My experience as a coach and a parent at the Oregon Surf soccer club in 2024
Let’s start with a big disclaimer: everything in this article is my personal experience with the Oregon Surf soccer club as a coach and parent for the 2016 boys, which were part of the “Development Academy” program in the 2024-2025 timeframe. I started coaching at Northwest Elite FC early in 2023 and before it rebranded to Oregon Surf, but I resigned at the conclusion of our fall season in November of 2024.
My intent here is to simply document a bit of my experience in case any future families or coaches find it helpful when making a decision about whether to join the club. I’ve only coached and had my own kids in the program at the younger levels and maybe Oregon Surf is a wonderful experience at the upper ages, but I would urge you to seriously consider other options if you’re evaluating the Development Academy or younger competitive levels as an option for your player.
I have a separate story about our older son and the insane mismanagement in the 2014 (U11) grouping this year, but we’ll save that one for another day. Let’s dig into coaching and the Development Academy, from someone who worked there and saw behind the scenes.
It’s very much a pay-to-play program
I know that many families joining the Development Academy are getting into club soccer for the first time, so be prepared for some sticker shock if you’re coming from recreational soccer where you probably pay less than $200 for the entire season. These numbers could always change in the future, but here are some ballpark fees from the 2024-2025 season.
It will cost $50 to attend “tryouts,” which is just shameful. There is no tryout for the Development Academy—they take anyone who shows up and wants to pay Surf the full registration fee, which is honestly part of the problem we have right now. Surf’s model is built around having as many players as possible, which means the coaches are oversubscribed and players won’t get adequate attention in training. The tryout days are really just another training session and a chance for the coaches to see the kids.
In 2024 it cost $1,300 to join the Development Academy’s year-round program, and yes, year-round training is your only advertised option, which is, frankly, ridiculous. Kids should be trying different sports and taking a break at some point, but this is pretty much how every team in the Portland Metro area structures their program. Weirdly, indoor soccer or futsal costs during the winter months are also not included because the club relies on parent volunteers to run those teams (and they ask some unlucky parent to front the team registration fee for everyone and collect the money themselves instead of providing a centralized billing system.)
Every tournament will run you another $50-$75, depending on how many players participate. For some reason these aren’t just estimated and rolled into everyone’s registration so you get hit with some additional fees later.
$400 in game and training kits. Yes, you’ll need to purchase both the game and training kit. And expect to buy an extra training kit or plan on doing a lot of laundry every week so your kid has a clean kit mid-week because they are expected to wear them to practices as well.
The coach-to-player ratio is really poor
Last season (2023-2024) we had roughly 24 kids and four coaches at every training session, which included myself, another parent who thankfully stepped up to help coach, a 19-year-old, and an 18-year-old high school student (the latter two were the entire coaching staff for the 2016 boys when I first offered to start helping). But, at least we had one coach for every six kids so any of us could easily pull a kid aside to provide some quick, focused instruction without disrupting the entire session.
This season our high school student graduated and went off to college, and our 19-year-old got a new job that prevented him from regularly attending practices. We also expanded up to 32 players, but for most of the summer we had only had two regular coaches at training and went to a 1:16 ratio. To be fair, the Development Academy has an Assistant Director and a couple coaches who would float where needed, but even on the days where one of them could help, the group sizes were so large that practices were not nearly as valuable for the players.
There were also a few days this summer where I found out at the last minute that I also had to include the entire 2017 group with our training session so we’d actually have closer to 40 kids, and no extra coaches. In fact, one of those days we only had two coaches because someone was out of town! So parents are paying over a thousand dollars to have their kid get instruction in a 1:15 or 1:20 ratio when they could pay 1/10th of that to play in their neighborhood rec soccer team with maybe 12 kids and two coaches.
Field access has been inconsistent this year
I’m not sure how the field allocations work for Tualatin Hills Park and Recreation District (THPRD), but last year we were on a very nice turf field for the entire season. It was at the same location, every single Monday/Wednesday and there was never a hint of it changing.
This summer the club was been bouncing around between two different locations and we didn’t find out the location and times for the next month until the last minute. We received the July schedules on June 27 and our August training schedule on August 4. In May and June we had two fields for the entire Oregon Surf Development Academy, which is composed of boys and girls, each broken out by age group birth years 2015, 2016, and 2017. The girls had one field and the boys teams divided up another field into thirds, although neither field had nets on the goals.
