I can see that this really could have an impact, like you were just saying, and just increasing the number of kids or not having so many kids drop out of sport because it seems like a more enjoyable way to learn.
Todd:
Right. This is happening I think in really innovative classrooms all through the United States. What happens is, when you go to show off your school and I used to be a classroom teacher, it looks orderly if every kids is in rows and you go by and you look in the window in room 101 and everybody’s raising their hands and sitting up straight. The problem is, that’s not what learning is. It’s just not. That is what child management may be about if they were worried about sitting up straight and raising their hands, that’s not how learning takes place.
Learning is chaotic, it doesn’t come in lines, it doesn’t come in static situations, it doesn’t come by mindless and boring repetition.
When it’s orderly, it may look good to the parent or to the coach and they say, “Hey, everybody’s in line and orderly,” but learning in no place in the world in it’s natural form, is it orderly. It’s chaotic, it’s nonlinear, it has peaks and valleys, it has failures, it has success, but most of all it has the learner being the central component of that process.
We’ve taken that away for the kids by being organized, well disciplined coaches with everybody in the right section standing next to a cone, so the coach can say when to go or blow a whistle or when to shoot, that’s just not the way that learning takes place.
When we pretend that it does, we do a disservice to the kids in the classroom and we also do a disservice to the kids on the field. It’s not by ill will, it’s because we believe, because we see it orderly, that order is taking place. Order is the only thing that’s taking place, learning is not.
Skye:
Parents need to be okay with coming out to training and seeing a kid play all the time. When I’m coaching my son’s rec teams in the past, they’re playing the majority of the time. I want them to be doing that. I sensed sometimes the parents think, “She doesn’t know what she’s doing, she’s just letting them play all the time,” despite the fact they’re getting so many directions. There’s a sense, as a coach, of having a little bit of stress of what the expectations are of the parents that are watching or that are there and trying to provide that good environment. It sounds like what you’re saying is that:
Parents need to rethink what they’re willing to see and what they perceive as an acceptable training environment, a positive, engaging training environment for their child.
Todd:
Even in a simple restricted game position play like a rondo, we can accomplish a great deal. Now if I layer on top of that as a professional coach a position play game which puts somebody in the middle with external players, now we’re talking width and depth and decision making, internal passing, we’re talking one, two touch, three touch, how to pressure, reading the defense, everything that’s in the game takes place, but it takes place in an environment that is reduced at least in breadth but not in concept. I take a little bit of the chaos away, but I keep it in a controlled environment such that it can be processed by a six or seven year old.
Now, when I go to play, this is why I think even U.S. Soccer and the NSCAA is promoting this tremendously is, I don’t put a six year old in 11 vs.11 because in terms of his geocentric awareness, there’s twenty two players.
To be honest with you, it’s hard for professionals, we play with twenty two, but you’re really playing subsets of three and four at a time, triangles and diamonds throughout the field.
With young kids, if you go out to training and you see rondos being done in a dynamic way, if you see position play games where the kids are constantly making decisions, constantly engaged on and off the ball, not standing at a cone, but playing within those cones. Then you see small sided games for the younger kids where it might be two vs. one or three vs. two or dribbling across a line to score, or dribbling to two goals, then you’re probably seeing a coach who understands the wonderful world of learning and how to process those concepts from six to sixteen. If you’re going as a parent and watching your kid, if you’re bored silly and your kid’s bored silly, you should probably maybe rethink what club you selected, right?
Skye:
That’s what we’re trying to do here with SoccerParenting, is give parents this understanding of the process and what the best environment is for their children so that some of the power in the relationship that exists between clubs and parents, that power can be balanced a little bit more. As parents get more educated, I think that they can then make those proper choices and those good quality choices for their kids.
Todd:
Skye, I read your blogs as they come out, I’m part of your network, I appreciate being part of that network and I read your article about your son. There’s nobody that understands our children better than we do. The question is, are we willing to understand them? I have six children, they’re not all the same. one wanted to play soccer and is still playing soccer today professionally and one at fourteen decided he was going to go for a horse riding lesson and I always loved horses and so as long as we don’t pre-prescribe what our children’s future is going to be and don’t put those expectations that they have to earn scholarship at ten years old or be national champion.
Your article I think was brilliant. If your son is happy playing, making friends, and engaging…When he was born, did you think, “I can’t wait until he wins an under twelve trophy for me?” No. You thought, “I want him to be content, I want him to be engaged, I want him to be learned, I want him to be safe.” If that’s happening, win, lose, or draw, whether it’s at horses, or in ballet, or in art class, or on the football field, even on a losing team that can happen. I would say my advice to parents is, you know your children, the question is, are you willing to allow their future to develop in the way that it’s meant to be or are you trying to relive yours through them? Believe me, I’m a dad who played, so it’s very hard to bite your tongue and not speak when you feel you can solve everything for them. I think that we don’t have to solve it because our children are more than capable of doing it on their own and enjoying that process.
Skye:
Yeah, you’ve written a couple of articles with Soccer Parenting that have been just shared thousands of times and read thousands of times. The first one, Dear Parents: Silence is Golden I think it was-
Todd:
Silence is Golden, yeah.
Skye:
Silence is Golden, and the second one, Sideline Thieves. Both of those themes were sort of about giving the game to the kids which obviously we know is important. What about a child that is showing and demonstrating some real proficiency? If you had a parent of a thirteen year old come to you and say, “My child is really motivated, mentally there, very athletic, all of the good things are happening there, they just made the academy team or they’re in the top level ECNL team,” what would be your advice to that parent of a little bit older kid, thirteen, fourteen year old?
Todd:
Then I think you really have to, as a parent, and I think this applies to school as well as a club, you say, Is my child in the best learning environment? I would not equate learning environment with trophies won. They’re not equitable, right? Is my child in an environment where they’re continually learning to improve their baseline, and a coach can do that with wins or losses, sometimes a loss is the best time, sometimes a win is. Results can lie, results are not equated with your child’s development as much as we would like them to be. Even at the highest levels at Barcelona, they don’t take everybody from the under fourteen team because they won the league. They’re looking for individuals, as you mentioned, have a passion for the game, are willing to continue to learn, and are willing to challenge themselves in the next environment.
How do you do that now if you have a fourteen year old in Virginia or Seattle, Washington? You say, “Okay, have I selected the club where learning is the highest priority of my coach and the club, in it’s DNA?” You can figure that out. You can figure it out by watching training, if your kid’s coming back and you’re watching them improve within the environment enjoying it, then you know that there baseline is improving, that they’re going to have a better chance to play at the fifteen year old level, the sixteen year level.
The second thing is, I do think, and this is part of why I created TOVO Academy and it’s not the only opportunity for kids to do so, I do think it’s important to break out of your routine a bit and challenge yourself outside of that environment. I grew up in, by the time I was playing real competitive soccer at this age that you’re speaking about, I was in Simsbury, Connecticut.
Now Simsbury, Connecticut and Connecticut in the 1980s was actually a hotbed of soccer and University of Connecticut were National Champions, it was a great environment, I had a very good coach. I remember going to New Jersey, I remember taking a trip and challenging myself on another team, so I do think finding another coach, another perspective, another opportunity that isn’t familiar allows a kid to really determine, “Okay, am I just good in my pond or am I actually capable of going into a new environment, testing my skills and my ability to adapt my character, and come away as strong or stronger for having done so?” I think parents are smart enough to know without pushing a child, all you have to do is hit Google and you can find many opportunities to maybe give them something out of that routine. If you’re only within one coach or one club, you’re risking that that club has it a hundred percent correct.
I would say it with schools, right? A parent who depends just on school to educate their child I think is making a mistake. The school has a role in that education but learning is summer vacation, dinner with grandma, a trip to Washington D.C. with the school or with a friend or the mother or a cousin. I think the same thing – if we’re depending just on a coach to be responsible for the complete development of our child on the field or off the field, then maybe we’re limiting the resources available to us, especially today. What’s interesting, every kid that comes over to Barcelona, they know more about soccer than I think I do for sure. They know, they got YouTube, they got Google, they’re getting online, offline, they’re doing these things. Our kids are actually sometimes more social than the coaches to be honest with you, me included more than anybody.
