Ep 364 How Do You Run a 5,400 Player Club and Still Put the Kid First? (Part 1)

MustangSoccer.com: Fred Wilson's club in the East Bay. Founded 1972, roughly 5,400 players across Mustang and the Mt. Diablo Mustang affiliate. Fred's email is [email protected] and he means it when he says he will take the meeting. Mustang Soccer Data and Analytics: The club's public page on what they measure and why. BeyondPulse.com: Heart rate and workload monitoring worn on a belt, no vest to plug in. Matt Pell is the CEO. All 445 competitive players at Mustang are on it. Bepro.ai: Game analytics AI that tags 74 match moments per player with a video clip attached to every one. FIFA approved and used at the professional level. Pixellot.com: Mustang's main camera supplier for automated game filming. WinningLeader.com: Jeremy Boone's leadership program. Mustang ran their leadership group and then their coaches through it from August to December. CoachingYouthHoops.com: The one stop shop for youth coaches. Practice plans, season planning, and the resources behind this show. HeySai.com: Text based assistant that takes the administrative pain out of youth sports. Get on the wait list, launching this fall. (Say it "Hey Sammy," spelled H E Y S A I.) Coach Bill sits down with Fred Wilson, a Bay Area youth soccer legend who started as a volunteer rec coach at Mustang Soccer in 1989 and now oversees one of the largest and most respected clubs in the country. Along the way he helped launch the San Jose Earthquakes Academy and spent eight years there. The conversation opens with the hard question. Mustang measures heart rate, workload, game analytics, and eventually psychological profiles. So at what point does helping a kid improve turn into watching a kid too closely? Fred's answer is the thread that runs through the whole hour: the data is only ever a starting point, because you cannot measure head and heart, and none of it works without the relationship. From there it goes into the tech stack, the culture work Mustang did with Winning Leader, how a volunteer board evolved into a collaborative governance structure, why kids should play multiple sports, and a rapid fire round that every club director should sit with. Fred's central caution about the data era. All the biodata, game analytics, and psychological profiling in the world still leave out the intangibles a kid brings to the field. The measurement only earns trust when there is a real relationship behind it with the player and with the family, and when everyone understands the purpose clearly. The purpose is an objective basis from which a player can improve. Nothing more, nothing less. When Fred started down this road, a friend told him he did not want to, because he would drown in data and need a data scientist to explain it. That turned out to be exactly true. Mustang had spreadsheets full of statistics and players looking at them asking what any of it meant, with no comparative and no predictive value at the youth level. Two people fixed it. Dana Taylor, a former Quakes colleague, came in as the data scientist who made it usable for coaches. And a parent in the club who does analytics across industries looked at roughly 800 to 900 games of data and found patterns. That analysis surfaced 19 algorithms hiding in the data that identified KPIs tied to winning. The one Fred quotes: when Mustang broke the defensive third of the opponent more often than the opponent broke theirs, they won 94 percent of the time. Those were being pulled manually at first. Mustang went back to Bepro and asked them to generate it inside the system. Now a coach opens it and sees Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices