 Hey, coaches, what's up? Welcome back to the YouTube channel. Now in today's podcast, we have coach Maria. Maria is in Canada. She started a soccer academy in Canada a number of years ago. She talks about her journey of starting. She talks about the different type of value that she adds in her program and why she's different than other trainers. She has an awesome story. Pay close attention to this interview. I think it's going to really help you. Right next to me here, you'll see our username on Instagram. Make sure connect with me there. If you are a coach, you want to grow your business, get connected with me there. I'd love to connect with you personally. I can't wait for you to watch this interview. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. We have a ton of interviews that Leo has done already and there's a bunch that are coming out in the future. I'm excited for you to watch these. I hope these add a lot of value to you and your business. Sit back and enjoy this interview. Yeah, so my coaching journey started in 2012. I was a player just leaving university and wanted to coach on the side. I always had a passion for it, but I kind of decided I was working full time and wanted to give back. So I took kind of a volunteer role, which turned into a paid position once I got my licensing. And then I coached that for about two years, two and a half years, and then I decided to make it full time. I left my job, my full-time job with Nike, which was a pretty big move, and decided to become a full-time coach. And in order to get the highest qualifications and to be immersed in the culture, I actually moved to England. So I'm an Italian citizen. I lived there when I was a kid and I had some contacts there for working. I had a place to stay. So it only made sense to start from the FA level one and stay there as long as possible in order to fully immerse myself and decide when I was ready to come back to Canada. So that took me in 20, just at the end of 2014 to England. I was traveling anywhere from the North, so Liverpool, Manchester all the way down south to Southampton. I was staying in Peterborough doing most of my courses through the London FA, but just traveling everywhere. Anyone who I met through LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera, I'd message them and go watch their sessions. So what I thought would be six months ended up turning into a year. And I was just fortunate enough to get on to some pretty big courses and meet some amazing people. So when I came back to Canada, I decided to fully invest in coaching me full-time. And I got my first full-time role right away. Coming back, I was on the plane accepting a job, which was pretty cool. And then since 2015, end of 2015 being back, I've been full-time ever since. Never needed to pick up another job and soccer has kind of paid the bills. And just a passion to wake up every day and do coaching, private training, events, et cetera, that myself and now my company that I've started run. Perfect. I love that. So how did you find coaching or watching sessions in England with coaching in Canada? Yeah, much different. I think the Canadian system is getting up there now. More of the courses are structured like a UEFA or an FA course, but we still have a ways off. So a lot of coaches here in North America will go and do their licensing in Europe or South America. I also took my USSF licensing as well. So I find the USSF license and the UEFA and FA courses are pretty similar. So Canada is just not there yet, but we'll get there eventually with the success of our programs and obviously coaches coming up in the system. But yeah, I felt going to England was probably the best experience ever because it's the hardest place to be a coach and be a successful manager. And the coaching courses are just so structured. And I knew structure was important. And to be with some of the best coaches, I mean, some of the coaches on some of those courses are so my good friends, they're working in, you know, category one academies now, et cetera, coaching women's and men's teams. So I knew I wanted that standard that, you know, Canada couldn't provide at the time. And that's why I went over there. So yeah, it was definitely one of the best experiences of my life. That's awesome. That's awesome. So tell us a bit about your business then. So what does your company specializing? Yeah, so I started coaching Maria Soccer full time after I decided to leave kind of the youth club system. I'm still involved with youth clubs more as a contract role. But I just saw a gap in when I played as a kid to now. Obviously, we know kids are not outside all day after school or at the park on on the weekend. They're locked up inside and they're cooped up inside. So something I did as a kid was, you know, I'd go downstairs, touch the ball, play, you know, outside, even if it wasn't soccer, I'd be playing hockey, basketball, et cetera. I was being active. And I saw a gap in that from when I came back to kids not even being able to do five keep ups at you know, age eight or whatever. So I saw a gap and I said, How can I change this? And I basically took everything I did as a kid in my basement or in my backyard and just put it into a private training program. So I launched that in 2018. I just kind of it was just word of mouth. I had about 20 kids. Now we're over 150 kids throughout, you know, five or six locations and it just it just keeps growing. But I just kind of took what I did as a kid and put it into today's today's world. And you know, people pay for it. But it's the reality because kids aren't going to do the touches that they need to to get to the standard. I always hear, Hey, I want to be a professional player. I want to division one scholarship, et cetera. But I know they're not doing the work outside. So that's where kind of I found that niche is to come in there and be that that role model and that person to kind of fill that gap because extra training, private training, et cetera is needed. So that's kind of where I started. And now it's kind of launched into running my own events. So we bring coaches in from all over the world to work with the kids here in Canada. Coaches, you know, come over and watch the kids for scholarships, but it's kind of evolving. This