TopYa! Homework Program an Early Success
In this day in age, with all the entertainment options available to kids at the click of a button, it can be difficult for young athletes to get the time on the ball they need in order to develop as a player.
Whereas in the past, pickup culture thrived at the youth age, kids are now likely playing sports outside of their structured environments less than ever.
To combat this issue in its Player Development Program, NorCal Premier Soccer decided to embrace technology in order to encourage young players to spend more time developing their skills.
In partnering with TopYa! Soccer, NorCal has helped revolutionize its homework program by instituting TopYa!’s unique, incentivized path for skill development.
With the program, kids upload videos of them performing skills or tricks to a database that then awards them points. At the end of a certain time period, the young soccer players with the most points earn different kinds of prizes such as a Barcelona jersey.
“We started working with TopYa! this season to try to motivate players to spend more time with the ball,” said David Robertson PDP Executive Administrator .” We like it because it’s engaging for the kids, it’s intuitive, kids now are driven by technology. While we have a plethora of videos through YouTube that kids can watch and copy, but what this allows us to do is to have the coaches track and reward and give feedback to their kids.”
The program has been successful with the kids — roughly 500 of the 800 PDP players are active on TopYa!
“We’re using PDP as a platform to get it started, but we’d like to see more players in NorCal use it as a resource, because the more people that do it, the more competition and collaboration we can get between different players and different clubs around the state,” Robertson said.
In addition, the archived video of each player allows coaches to track and evaluate talent and progress in a way they wouldn’t be able to just by assigning homework.
“Even if kids aren’t necessarily achieving the challenge, we know that they’re at least trying,” Robertson said. “A 20 second video might take 2 hours to get.”
Two hours that kids might have been spending on something other than soccer.
To get started:
You can download TopYa! for FREE from the apple or google play store by searching “TopYa! Soccer”. When creating your account be sure to use the NorCal Premier Soccer Code: 2776 when signing up.
Then get started on NorCal’s Premier Skills challenges located in the Skills Academy!
For additional information, be sure to go to the NorCal Premier Website where you can view a full listing of the training options from NorCal, as well as training exercises relevant to YOUR DEVELOPMENT as a player!