Skye:
I can’t help but mention, you and I connected about a year ago and one of the things that happened early on in our friendship is that I had a young player who is a friend of mine go to TOVO and I wrote an article about it, I’ll put that in the show notes here for this conversation. I think that the experience that Nick had with you just opened up his mind to so many different ways of thinking. Up until then, all of his soccer education had been maybe a camp here or there, but had really just been within the same little pocket. We have a tendency to do that because our kids get so involved. It’s actually hard to find times, for my fifteen year old who’s playing, it’s hard for me to find a time for her where she’s not playing soccer (with her club) where she can go have a different (soccer) experience. It is definitely something that I had to seek out as a parent.
For parents listening, I think you said it, I’m saying it, go and seek out these extra opportunities for kids, whether it be something like an international trip or for us here in Richmond there’s the secondary training program that’s this indoor place that my daughter goes to Friday nights for free play now and then, she loves it. It’s just different. It’s different groups of people, different coaches.
Todd:
More of those programs are popping up, right? More of those programs, those free play programs. I know it’s hard to blend streets or neighborhoods as it maybe used to be, we know that, but it doesn’t preclude other opportunities.
You made a good point about, I think I was reading in your blog, and you’re constantly talking about the role about parents and particularly when you get into matches and training and so forth, I think on several occasions you and your colleagues through SoccerParenting have raised, even parents have raised, and some of the comments that we want to micromanage, I know, because I’m a parent as well.
We want to prevent them from any mistakes that they’re going to make and we want them to get the ball in the goal instead of wide at the goal, and we really believe that if we scream right before they do that, the reality is, that that’s for us. That’s not for the child.
If we’re going to be true to the child’s learning process, the intelligence has to be on the field and not on the sidelines, right?
Actually, particularly as you’re getting to older ages, that more pressured environment, the screaming of what to do with the ball is actually counterproductive, right? That’s what I brought up when we come back to Silence is Golden or Sideline Thieves. We believe, because our intentions are good, but everything tells us otherwise. In reality, the cognitive process happens so quickly, in milliseconds, and the dynamics are changing so quickly that there is literally no time for an instruction to come externally into our cognitive executive functions, come through our nervous system into our muscles and execute. There’s literally not enough time for that to happen. Our screaming, not only is it useless, it’s counterproductive because it freezes our children thinking that they’re waiting for instructions. Most kids I think, by the time they get thirteen or fourteen, have learned to drown out the coaches and the players because they know that, how can somebody play in a hundred thousand seat stadium like we have here in Barcelona and not pay attention?
If you talk to the players the processes are so quick. The way to help a child is to actually let them nurture that process quicker, faster, and with the liberty to do so at younger ages and just sit back in our lawn chairs and afterwards say, “Hey, fantastic, good try, and wonderful.”
Skye:
Why is that so hard for parents to do? I mean, me included. I’ve finally had to just say, “I’m not saying a word.” Like I would just say, “I’ll just say positive things,” forget it. I just would cross the line too often. For me, with Cali, I’m not saying another word the entire time that she plays and that was my strategy. Why do you think that’s so hard for parents?
Todd:
Listen, I’m the first, I’ve written about this, I was the first player coming out of system and then playing professional in United States or being coach, I was the first and worst example of that. Not as a parent, by the time I was a parent, I started late, I actually learned my lesson, but I learned as a coach, right? I thought if I instructed my midfield all the time and the winger and I was all over the play and the ref made a bad call, I don’t know, I was a mess. You ask somebody back in the 80s, I was like, “Man, that guy is chaotic.” It wasn’t because I was an ill will person, I just had that control, I thought that I was helping.
I actually had to test myself so I did what you did. The only way I could shut up was I bought fruit and I said to my assistant coach, this is no joke, this is a real story, this is how bad I got. I bought fruit and I said to my assistant coach, “Even if I get up, throw an apple at me.” I was healthier, one, I ate more fruit than I ever had my entire life, and two, I shut up. You know what? My players, not only were they not worse off for it, but they were better for it because they were capable of executing on their own, develop their own intentions, and an execution of that. They were capable of actually dynamically communicating between them in a way that I was also robbing from the sideline.
