They may not be able to train together or play any games at the moment, but the young players in FC Cincinnati's academy are working as hard as ever with the soccer world on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic.
FC Cincinnati director of player development Larry Sunderland outlined the steps the club is taking with its academy players on a Thursday conference call with reporters over Zoom, and how they're hoping to carry many of them into the future. It started with a mentorship program that Sunderland and Cincinnati head coach Yoann Damet established that connected the club's academy players with the first-teamers that play their same position. The young players researched their counterparts and their developmental pathways, then came up with questions for them.
The idea was so well-received, Sunderland said, that it got him and Damet thinking about how else they could use this time away from the game to engage with their young players. That led to the formation of an eight-week leadership program that has already featured an array of guest speakers that have joined conference calls with the academy players.
"Every first-team player was involved in [the mentorship] program and every academy player was involved in this program," Sunderland explained. "It was fantastic, it was really, really interesting. The first-team players were really engaged and maybe that's a credit to the academy players being prepared because the questions were thought-out, they were good. It was a tremendous project. It led us within the academy to start thinking about, 'Yeah, we're doing all the soccer educating stuff' but we wanted to think outside the box about how we could develop leaders.
"So we started this leadership program, it's an eight-week program we put together and it's kind of got a life of its own now, so it could go well beyond eight weeks."
One of the first speakers who addressed the players was former University of Wisconsin-Green Bay basketball standout Keifer Sykes, who was the subject of the documentary "Chi-Town" released in 2018 that chronicled his rise out of a difficult upbringing in intercity Chicago into a collegiate star. Sykes, who currently plays professional basketball overseas, joined the players for a Zoom call that went for over an hour and generated such a lengthy discussion that the call actually timed out.
"Keifer was like, 'Let's do this again next week.' So he came back the next week and he took the next week himself about all the things that he wanted to talk about," Sunderland said. "So we were like, 'Wow, this is really great, this is fantastic for the young guys.' So, the leadership program took off, Landon Donovan's coming on next Wednesday, and then we have two weeks where the players and staff are going to go over different leadership styles, we have two weeks of that, and then we have four weeks of speakers coming in.
"We have a big CEO coming in from the medical field to talk about leadership, we have Dr. Tom Davis from Leaders Elevate to talk about leadership, we have a longtime professional coach coming in, we have a force recon officer coming in to speak with the players. We have some really cool stuff that we'll keep going for four weeks and we'll do some end projects with the players."
On the soccer side, Sunderland the club is also giving the players individualized attention through calls that they're all doing with coaches, as well as block studies where they break down film on their position groups from FC Cincinnati games, their own academy games and UEFA Champions League matches, then apply what they see back to the club's on-field principles. They then put presentations together in small groups that they give to their academy teammates and the staff.
"This mentorship program, we want it to be a tradition within the club," Sunderland said. "We're a young club. We have the opportunity to build traditions from scratch.
"These are the types of things, we're loving it," he added. "We're going to keep this stuff going. Every player is getting more individual attention than ever before. ...I almost feel like we're doing more now and there's more interactions between staff and players and the first-team now then there was before this crisis. It's really pretty cool."