platform is always evolving and kind of taking everything I learned as a youth player in all my role models and kind of putting it into one centralized platform. So if a player sides up with us and wants to be a professional football player or they want to be get a scholarship, we can help them and give them the tools needed. Perfect, perfect. Well, first of all, congratulations for the growth of your company. And really, really happy and excited for you. And so tell me a bit then. So you've been in coaching for a while now. So what, what for you? It does a perfect coaching session look like? Yeah, I mean, everybody at first, when I started a lot of parents, you know, are like, well, my kid's not coming off the field sweating or, you know, why didn't you make my kid run, run laps? So I think what we try to do differently is we take a player. Usually our players are 13 plus. So we try to do specialized training in certain positions because at 13, most players start to specialize in their position. So a center midfield, we try to do sessions based around center midfields. We do a lot of striking clinics. So in there, we'll see a lot of forwards come in or wingers or even attacking center midfield players and goalies. So that way we can shoot on them. So we try to do specialized training. For our younger, we just do like the ABCs, like a build agility balance coordination with technical training that they're not getting at their team. Because at team practices, you know, I coach in youth academies still. So do my friends or I'll go watch a session and they're not doing ball mastery or they're not, you know, doing stuff like, you know, thousands of touches on the ball. So we kind of come in and really focus and hone in on those skills compared to team skills, because all these players who come to us play at clubs all across Toronto. So a lot of them just need that extra individual stuff that yes, they should be doing in their backyard. But we all know they're probably not. There are some that do, but the majority aren't outside touching the ball as much as they would like. And obviously, the weather doesn't help here to be in all the snow all the time in the freezing cold. It's actually nice now, but most of the time we're cooped up inside. Yeah, awesome. So so let me take you back to it when you first launched your your business. How did you get your first client? And how many currently? Well, you did mention your your training about 100 plus. But tell us a bit about how how you got your first client then? How did that come about? Yeah, so it's just some players that I had worked with before I left for England. Some players that I kept in contact with from England, some parents and I just said, Hey, you know, I've left the youth club system. You know, I was working for an MLS club at the time and I just decided to leave it to focus on my business. And I said, If your child ever needs extra training, you know, I'm free. So I started sessions in a park, kind of just not paying for a field and just kind of showing up at a you know, school pitch that's pretty uneven and just doing some training to evolving from there, you know, that player liked it and then told a friend and then, you know, 10 or 15 friends later, I needed a bigger space and then, you know, finding finding some some time indoor time and some some time where I knew was mine was was difficult at first. But that's kind of how I got my first client is just kind of the relationships I built before I became a professional coach and just keeping those good relationships when I came back to further develop those players that I started with when they were younger and then I came back three, four years later and now they're in high school and they need extra specially specialized training. Love that. Love that. So what do you look for when you when you bring on a new client into your into your program? Yeah, so we go through just a basic assessment, something I just created. So we ask a player to come in and we try to do a one on one session with them. Sometimes it is difficult to manage to get a player one on one. But we try to bring them into a training and just kind of go through different categories for our players that we start with age six age six to 12 will work on the basics shooting, passing dribbling, coordination, balance, etc. And we'll just kind of tick off where they are and give them a progress support and be as upfront as possible with the parent. And again, you six to you 12 player again, they're not looking like they're a messy at this point. So we really try to work with them on a plan away from our training because they're seen as one, one, two times a week compared to how much time they have away at home, etc. And then anyone 13 plus for us, we put them in a session with our players that we currently have in our program. We now have full time players with us, we have part time players with us. So we'll throw them in a session and just kind of evaluate their level based on those players we have. So it's just kind of just giving them an overall, overall assessment and then obviously speaking openly with the parents. So we'll set up a 30 minute call after the session on zoom or over the phone or in person and just kind of tick off the points where, hey, hopefully you liked it, hopefully you come back, not everybody does, it's just the reality of it. But these are the things, in my opinion, a player needs needs to work on. Sometimes the harsh reality is if you're really upfront with a player and they don't really like the feedback, it's fine. But you know, obviously there's certain people doing this in Canada that really know what it's like to get a player to the next level. So I think I'm pretty honest with the players as to where they are and where I think I can get them. That's awesome. So something we work with coaches in our program is adding value away from the field. So what's a couple of things that your company does in order to provide value for the families you work with away from training? Yeah. So I think, you know, obviously with COVID, when the world shut down, we had a tournament planned. It was going to be our first one where we selected 18 female players and our business is mainly females. We do have males in our program, but it's mainly female players and we selected 18 players at a really, really high standard. This was probably one of the best classes of players I worked with. They're all at school and university or playing professionally now, but we had selected them to take them on like a first kind of tour of America, something I did when I was a kid, to get in front of coaches and it was planned for April 2020. So obviously no one knew, no one knew COVID would be this long. I thought it was going to be two weeks. So, you know, it was trying to, we hand selected these players, we charged them a minimum fee and said, hey, we're going to get on a bus, we're going to go and see all these schools get you in front of coaches, etc. And then it obviously didn't happen and when it didn't happen, I was gutted, they were gutted, but I just said how can I give more value to players and kind of expand my network? My Instagram kind of took off, it went from a couple thousand followers, I think we're at 16,000 now, and it was just building a network and offering it for free. So we offered free training two, three days a week and then we offered free one, it was either two days a week, Tuesday and Sundays, we interviewed coaches, professional players, whoever we could get ahold of on Instagram or on Zoom and we ran these these sessions. So now that COVID's over, we're still continuing to offer that for our players. So we're bringing in coaches and talks, we brought coaches from England over to see our players. We travel a lot now that the borders have opened to the United States because we're so close and it's just offering these extra things that maybe a club can provide or a club does provide, but it's so rare that we offer it all the time. I mean since the borders have opened in December, we've been in the States twice, going back another two times, and then a trip to England planned in July. So that's kind of the extra value with us is hey we can help players get to that next level, if the club is okay with it and some clubs are, some clubs aren't, but if your club's okay with it, then these are the opportunities for you. We also have a WhatsApp group chat, which I think started with a couple players on there because all the girls in high school were like oh I don't have WhatsApp, now over 200 players in this chat and we send out extra content, extra sessions, and these trips that we do plan for these players. That's awesome, fantastic. So apart from COVID, which was obviously an obstacle for yourself and for many trainers, coaches who have businesses, so tell us about your biggest obstacle when you started. Yeah, so like I mentioned here in Canada, indoor facilities are a must in order to keep going throughout the winter, I mean you're probably inside, if you're brave enough you'll stay outside till middle of November and then it'll get really cold. So from November to I would say around and a March early April, you have to be inside. So to find indoor spaces is very tough, I mean you're not getting a 3G 11v11 pitch to run your sessions. I mean most of the players who probably will listen to this because I always send players a podcast and stuff to listen to. We'll laugh at some of the spaces that we've provided for them, you know little 10 by 10 rooms, you know even sometimes smaller or in people's backyards or in basements, garages, wherever we could get time through the winter we would train. So finding indoor time was probably the biggest challenge. We have a great relationship with a couple indoor facilities now, but just finding time to train and get prime hours because you know we were getting 10 to 11 p.m. and we had some kids that you know obviously are in bed at that time and usually I am too but it was just the times we could get or we're training at seven in the morning just to fill those time slots and it was a big shout out to the parents getting up and and staying late to drive the players there and now we're kind of on a consistent basis where we train Friday, Saturday, Sunday and then usually one day during the week and we have those good hours where people are sacrificing sleep or you know waking up early you know and kind of sacrificing their their home life because everybody needs a balance. So that's kind of been the biggest challenge is indoor facilities and any coach here in Canada or working in a city where you do have a pretty long winter we'll struggle with. So do you guys have your own facility now or is that something you're working towards? That's the plan hopefully it was it's obviously February and March of 2020 I'd taken a trip to England January 2020 and just felt kind of re-inspired and I went and met all my friends that I had done my courses with and kind of asked for that for my 30th birthday gift and came back in February March and said I need my own space and started to look had a couple offers on some places and then obviously pulled out of those offers because you know COVID happened and stuff so that's the plan is to get my own facility that's the dream I'm working with a lot of parents that kind of want to invest in it as well because not only is it a good investment for their their child but it's a good investment overall for parents or investors across Toronto and and kind of the greater Toronto area because people need time and people need rentals and there's people like me starting off with private training where I hope I could provide a facility for them one day like so many other people provided for me so that's the plan that's kind of next in the works for my company and kind of the next step is finding a space. Perfect, perfect. So where do you see private training going in Canada in the next two to five years then? Yeah I think we're going to get a lot more kids playing playing playing soccer and starting off at a young age I mean my two little god sons they're six and eight they're big basketball players because the raptors were so good and now they're like hey Team Canada you know Fonzo Davies Jonathan David etc so now they're starting to take a big interest in it and I think a lot of kids now with Canada qualifying on the men's side for the World Cup and then the female team winning the Olympics I think it's spiking registrations in soccer I know soccer here