Our Contrarian View on Team Soccer

For the last 20 years that we’ve been involved in Hawaii soccer, we’ve watched team after team form and then fall apart. We experienced it ourselves as players — playing for a host of different clubs on different islands. Our parents spent money every weekend flying us to Oahu to play for various teams, all in the hopes that we’d be able to play soccer at the next level.

While we enjoyed our time with different clubs, all three of us — Nikki, Tommy, and Joey — ended up getting recruited from camps. Between the three of us, we did every possible tournament in Hawaii and on the mainland that you can think of. Yet Nikki got recruited at a local camp, and both Tommy and Joey were recruited at the University of Portland camp (Tommy to UP, and Joey to Pacific University).

Now, after starting Triple Effort Training and talking with many families, we’re seeing the same scenarios play out: parents spending time and money to have their kids play on Oahu because there aren’t strong options here on Maui. We understand that your kid is the most important thing in your world — and the last thing you want is to put them in an environment that’s discouraging or focused on the wrong outcomes.

While we encourage competition and believe teaching your kids how to win games is important, we understand that’s not the goal worth chasing. Our goal isn’t to win league games on Maui, or local tournaments, or even national tournaments. If that happens as a byproduct of our mission, great — but from a soccer perspective, the outcome for our academy teams is to make your kid the absolute best they can be, so that when they get an opportunity to perform at an ID camp or a combine, they can deliver.

That’s what gets them recruited. That’s what gets them to the next level. While winning the fourth division at Surf Cup may look good for us, it’s not what’s best for your kid.

And taking soccer out of the equation, the other goal of the academy is to teach them what the process of winning actually looks like — how to set goals, consistently execute habits, work with others, respond to losses, respond to wins, and show up when it’s hard. These are the things that will serve them when they decide what they want to do with their lives. Whether that’s becoming an entrepreneur, a lawyer, a doctor — or anything they choose — they’ll have built the habits to achieve it. 

-Joey Musto