My son Tommy started with TCSR when he was just about to turn 10 years old. After years of trying different sports, basketball, flag football, baseball, swim and a black belt in Karate, he had asked us to try soccer. After one fall season and Allstars, he begged to go to “Club” soccer. As we do not come from a “soccer” family, our son had not been born with any natural soccer ability, but he sure loved the beautiful game. So in January 2014, we took Tommy to Club.
It didn’t take long to see that he was far behind most of these kids. He did not know even the basics of how to correctly dribble or pass the ball. But he was insistent that Soccer was going to be his game. Luckily, after a few weeks, we heard of one of the Coaches that was running training on the side and we met Coach Ramo and his TCSR program.
I think Coach Ramo almost cried when he assessed my son’s skills at their first meeting. He was very clear that some of the training would be boring, repetitive, and often it was, but Ramo took on the challenge of teaching this kid from the beginning and Tommy took on the challenge of putting his soccer training first. Tommy had to keep a notebook and would be assigned a move to practice over and over until he mastered it. We would sit in the front yard and count hundreds, even thousands of his moves as he repeated his soccer homework as assigned. There were days that he wouldn’t want to go out and practice but our agreement was that he had to put the work in if we were going to put all our time (and money!) into club soccer.
Fast forward 5 and half years. Tommy has become a solid, if not one of the stronger players on his club team. He can play just about every position proficiently. He started Varsity as a Freshman at school and I have two other High School Coaches hounding me to bring him to their schools for the remainder of his High School years. I sincerely believe that we owe much of the credit for his skills and continued love of the game, to Coach Ramo and his TCSR program.
Christa Shore. Tommy’s Mom