In August through November, we moved to a turf field with two goals. Yes, one field. For the entire Development Academy—boys and girls, as well as Surf’s Junior Pre-Academy group. Each group has a very small slice of the field to work in, which is pretty limiting for the types of exercises you can set up for a training session, and there are only two goals (both of which are the wrong size for these age groups.)
Maybe this is avoidable? I really don’t know, but it feels like a big planning fail. I tried to ask at one point and was told we were waiting on THRPD to issue field permits, but it seems like we’re doing something wrong compared to last year when we know other clubs have much better field space.
Summer time is tournament time
One of my favorite parts of the season was the tournament scheduling. First, the club sent everyone a calendar with the “potential tournaments” we would join. I shit you not, almost every summer weekend was marked as a potential tournament. Why or how someone thought that would be helpful to families, I still don’t understand—all it did was increase anxiety and uncertainty.
Later we were told which three tournaments the Development Academy teams would participate in, with zero checking of availability for the coaches. The first two were largely uneventful, but it got real exciting for the third one: it turned out about half of the coaching staff had their teams booked for a weekend in Portland while the other half was booked with their other, older teams in Seattle. What could possibly go wrong?!
Surprise, surprise: we ended up with some games on the girls’ side that didn’t have a coach available, setting off a chain of text message threads trying to sort out who was covering which game. In the end, the club’s Technical Director on the girls’ side—World Cup winner and Olympic Gold Medalist, Tiffeny Milbrett—graciously stepped in to help coach a few games so it was probably the experience of a lifetime for those girls, but it was a completely avoidable fiasco.
Last point here: I’ll give you one guess how many of those summer tournaments selected by the Director of Coaching were actually attended by the Director of Coaching. You’re right, it was zero.
Hope you like dribbling
Speaking of which, this new Director of Coaching took over the Development Academy this May and he would regularly send all the coaches a plan with what their weekly objectives were for each age group. The first seven weeks for my U9 boys was dribbling.
I have nothing against dribbling or developing individual ball skills (these are important things!), but let’s get some variety in there, right? How do we deliver quality passes? Can you move off the ball and find the space? How do you strike a ball? I wasn’t advocating for anything super advanced, but there’s a lot more to the game and focusing on one single skill every single session was incredibly boring for the players. You could see the light in their eyes go out and the joy of playing start to slip away from even our most engaged players. “Dribbling?! Aaaagain?! Ugh.”
I thought for sure once the fall session started we’d move on, but he restarted the curriculum and we went right back to dribbling again before moving all the way up to passing halfway through the season.
Best of luck knowing where to be on the field
In addition to the death-by-dribbling approach, we were instructed to have scrimmages no larger than 3v3. I actually love that approach most of the time and also prefer having kids in the small-sided games because it gives everyone more time on the ball and more touches.
The challenge was that we play 7v7 on a full field when it’s game day so when we showed up at our first tournament games in the summer, well, no one knew where to be on the field. Goal kicks and corner kicks were, unsurprisingly, a total disaster. Let’s be clear: we’re not out there to focus on winning games with development academy kids, but we missed our opportunities to make the practice sessions game-like and teach the kids how the team moves together between different phases of the game. It was very disorganized and chaotic, and it didn’t need to be that way.
You’ll probably be short players on game day
One of the biggest battles we faced was how our Director wanted to split up the teams. We had 32 kids total in our age group with a pretty wide range of skills and three coaches so I suggested (unsolicited, since he never asked his coaches, which is totally weird, right?!) we register one in the Gold division, one in Silver, and one in Bronze so we’d have 10-11 players per team.
Instead, he signed up four teams—two in the Gold (top) division, and two in Silver—for 32 boys, meaning we’d roster eight players to each 7v7 team.
The boys would absolutely get more playing time this way and have the flexibility to play in multiple games each weekend, but it also meant we would probably play without subs or down a player for a lot of games. Having been around these kids for a year now, I knew many of the families either have other kids with games or things going on during the fall weekends, and it’s a reality that you have a couple of players who are running late or will miss games each week.
And based on what we saw in the summer tournaments, I was very concerned that splitting our teams in half at the two highest division levels was going to leave our teams struggling to compete against the other clubs in those divisions and make the games not much fun for the players. (He didn’t show up to a single game from any of the three tournaments we played so of course he wouldn’t know that.) I’m not saying the focus is about winning, but if the kids get thrashed every week, that’s not fun for them or the parents. I wanted the boys in the right divisions where they would be competitive with the other teams and be appropriately challenged.