Believe me, in my twenties, I was the worst example and I had to go through an arduous process. As I said, I had my kids late, in late thirties and in my forties, so by the time they came around, all the parents sit together, I know them, I say hello at the beginning of the game, and I just go sit on the sides.
And I do one other trick as a parent now, I think of the field as all my children, right? I literally do. It’s a trick I have for myself because I have this control management type of personality, right? I literally think, if I look down the field, and we play seven vs. seven for my under nine boy for example. I think he’s a nine year old boy, if I look at the field as all my children, what do I want? I want a positive, happy, engaging, dynamic, oohs and aahs of goals scored, goals missed, and I want them to shake hands and I want everybody to be healthy afterwards.
A successful day is not winning or losing.
I’ve redefined success, literally I sit aside, I don’t have to have so much fruit anymore, and I shut up and I say, is that happening? If that’s happening, the score is irrelevant, right? Sometimes, we have to be honest, the other team plays beautiful football. I’ll even make a note and say, there’s times when the coach comes off to the other team I had never met and I’d say, “I just wanted to let you know how exciting it was, your boys played brilliantly,” or in defeat, “your players were wonderful and dignified.” They just happen to be on another team because they might live in another part of town
It’s an artificial constraint that we put on ourselves as parents. Of course want our child to be successful, but don’t we want that for all fourteen boys on the field or fourteen girls or twenty two? Of course we do, and when we step back from that, I think we’re capable of recognizing that as a beautiful day in Spain, everybody’s playing. I’m sure it’s the same in Virginia or North Carolina or Seattle, Seattle might be a little rainier. Take out the umbrella, have some fruit is the first step, and let the kids play.
Ironically, if you let them play, they are going to progress further than if you rob them of that opportunity.
Skye:
That’s great and it’s just yet again a good reminder and hopefully parents will take this information and try to apply it. We could keep going for probably another hour, I always enjoy talking to you, but we do need to wrap it up. How can people find you? Well, you have this TOVO Academy behind you, but what’s the best way for people to reach out to you if they’re interested in their child attending one of your programs, of getting some more coaching education, or seeing what you’re doing in the United States?
Todd:
I think the best thing is, first step, just go to TOVOAcademy.com, first easiest step is right on that home page you can sign up for a newsletter because obviously this will resonate with some parents and some cultures but others not. I don’t pretend to reinvent the wheel here. It’s just a very clear methodology that I think will be a proponent of better talent development, right? It doesn’t mean it’s correct, but it is resonating with people who have experience and who want to. The first step is just go to TOVOACAdemy.com and just sign up for the newsletter. You’re going, through a blog or two or by reading through the pages, understand that this is for you or of any interest to you. If you read those blogs and it resonates with you as a parent or as a coach or even as a player, then you can look at the programs, right? We have six programs available, whether they’re Barcelona camps or training camps in Seattle or Club Alliance programs if you happen to be involved in a club or a board member. If you’re a coach, you can take a coaching course.
We’re kind of building, I say kind of coalition of those people who believe that we can rethink and redesign the way we train. For those that don’t believe in it, no worries. If you start at TOVO Academy and read a little bit about what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, then just if you have questions, like I’m doing with you, we’re having a nice kind of global conversation about what’s best for our children.
Parents, as you know, because you started your Institute for this, parents are the most important people in this process.
I appreciate the efforts you’re putting in because you are actually taking this head on, and then coaches, and then the rest of the people and this will come into their lives. I want to thank you for giving me the chance to promote what we’re doing but also really more importantly, engaging the conversation with your parents. I hope that we can keep that conversation going because I think there’s some changes we can make for the better.
Skye:
For sure, it definitely feels like there’s a lot of energy moving in the right direction. The change that we’re all seeking is slowly starting to happen. I appreciate your being a part of this conversation and all the things that you’re doing through your training program – so thanks for joining us today.
Todd:
Yeah, we’ll see you in Virginia maybe soon?
Skye:
Sounds good.
