Unlocking Elite Decision-Making and Space Exploitation for High-Level Youth Soccer Players

First of all, you've gotta be committed. You might think that's a large investment, but it's certainly worth it if you're the right family and you've got the right kid and you're looking for a good return. Shane Nieuwenhuis. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and my child has been playing soccer for about 10 years. Prior to joining Ekta, he's been playing at a high level of soccer, and the primary reason for me connecting with Garrett and Ekta was for improving the cognitive processing side of his game. I decided to move forward with Ekta once I'd met with Garrett. We had a good conversation. I liked what he had described around the methodology and what the focus was for my son. It felt good in terms of the personal attention I'd get from Garrett and his team with my son, Ryan. The content felt advanced, but yet structured well enough where a kid would be able to understand it. I think what Garrett and the team do is they bring an excellent balance to constructing feedback for a kid based on their age. It's a really good combination, I think, of technology and video review. I mean, I'll give you an example. Ryan started this program working with Garrett while he was playing in Spain, and has now continued it while he's here back in the US. Scheduling is super easy. The team is extremely flexible, very accommodating. I like the fact that they review clips because it's meaningful and it's highly contextualized to, you know, the way your kid plays. So the feedback is not generic and is certainly not, you know, thematic in a sense. It's very much pertinent to what they do, and I think what I'm finding is that the feedback is very much tailored to the level that your kid is at. So as they start to make progress, I think you start to see more, more robust feedback in terms of concepts and what it is that they need to work on. So, been really pleased. I think the program is helping us deliver on what it is we were aiming to deliver on, which is how do we make better decisions in high-pressure situations. Garrett has been able to isolate a few moments for Ryan where there are just small things that actually end up becoming big things. Those small things can make a big difference, so just decision-making, for example, around progressively playing with the ball. How does he play into space? Timing, positioning on the field, and then also, actually strangely enough, even some small technical items that will actually improve his decision-making on the field as well. So, been really good there. I've seen a change in him and what he does in open space with the ball. He's a center back, so very different position for him. Primarily with Ryan, we've focused on, what Garrett's been focused on with him is taking open space and playing into that open space. And then the other thing we've really enjoyed is the concepts around how he's teaching Ryan about space and movement in general, and then how Ryan gets to exploit the different areas of space on the field. Ryan's pretty cerebral in terms of the way he thinks about soccer anyway, so this just fits him really well, so it's good. Your kid has to be committed to wanting to develop him- themselves. Invariably, if you see your kid hitting a ceiling, this is probably one of the unlocks for them with respect to how they go from just being a decent or good technical player to actually making an impact on the field. The big difference between really good players and everyone else is not necessarily always the technical skills. A lot of people think it is. It's actually the decisions they make. It's what they choose to do, and it's how quickly they decide to do it. So if that's important to you for your kid and if you recognize that, then this is the kind of program you should be thinking about.