COPA Membership Changes
We aim to disrupt the status quo of traditional subjective player development methods to maximize your athlete’s growth.
Feedback | Flexibility | Commitment
COPA STC is committed to unlocking your athlete’s true potential through an objective, data-driven player development model. We aim to disrupt the status quo of traditional subjective methods in an effort to maximize your athlete’s development. To be successful, this disruption will require feedback, flexibility, and commitment.
Feedback
Feedback is the secret sauce in skill acquisition. Intentional and specific feedback is what focuses the athlete’s attention, it’s what guides their understanding of performance, and what can intrinsically and extrinsically motivate them both to become their best selves and to challenge the performance of those around them. Moving forward, our unique scorecards, COPA.me badges, dynamic leaderboards, objective training levels, video analysis, in-session metrics, and additional tools will accelerate and gamify the development of our members.
Objective Evaluation
Our core purpose is to identify your athlete’s objective strengths and weaknesses, provide guided recommendations rooted in sport science to optimize your athlete’s development, and then track their development over time as they engage in a purposeful training methodology. With our mission and purpose always in mind, we’ve been working behind the scenes for the last five years collecting and analyzing data to establish protocols that objectively evaluate your athlete’s essential technical, physical, and cognitive skills.
Solution: COPA Score and SpeedLab Score (ages 12+), Junior COPA Score and Junior SpeedLab Score (ages 9-11), and COPA Skills Checks (ages 6-8)
Data-Driven Feedback
No matter how an athlete performs in an objective evaluation, they will receive engaging, useful, and actionable feedback. By analyzing an individual’s data against a proprietary database of thousands of athletes, we can effectively identify an athlete’s development needs through comparative data analysis. After understanding an individual’s strengths and gaps, we can prescribe individual development plans that guide and optimize their development. This critical data provides a quantitative benchmark used to measure an athlete’s progress and compare their skills-specific performance to athletes of the same age and gender.
Solution: Scorecards providing in-depth analysis of objective evaluations (ages 6+)
Consistent and Frequent Feedback
While our more comprehensive feedback loops mentioned above will occur periodically, we strive to incorporate feedback into daily and weekly training in the form of COPA.me. COPA.me is a summary of their journey as a COPA member. This booklet allows the player, parents, and coaches access to the data we’ve gathered and see just how much they’ve developed. Players can even collect unique badges from different training offerings to show off just how hard they’ve been working. Challenge Badges will be a player’s way to keep their high scores all in one place.
Solution: COPA.me (all ages)
Metrics and Video Analysis
While we’ve always incorporated this type of feedback, we wanted to reiterate our commitment to these tools. Our technology creates an immersive environment where key in-session metrics are displayed, creating instantaneous feedback that drives intent. Lastly, we have over 20 PlaySight cameras recording our training spaces, providing a platform for our coaches to leverage in-session video analysis. As a member, you have access to our recorded training sessions at your fingertips.
Solution: Immersive and instantaneous feedback through in-session metrics and video analysis (ages 6+)
Flexibility
Affordable Options
For the first three years, our membership model offered the option of training 1x, 2x, or 3x a week at specific price points depending on the member’s age. With our updated membership platform and new pricing structure, members will be receiving many more opportunities for cheaper, such as access to unlimited training sessions, hyper-focused specialized clinics, data-driven feedback, and flexible scheduling. The age-specific prices are no longer determined by the number of times a member can attend each week. They are now based on a member’s preselected commitment level to their training, giving them more opportunity and flexibility.
Solution: Affordable pricing structure based on member’s commitment level (all ages)
Train When You Want
Our membership model options of training 1x-, 2x-, or 3x a week also created a rigid schedule. Although this generated consistency for both COPA and your family, we learned it wasn’t agile enough to adapt to your family’s scheduling needs. Nearly 85% of our freezes and cancellations were due to a scheduling issue. Our membership services team has faced a perpetual mountain of permanent day/time change requests, make-up requests, membership freeze and unfreeze requests, and program switches. One lesson learned is that we need to accommodate your busy life as schedule changes are not your child’s fault. If you want to train every Monday at 4:00 PM, great. If you need customization and flexibility, we need to offer that option as well.
Solution 1: Flexible scheduling (all ages)
Solution 2: Adding Sunday sessions to give you COPA 7 days a week (all ages)
Train As Much As You Want
Objective data is a double-edged sword. Our feedback loops will require us to be confident that we can make a material impact on your athlete’s development. Through our data analysis, it’s evident the more consistent and frequently you train, the bigger the impact we can make. For example, in a sample size of 150 athletes that visited the SpeedLab in just one session per week for eight weeks, the average athlete increased their speed by 8%. Athletes that were able to commit to two sessions per week in the same time period saw their speed increase by more than 14%. This is simple science, adaptation takes time, clear direction, appropriate stimulus, and frequency. More frequent training allows our coaches to become more familiar with your athlete. Whether you come for multiple sessions in one day, or you come multiple days in a week, we want to serve your athlete more frequently. Regardless of age, we know we can make the biggest impact if we see your athlete more often.
Solution: Unlimited training (all ages)
Holistic Training
We are committed to the holistic development of your athlete. We don’t want you to have to choose between your athlete’s physical development (SpeedLab) and your athlete’s technical soccer development (COPA Train). By combining both programs, we are serving your athlete with the most comprehensive training program. SpeedLab at 4:00 PM and Soccer Training at 5:00 PM, or SpeedLab on Monday and Soccer Training on Wednesday, choose one, choose both, or switch it up.
Solution: Combining our SpeedLab and COPA Train programs into one comprehensive development membership (ages 9+)
Train On Your Individual Needs
Large team training in club environments can be challenging to meet the individual skill development needs of your athlete. Our current small-group training sessions are designed to broaden the core fundamental skills needed to succeed in the field in a more personalized environment. Regardless of your athlete’s position or individual needs, every player can benefit by improving their ability to receive and strike the ball, make better decisions, and move more efficiently. We also recognize that every player has specific needs to help develop their individual game; whether that is honing a strength that makes them special or improving a weakness that may be holding them back. In addition to our core SpeedLab training and Soccer training sessions, we’ve curated an array of Specialized Clinics that are hyper-focused on the key performance parameters outlined in our Scorecards. Based on the objective data we collect, our sport science team will provide training recommendations or “prescriptions” aimed at optimizing your athlete’s individual development needs. Need to work on finishing in the box, driving balls with both feet, acceleration and deceleration, or your awareness and vision in the middle of the field? We’ve got you covered.
Solution: Specialized Clinics (ages 6+)
Establishing Peer Groups Through Objective Training Levels
To create the best training environment, we have found it critically important to establish peer groups to ensure players of similar skill levels train together. To be fully transparent, we have used subjective evaluations to assign a “coach rating” to your athlete in an attempt to establish peer groups. This was the best practice until now. COPA STC aspires to remove the ceilings placed on players through traditional subjective evaluations. Therefore, your athlete’s COPA Score, Junior COPA Score, or COPA Skills Check will determine their training level. To accommodate a flexible scheduling option and maintain high-quality training environments, all training sessions for ages 6+ will have a training level pre-requisite. As your athlete improves their objective scores and achieves critical benchmarks, they unlock new training levels while simultaneously gamifying their development.
Solution: Objective training levels (ages 6+)
Focus On What You Want
We highly recommend that you follow the prescribed individualized training plan formulated from your COPA Score results. While we want to guide your development based on objective data and science, we also want to promote an environment of maximum enjoyment. Allowing your athlete to choose sessions they love is also part of the plan. We want to ensure your athlete is excited about training and coming to COPA STC. An intrinsic love for the sport promotes a positive developmental mindset.
Solution: Customize your schedule (all ages)
Integrating Competition
Competition is healthy. It’s imperative our COPA athletes transfer the skills they are developing in their small-group training sessions into a game environment. We’ve found that learning is heightened when the player removes the fear of making a mistake and is free to try new skills and develop new confidence. Removing the critical eye of a parent or the analytical eye of a coach or ref encourages this growth. The best players find creative freedom, and we want to encourage that type of environment.
Solution: Integrating Gameplay sessions (ages 6+)
*Pro Tip: We’ve had upwards of 85 COPA members show up to Friday night Gameplay while parents went out on date night. That the feeling of freedom can be enjoyed by all.
Manage Your Schedule
To accommodate all of these exciting changes, it requires us to migrate off our current custom software and into a new member portal that allows you to coordinate schedules, register for sessions, view billing, and stay connected with COPA at home or on the go. Our current system isn’t set up for an agile environment providing you with maximum flexibility.
Solution: Migrating to DaySmart software (all ages)
Commitment
We’ve analyzed the data and listened to our members. We believe the changes to our membership model will provide the best platform for COPA STC to make the biggest impact on your athlete’s development.
Time is required for us to make an objective impact on your athlete’s development. A material change in your athlete’s skills doesn’t occur overnight or in the course of one month. The data makes us vulnerable, but we are confident enough to be held accountable for the objective impact of our player development model.
On the 15th of every month, we will be posting the following month’s schedule on DaySmart so you can conveniently schedule up to 45 days in advance. We need a level of certainty to properly adjust our supply of sessions and staff schedule.
Our shift to an assessment-oriented, feedback-rich, unlimited and flexible approach to skills development is our commitment to you and your child to continue to innovate and provide the best available offerings on the market today. We invite you to join us in forging a new and more advanced way to develop soccer skills, have fun, and develop your child’s athletic prowess.
As you might imagine, this new approach will have operational impacts on our facility and, as a result, we will have more limited membership available. Moving forward, all of our memberships will have a minimum commitment level. We will offer 3-, 6-, and 12-month commitment options with the monthly price decreasing with each increase of your commitment level. Following the fulfillment of your commitment, all memberships renew month-to-month at your established commitment level price.
The new membership model is the COPA STC you’ve been asking for – the COPA Score, the unlimited training, the flexible custom schedule, the hyper-focused skills clinics attacking the individual needs of your athlete, the gameplay, the comprehensive training combining SpeedLab and COPA Train, and the data-driven feedback. We are a home for the athlete with a sincere passion for the game and an unmatched desire to achieve their goals. For those families that feel their child’s individual skill development needs aren’t being met in their other soccer environments. For the child that responds more positively to feedback, technology, and emotionally engaged environments. For the parents that want their child’s development to be guided by cutting-edge science and technology. If that resonates with you, then join us in pioneering an objective and data-driven player development revolution.
