Real Salt Lake launch landmark MLS residential academy, break open U.S. market

MLS 2009 Champion Real Salt Lake has launched the first-ever residential MLS academy in Arizona, suddenly changing the landscape of soccer development in the United States and challenging assumptions about regionally restricted developmental territories and possibly even transfer fees for developed U.S. youth players. Expansion team Vancouver will enter MLS with an established residential academy in 2011 and Chicago Fire, New York Red Bulls, and FC Dallas each have one in planning, but Real Salt Lake quietly accomplished the feat, now underway. This fall, RSL’s two residential teams will compete in the U.S. Academy Development League.

On August 1, 20 U-16 and U-18 players from Utah, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and New York arrived to reside at the well-appointed Grande Sports World Complex in Arizona in a program comparable to European club academies. They began school on August 9 at two local high schools and in 2011, RSL is planning to educate the players at an international prep school to be located on the Grande Sports site.

Prior to RSL’s landmark academy, IMG has run a residential program in Bradenton, Florida, which supports the U-17 U.S. National Team, but until this summer NCAA regulations restricted young athletes from most interactions with the professional game. With those recent changes allowing young players to compete and train with professionals without losing amateur status, MLS clubs are able to more closely develop U.S. players according to worldwide standards while still preparing them for the college.

Grande Sports World, originally developed 50 years ago as a spring training site for the San Francisco Giants and a resort on 700 acres, is now a public-private partnership between the city of Casa Grande and owners Mr. Ron Burks and Ms. Michael Saunders. The city purchased 40 acres from the current owners and the owners re-invested those funds in the new $20 million facilities. The complex still features the historic resort and golf course, but also hosts preseason training for four MLS teams as well as year-round sporting events and tournaments. The complex has eight full-sized fields of Bermuda grass with six lighted, an outdoor technical area, state-of-the-art indoor athletic facilities, and four locker rooms. Real Salt Lake, in partnership with Grande Sports World, plans to increase the residency program to both a lower age group and an older one to bridge the U-18’s and the professional team and ultimately host 80 residential players altogether.

The ground-breaking Real Salt Lake academy is under the direction of Greg Vanney, former defender for the U.S. Men’s National Team (36 caps), LA Galaxy, DC United, Bastia of France’s first division, FC Dallas, Colorado Rapids and since January 2010, director of soccer operations for Real Salt Lake’s residential academy. On August 20, I spoke with Vanney at length about the residential academy and the changing landscape of youth soccer development in the U.S.

LE: How much of a landmark is this residential academy?

Vanney: It’s creating a new landscape. The people at US Soccer have very close eyes on what we’re doing, how we’re doing things. We have a little bit of a blank slate. We’re going to be measured by – “can we develop players?” That’s really where soccer needs to go in this country because we’re so oversold that winning is the most important thing and it hurts us as a country when it comes to developing players. RSL were willing to lose games last year to reach their ultimate goal which is develop their team and play the best soccer they could play at the right time. We sacrifice that at the youth level way too much. Here, we’re measured by how much our players progress during the course of the year because that’s what Real Salt lake wants to see. Whether we win the Academy League or not means very little to them. If we put five players into their program then we’re successful. This potentially has a huge impact on where things can go.

LE: What parts of their philosophy do Real Salt Lake most want to carry through to their residential academy?

Vanney: Character. Hard workers. They’re a very well-bonded team, the relationships between the coaches and players – a lot of respect there. Quality of player is important, but character, guys who are hungry and seeking to go forth - character, that’s a big part of it. Obviously a good player is a good player, but if they don’t have character then they may not fit in. Each of them has an individual plan as well as a collective team plan, so they can be successful when they go on the field. We look at it as our responsibility to develop them individually to where they can fit in at the next level.

LE: Over the past two years Real Salt Lake have developed, arguably, the most stylish soccer in MLS. How have they achieved this?

Vanney: They’re very committed to passing soccer, committed that every player has a responsibility both defending and a responsibility in attack. You see a lot of MLS clubs who have guys who run very fast in one direction and that one direction is forward in attack, and they run very slow when they actually have to get back and defend. You never see that with RSL guys. All of the players do that on the defensive side of the ball, they all work to get back into their positions and that helps them defend organized. They have a great keeper [Nick Rimando] as well, who’s been very hot.

