In early August, US Club Soccer partnered with a platform to help make the youth soccer culture more nurturing and holistic in the way it measures and values each player’s experience. This new mission is called Players First. The foundation of Players First is built upon five pillars; club development, coaching development, player development, parent engagement and education, and player health and safety.
US Club Soccer CEO, Kevin Payne, said in August 2015, “We’re on a mission to change the sport. In order to achieve our mission, we need a vision, courage, enthusiasm, resilience and a plan. The reason we should be attempting to embrace a Players First philosophy is not because it will be easy, but because it will be hard.”
Recently, in order to expand the long-term success of soccer clubs in the United States, US Club Soccer added another collaboration to their vision: Fit for 90. US Club Soccer announced Fit for 90, a player-monitoring platform that delivers sports science to soccer coaches, players and teams, as their official player monitoring system, with the hopes of revolutionizing youth soccer.
Fit for 90, founded in 2013 by Dr. John Cone, is a player-monitoring and analytics platform with a unique system that provides player feedback. The feedback can help improve player performance and prevent injuries. Fit for 90 supports and builds off of the Players First pillars of Player Health and Safety and coaching development.
Fit for 90 provides coaches with player information that will help understand an athlete’s readiness and stress to decrease risk of injury and increase player development and performance. It identifies early signs of fatigue, stress, or under-recovery specific to each player to help keep them on the field.
Essentially, the sports science of Fit for 90 aims to improve a team’s overall wellness and can help coaches refine their methodology and maximize player training.
Coaches using Fit for 90 will receive emails and alerts when a player is at a risk of injury. Recommendations are made based on each player’s current and historical data. It also has a simple 5-part readiness questionnaire that players can spend a few minutes a day filling out in order for coaches to know how they are feeling at all times. Players can submit their areas of muscle soreness from a phone, tablet or computer.
“We are very excited to be a part of Players First. This is an exciting movement in the U.S. youth soccer to create a better environment for players to stay on the field and compete at their best,” said John Cone, founder and CEO of Fit for 90. “Monitoring is highly prevalent in pro sports, but it is infinitely more important in young athletes due to the combined stress of growth and training; the knowledge our monitoring system delivers helps coaches balance stress and readiness to prevent injury and cultivate health development.”
Soccer athletes of all levels are using Fit for 90, including the U.S Women’s National Team, Major League Soccer, National Women’s Soccer League and collegiate and elite youth programs.
The U.S. is certainly behind the other top soccer leagues around the world in terms of player development, but collaborations like this with Fit for 90 are a step in the right direction.