Who is CenCal Cosmos?
CenCal Cosmos is a competitive youth soccer club operating in the Fresno-Clovis area. The club will be run as a non-profit organization with the long term development of its players and coaches as its number one priority. Alongside transparent fiscal management.
What are you doing to ensure that player development is kept as the number one priority?
As a youth soccer club, developing children as both players and people has to be the primary goal. CenCal Cosmos will be staffed by quality coaches whose priorities align with those of the club, namely age-appropriate skill development alongside learning the important life lessons that being part of a sports team can provide. Our coaches understand their role within the entire club development structure (i.e., the skills a U9 player must learn and master with the end goal of reaching the players potential at U18, not necessarily winning games at U9) and also their role as mentors in helping our children learn the skills and values required to be successful and valuable people. You will see documents published on our website that outline our commitment to these goals. We employ full time expert directors who oversee all practices to ensure that the long term development needs of the players re always being met.
What are you doing to ensure that coach development is kept as a high priority?
Our coaches are our most important asset as they are the people with direct influence over our young players. At CCC, we are actively working to provide a staff of the highest quality, both as coaches and also as leaders of young people. Beyond that, we have initiated several programs to help these coaches develop themselves. For less experienced and younger coaches, we have provided a system that allows them to use their knowledge of the game to help players while being mentored in the areas of practice development, team management, and parent interaction by more experienced coaches. Our Youth Academy set up (see below) is one of these initiatives. Additionally, we will employ a less experienced coach as an assistant coach with each of our older teams in order to provide a stronger learning environment for our players but also to help develop the coach in the philosophy of CCC. We have monthly coaches meetings that are professional development based and also encourage and facilitate our coaches participating in formal coaching license courses. We just had 6 coaches compete the NSCAA National and Advanced National (C and B license equivalents) in Sacramento in January of 2016.
What is the Youth Development Academy?
The Youth Development Academy is a system that allows for the maximum development of younger players. All of our U11 and younger teams will train as a group within their age and gender, i.e. all U9 girls teams will train together. The trainings will be designed and led by the Youth Academy Director, a highly experienced youth development coach. Each team will have a coach whose role within the session is to work with the individual players. These systems leads to significantly more 1 on 1 coaching time than the traditional method of having a single coach trying to keep all the players on track, run the session, and then do some individual coaching wherever possible. This system also allows less experienced coaches the opportunity to learn under the Youth Academy Director and to begin to take more responsibility for designing and running sessions as they develop.
What is your affiliation?
CenCal Cosmos is affiliated with US Club Club Soccer and NorCal.
What does it cost?
2017 season registration will be $300 with a $70 a month club fee, which will continue for ten consecutive months. Additional team costs will accrue to cover referees, coach per diem, tournament fees, etc. These should be minimal at the younger age groups but will increase as a team gets older and attends more tournaments, etc. These teams fees will be laid out at the opening team meeting.