On the attacking side they look to play very quick, to play short passes, they’re not very direct. They have a diamond in midfield, they don’t provide a lot of width necessarily in the final third, they get width from their outside backs, but they keep players relatively close together so they can connect on a little bit shorter passes. You very rarely see them just dumping balls into the other half and playing long balls into space, they really look to connect off each other. They have some individually very talented guys who can do some special things - this year Javier Morales has been fantastic, outstanding - but they don’t rely on a couple guys like some teams rely on a couple guys to make a big play. They really are a team, a group of guys who each contribute. That’s what’s different – no matter what happens, they stick to that.

LE: How did this residential academy come about?

Vanney: I came on board here as the director of soccer operations in January. I’m very good friends and former teammates with all of the coaching staff at Real Salt Lake and know General Manager Garth Lagerway very well. Arizona is a developmental territory under MLS rules for Real Salt Lake. They won the SUM Cup a couple years back, the U-17 MLS Championships, and went to Madrid and competed there and did well, so there’s some precedent for RSL academy being here. I met with the owner here and gave him my vision for this facility and he said, I love it, come on board, you’re going to build soccer for us. I had been talking with guys at RSL and I flew up with them and we put a proposal together to move forward with the development academy. At the end of February, we had our application in to US Soccer and they came out, did a site preview and were amazed with the facility, which passed with flying colors. All of our staff are former MLS players, two of us have played internationally, all of us have played for US Youth National Team programs at some point, we all have A licenses and they all knew us. They came out and watched us run sessions, they met with us and we gave our philosophies to them and they gave us a passing grade. The next thing we had to prove to them was that we had a player pool because we were building a club with really no players.

Through January and February, I created partnership clubs in Arizona, so we have six partner clubs in Arizona. I sat down and met with them and said we’re looking to bring in the RSL Arizona academy and we want your clubs to be our developmental arm. We’re not going to come in and take away your U-10s, your U-8s, your U-11s, we’re not going to strip the base of your club. We want to provide support to you – curriculum, coaching development, any expertise we can provide to help you develop your players.

LE: Similar to what the Rapids do?

Vanney: Exactly. So they were on board and as a part of that they said, what players do you want from our club? What U-16s and U-18s do you want to help build your teams? So US Soccer came out and wanted to see what the Arizona player pool looked like, so we brought in the players that we had been scouting and did a session in March and May and proved that we were meeting our time lines and objectives to get started for 2010-2011. So in May, Memorial weekend at the showcase we were awarded the Development Academy. In our vision, we didn’t think we were going to start the residency program for another year, but what ended up happening was once the announcement came out, obviously the soccer world knew of the facility, one of our coaching friends in New Mexico, which is an under-served state - they don’t have a development academy – said he had a very good U-16 team there and several players very interested in this program, a couple of which have been in the U-14 and U-15 national teams and they may be willing to move to a residency situation.

That started us thinking - can we create a residency plan here in the next couple months? We brought in those players from New Mexico – four or five of them from that club, we had a couple more kids from New Mexico from Albuquerque – they came down, tried out, we kept them. The gentlemen from New Mexico made contact with a club from El Paso who has a history of putting players into national team programs – they called us, wanted to bring down players, so we invited them in, they brought players to train and tryout, so we took a few of them. Then we had players from Nevada and all of a sudden it started to spread and to be fair, we hadn’t even marketed the fact that we have a residency program. Just through word of mouth we were able to bring in 20 high caliber players, multiple with youth national team experience and almost all of them from under-served development academy markets.

We never made a formal announcement that we have a residency program. We’ve haven’t done that yet partly because between June 1 and July 1 we put together our residency plan, so we felt more comfortable starting the program through our contacts. It’s open to anyone to come try out. We’re at 20 now with the possibility of 22, so maybe three or four more. In addition to those 20 players, we have another 23 players who are commuters from Tucson, parts of Phoenix. So, we have 20 kids who live here on a full-time basis and a total of 44 that make up the U-16 and U-18 teams right now, ages 15-18.

We have an RA, all of our staffing, a trainer on site. In the resort there are courtyard rooms where the San Francisco Giants players used to live, so we took a block of those courtyard rooms and turned them into our dormitories.

LE: What are the sports facilities like?

Vanney: As nice as any stadium across the country, including NFL stadiums, it's a very professional set-up that our guys live in and compete in. In our performance center we have a 10,000 sq. foot state-of-the-art weight room that the boys use when we do physical development stuff – our weight lifting sessions, performance training. It has a rubber floor and we have enough space to do technical work to stay out of the heat. Adjacent to that, we have physical therapy space, all of our training tables. There are four locker rooms and seventy lockers in each one and as an academy we occupy one of those locker rooms. Each one has an equipment room that has its own industrial size washer and dryer, each one has separate coaches’ offices as part of the locker room and its own coaches’ locker room, and obviously showers and its own private training room. We wash and dry everything every day, we put it out for them in the equipment room, they pick it up, it’s very professional.

When you walk outside of the performance center, we have eight fields, six of them are lighted and amongst the top quality in the country, flat Bermuda grass. There’s also a 50 x 50 yard technical training space that has a wall, goals, soccer tennis - different things so the kids can challenge themselves technically. In addition, we have 16 classrooms, so when we do video or when we meet with the boys we use one or two of the classrooms to do our presentations, our meetings. That building is around 50 yards away from the resort quarters, so it’s all really one campus.

LE: Tell me about their education.

Vanney: There’s a brand new high school in the city called Vista Grande and I met with the principal and guidance counselor and created a partnership and set up schedules that make sense for our players. They’re there for education and education only and the school knows that from a sports standpoint they play with us year round. Players got their core courses in addition to courses to qualify them for universities and we created a very good relationship. They come and pick up the kids in the morning and after school. That school in particular doesn’t have seniors, so our seniors attend Casa Grande Union. The seniors, we commute them to school because they don’t start till 10AM because a lot of mornings they have morning training sessions or they’re in the weight room. In the summer we train in the mornings and at night, so usually we start between 7:30-8:00 in the morning and we’ll come back out at night under the lights starting about 7:30-8:00 in the evening. We use the gym, the weight room, the classroom in the daytime sessions.

LE: Do you reimburse the schools in some way?

Vanney: No, we don’t. The way it works in Arizona is for every student that they get, the state actually pays them about $5,000. By us bringing the students, they actually make out a little bit. From us, they pick up 20 students who are going to graduate and if they don’t become professionals, they’ll go and play college soccer, which is great for their school. It’s a win-win for both of us. All of our kids are very good kids, solid students, they bring a lot of recognition to a brand new school in a relatively small community and the state funds the kids because it’s a public school.

We’re starting our own prep school on site at our facility and that’s why we have the sixteen classrooms. We’re continuing to develop our facility and are only in the first stages of development. The international school that we’re working with has multiple sites around the world so we would be working closely with our international school to go into those communities and look at players – do tryouts, do evaluations. Their ownership group, their umbrella, is in over 20 countries, over 40 locations in over 20 countries - South America, Central America, Europe, Asia.

LE: What does RSL fund?

Vanney: We're funding all of the soccer expenses such as travel, equipment, training fees, etc. The kids’ parents cover the housing costs as we continue to work towards building a scholarship fund and other resources to help offset living expenses. Ideally, one day, the goal is to find the means to make residency free for all RSL-AZ players.

LE: Have any of these players been claimed as RSL homegrown players?

Vanney: We have two players from Utah already been identified as homegrown players. But we have 12 players, maybe 14, who have youth national team experience.

LE: What’s the status of RSL’s youth program in Utah?

Vanney: Right now what’s happening in Utah is the summer program, kind of tied into the ODP system. Their state director Greg Maas trains periodically through the year and they compete in events over the summer and working though the clubs and the state association. But they don’t have a developmental academy situation and they don’t have a year-round RSL academy even in US Youth Soccer standards.

This is Real Salt Lake’s one and only development academy here in Arizona. As you keep an eye on our residency program over time, we’ll get a younger and an older age group team, something that bridges the gap between the professional team and the U-18 teams. They’re going to have the reserve team and we’ll probably put something in there that probably helps.

LE: Ultimately, how many residential players would RSL like to take on?

Vanney: Ultimately, probably 80 in multiple age groups, not just U-16 and U-18.

For more information on youth transfer fees, the new reserve league, developmental territories, and international loans, read: A chat with Real Salt Lake's academy director Greg Vanney on changes in U.S. soccer development.

View the slideshow of Real Salt Lake's residence academy at Grande Sports, Arizona.

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