FTBL Academy is a youth soccer training club in East Pasadena, started in 2020 by Coach Rafa with one idea: that a child gets better in training, over years, and that somebody should be paying attention to that child by name.
Three groups are named, and all three are served. The player gets an education in the game. The parent gets the truth about what development looks like, said plainly and repeated. The coach gets a method to carry and an education of their own.
Rafael spent a year studying what was wrong with youth soccer before he opened anything. What he found was a game organized around the thing a family can see: the team, the schedule, the Saturday result. The individual child, and the years it takes to form one, were nobody’s job.
FTBL opened in January 2020. By February everything was shut. By June he was running a small group at a park for free. The first paying families came in November, and it grew from there, slowly, one family telling another.
The teams came later, and the first season was hard: FTBL didn’t win much, and half the players left for somewhere that did. The ones who stayed became the base of everything since. They got better. Some of the families who left came back. And the line every FTBL player learns came out of those years: training is where you get better; games are where you show what you can do.
Some families call it the third way. Not instead of the Saturday team or the club, but the training that was missing from both.
The method is Coach Rafa’s own philosophy of youth development, formed by playing, studying and loving the game. It hasn’t changed much since 2020. What has changed is that it’s now written down, so every coach runs it the same way.
The same things in the same order. What rises is the demand.
Written before anyone arrives, the same whoever coaches, a decision in every minute.
A written plan with their name on it. The team is drawn from the training group, never the other way around.
The base is repeated on purpose. A player is never finished.
Every coach has completed the FTBL coach course. No volunteers, no parents filling in. Coaching in English and Spanish.
Eight things every FTBL coach is measured on. Most academies don’t publish the standard their coaches are held to. We think a parent who can read it can hold us to it, which is the point.
Walks on knowing what will go wrong tonight and what they’re watching for.
The question is the default. Comfortable letting a player be wrong for another two reps.
A player given three corrections has received none.
Every player gets something individual, by name, every session.
Feedback a child can act on in the next rep, and a parent could repeat at home.
Kind and demanding at the same time. The bar doesn’t move because a child is tired.
What the player is working on and what comes next. Never a promised outcome.
Takes a correction the way we ask players to.
The Lab
3100 E Del Mar Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91107
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Families come from Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, Arcadia, Alhambra, Monterey Park, Temple City, Rosemead, South Pasadena, Sierra Madre and across the San Gabriel Valley.