We eventually did settle on having only three teams of 10-11 players for the 2016s, but it took hours of texts, escalation emails, and a meeting with the leadership team to make it happen, which was an incredibly inefficient process. And after all that, the club still registered four teams for the older, 2015 age group and guess what? They struggled to field full teams or have subs, every single week.
Coaches supply all of their own equipment
When I started as a coach I was given absolutely nothing. No cones, no soccer balls, no bandages or cold packs—literally nothing. At one point I asked “do we even give coaches a first-aid kit?” and was told you just go find someone on the field who has one if a kid gets hurt. I guess that might work for practices, but it seemed like a real head scratcher for when games started and I’d be the only coach out there.
I ended up building out my own kit, purchasing twelve extra balls for the kids (many would always forget to bring theirs), a ball pump for the flat balls half the team brings to training, cones for setting up activities, pinnies for making teams and scrimmages, goalkeeper gloves and shirts, and bags to carry all the stuff in. It was fine—I felt like it was a reinvestment of the minimal dollars I was being paid, but it definitely felt weird that a club that thinks so highly of itself wouldn’t provide any of that stuff. Especially at the younger ages where we don’t have set goalkeepers. Am I supposed to hope some kid would bring gloves and a different color jersey?
Our neighborhood rec soccer club provided all of that stuff to the coaches and registration fees were 10% of what Surf charges so it’s unclear how we can’t supply coaches with their gear. And that lack of equipment follows you to game days as well—thinking your kid is going to sit on a nice bench or stay cool in the shade under a Surf-branded canopy on those super-hot summer game days? You better buy one for your team and bring it, ‘cause the club ain’t handing those out. (Thank you to all the wonderful parents on my teams that brought out their own canopies and benches week after week!)
Surf only pays for 50% of your licensing
Oregon Surf will reimburse you for 50% of your U.S. Soccer licensing costs after showing a completed certificate. I guess that’s reasonable, but as another data point my son’s neighborhood, recreational soccer club (Somerset West) reimbursed 100% of the fees if you took a course so it felt a little weird that a higher caliber club which charges 10x the price of the rec soccer one would provide less incentive for their coaches to pursue formal training. Maybe they’re worried about coaches leaving after getting licensed? Seems like something you could solve by treating them well or having them sign an agreement to pay back the license reimbursement if they leave within within a certain timeframe.
You do get paid, a little bit
I have no idea how this compares to other clubs, but Oregon Surf sent me a coaching contract to sign that was $5,000 annually, so I saw about $375/month after taxes. I had two kids in the program and between their registration fees, uniforms, tournaments and all the equipment I was buying for my own team, I pretty much saw this as a wash before I spent a single second coaching. You’re basically a volunteer, which is fine. I was out there because I enjoyed coaching the kids.
Coaches are asked to give extra days of their time for free
I’ll also point out that this year the club starting doing “Surf Symposiums” where they ask all of the coaches to spend a full weekend day together three or four times a year. The idea is fine in spirit—let’s all learn and improve together, and bring in some kind of guest speaker—I get that, but look, you’re asking for another 8 hours of everyone’s time and doing nothing to cover it, other than maybe serving some Jimmy John’s sandwiches.
If getting the coaches together is important the club should either pay them, or cancel a few training sessions and split up the event across a couple weekday evenings once a quarter.
Communication from the club is
Left you hanging there because that blank space is exactly what you’ll get from the club in terms of communication. You might find yourself tapping the screen, wondering “is this thing on?” and no, it’s not just you. About once a quarter the club will host an online meeting to give an update, but it’s really all focused on how well the upper-level teams are doing and is honestly a total waste of your time if you only have kids in the younger groupings.
Everything else comes from whichever group your player is in, so your experience will be wildly different depending on your Director of Coaching and individual coaches. I’ve honestly lost track of all the WTF moments and misses here, but one of my favorites was that we eventually hired a new coach in the summer (who quickly left in the middle of fall). The club never even announced him as a coach, or even told the parents that he had left. I’m sure if I hadn’t sent a departure email to the parents of my players that they might not know I also left.
That’s probably enough background for now, but as I wrap up I should state that I am under no illusion that other clubs operate in some gloriously perfect fashion. They all have their issues, but I hope this was helpful background to at least one potential player or coach. My last point is that if you happen to be a 2016 player, you’re in luck because the coach who took over for me is a fantastic human being and I know he’ll continue to shield the players and families from many of the issues I documented here.