in Canada took a massive hit during COVID which I'm sure happened all over the the world but especially here in Canada it took a huge hit but I think those teams winning have inspired the younger and younger youth players coming up so I think players are messaging me or other trainers to say hey my son or daughter wants to get into soccer they've never played before do you provide extra training for beginners and somewhere where we didn't kind of do before where we weren't working with beginners we only work with kids who are playing within academies is something now we've opened up and it's great because a lot of the players who trained with me since 2015 2016 who are still in my program are now coaching for me which is great for them to go with me and kind of see the way I run things to now taking over and running a business and having their own clients under them which is which is massive so I think it's only getting bigger here more people are doing it more people are seeking private training which is great and more people are now signing up instead of one or two sessions through the year they're coming once a week or whatever they can commit to I think is is pretty pretty cool awesome awesome so what would you say to another Canadian coach or trainer that's watching this this interview and wants to start a business like yourself but hasn't yet done it what's the what's the one piece of advice you would give them or her yeah I think make sure you're fine with the off times to work most kids play here for Monday through Thursday and then once on the weekend so you give up a lot of time you give up your night you give up your weekend so that's the first step is is the change in a schedule for a coach in order to adjust for you know private training and being able to provide a good service away from their team training so that's number one I think a second one is make sure you have clients that can sustain it and find a good price point that's going to going to work for you and and obviously covering costs insurance shirts etc but I love taking on coaches some coaches come to me and I know they're starting their own business and I'm fine sharing my resources and helping out and if I can provide for players which I can accommodate all these players we always get I hope one day if they do start their business I can pass them off to another coach or trainer that I really see value in their session but I also think too there's a big change from being a player to a coach and some people struggle with that you can't be a player and then coach as well you have to be able to separate the two which is kind of the main advice I have for coaches that come in with our program or advice I always try to give as much as possible is you know you have to hang up your boots and you know put on your your runners and be a coach and really focus on those certain aspects of it because there's so much more to coaching than maybe a player sees and from me as a player to now being a coach I'm like wow what my coach had to go through I kind of understand that journey now as as a coach so I hope players who want to get into this especially at a high level like like myself and so many others just kind of realize those differences awesome awesome so tell us a bit about your your current sales and marketing process how do you guys sell and market your business yeah so we do a lot of emails through MailChimp I think we're over 3000 people on those those emails we try to send them out weekly or monthly depending on what we have going on so we send out what's planned for the season so we send out four big ones through the season so what our winter looks like our spring or summer and our fall programs will look like we've created different WhatsApp groups and then the majority of our sales and kind of marketing is through Instagram so we have four or five different platforms on there we have one around recruiting so if you want advice on recruiting or how to be recruited we have a platform on that we have a platform for our company our side company called Project 3 which is elite female and male players who travel with us to the United States and then we just kind of have the main one mine Coach Maria Soccer and we just kind of put out their weekly sessions or we do a lot of pop-up clinics now that the weather has gotten so good this year and COVID is kind of over we weren't planning anything in April and now we can be outside again fields have opened up and the mandates are kind of gone so we've offered a lot of like pop-up clinics so a lot of our players follow us on social media and then we send out emails when we can so those are the majority of our too and it's just trying to lock down a player and say hey give me your email or give me your phone number I'll add you to this group and then just kind of sending out sessions weekly or daily for them or just any kind of content and then them seeing it and then coming back to your sessions is important awesome so talk to us a bit about how you onboard players so if I'm a parent and I want to join your program what's the steps you guys take do you do you have evaluation sessions how does that work yeah we have evaluation sessions we get a lot of players and it differs we get a lot of players who who need help with recruiting is our main one so that's kind of the main business we do a lot of coaching at night but during the day we help a lot of players be recruited so a parent will call me and say my daughter or my son wants to play soccer in the United States or play soccer here in Canada or go abroad I know you specialize in that I heard from a friend of a friend or I saw your Instagram and so we'll help them a lot with that side is the recruiting and kind of our platform and how we kind of do things and then in regards to private training like I said we have evaluations for players we'll send them the evaluation before just kind of jot down some points and then after the session sometimes it's not right after because usually as a coach we're back to back to back we'll set up away from the session a 30 minute call within that next week to kind of go over okay you know Johnny you did well in shooting but you know your left foot's weaker than your right this is what I would suggest to do away from training and if you come with us we're really going to specialize on that left foot etc we'll just kind of work through us a plan for them and we try to get through to the player depending on the age because parents are really involved which is great but at the end of the day the player needs to kind of hear that feedback as well and kind of get their thoughts because they were on the field during that session instead of the mom or dad or guardian or you know friend kind of watching to the side we really try to focus on the player and making sure their needs are met and then any feedback they have for us they'll give it most of them don't really say much on that call they'll say yeah it was good no I really enjoyed it but we'll try to get some answers out of them and really inspire them to keep coming back and keep working hard in order to get to what goal they have if it's scoring a goal with their weaker foot or they want to be a professional player we kind of take every kid individually and work with them within what they want out of soccer perfect so the question a lot of coaches ask us when with their business is should I should I charge for eval sessions evaluation sessions so do you guys charge or is that free how does that work yeah it's free the first one is free so we we give them a session and it's just kind of some points throughout so those are just like five main main categories and then there's three or four sub points depending on their age that we kind of just check off and again we're not giving them fours or or fives all the time and those are our highest fours because not every player is going to be a five and rarely do we give out a five because I think everybody not only in soccer but in life needs to work on certain things so we don't charge for them the only time we do charge if we go and evaluate a player for a scholarship so if they need help with recruiting and they say hey I'm playing on a Tuesday night at 9 p.m. at this field can you come and watch me play and then give me some points we charge for that but in regards to private training and taking on a new client we give that session for free that evaluation for free to to a parent and a player in the 30 minute call and again like I said we have a good turnaround rate of getting players on board but I've spent maybe even longer than 30 minutes speaking to some parents and kind of giving them some feedback and they've never returned which is which is fine but I know our success ratio on turning around players is pretty high that I know I can afford to take those players on that I already know probably won't join or just based off the tone of the parent or a player they might not come on board but again I was given so much free advice back in me coming up as a youth player that I'm fine doing that because at the end of the day if I see them on TV and I know even if I spoke to them for a couple hours or met them for a couple hours on their journey I feel a little bit of a tap on the shoulder saying I'm glad I had maybe even a small impact on this player's journey yeah love that perfect so last question for you then where do you see Coach Maria Sokka in the next five years from now then yeah hopefully still doing the same thing having a own facility this year we've taken on teams as full time so again we've started private training we were training players who played for so many different clubs and then it was an approach from some parents to say why don't you do this full time and it was just kind of worked out for this year had a lot of time to plan it and with some parents and really put together a structure so it's taking on players on more of a full time role to have an impact on them so it's doing that and then having you know an own facility and then just keep going from there as many players as we can get scholarships for or help them get professional contracts etc some players decide hey it's not for me and we have a lot of players in high school kind of contemplating staying in but we'll give them a job in social media or refereeing or being a part of the game and in some capacity so I just want to see as many of our players stay in soccer as possible and whatever that allows us to do and help them out with we'll help them out and we've helped players you know become admins at clubs or full time referees which is fine as long as they're staying in this sport because I mean I can't believe still sometimes I wake up and you know I tell people all the time I wake up and my full time job is soccer and people always ask me oh you get paid for that oh you're not volunteering but you know to be as successful and you know to come back from England I always say this I had no money I was living in a hostel so now owning my own car and my own home I think is important for for people to understand where it could take you if you do it the right way perfect love that perfect all right Maria well thank you thank you so much for your time thank you for sharing your your journey your story with us if there's any coach that is inspired and there will be by by your story by your business your journey how and what is the best way to get in contact with you or follow your your company yeah so the best way is through Instagram it's at coach Maria soccer we post twice a day daily content players that we train sessions that we run motivational quotes upcoming events that we have my number also is on my my social media platform that you know you could get in touch with me no problem but that's probably the best platform to reach out for me I'm pretty good at answering my my dm some days there's you know crazy amounts in there but I try to sift through them as much as possible and I have a good team to help me sift through those those dms as well so yeah just shoot me a message again I don't mind during the day talking anything software so yeah that's the best way to kind of get a hold of me perfect and what we'll do is we'll add that to to the bottom of the video so people can can check check those links out awesome yeah thank you so much for having me and good luck to all the coaches out there perfect all right we'll take care and good luck with everything and hope to to connect with you again in the near future awesome thank you