Like just about every organization around the world, the New York Red Bulls Youth Programs have been forced to adjust on the fly.

Under normal conditions at this time of year, the programs would be providing expert support and team training to their community club partners, operating spring day camps and evening clinics for individual participation.

But with the New York/New Jersey area under lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19, Simon Barrow, the Senior Manager, Player Development, and his team have quickly pivoted.

Barrow have leveraged their existing resources to launch the “Red Bulls Train at Home,” which is a free resource providing players of all ages and abilities with a range of activities that they can practice in a safe and secure environment during social distancing.

“As soon as we realized that we were all going to be off the field for an extended period of time, we knew it was important to serve our player pool with a structured training environment that could be put into practice at home,” Barrow told TopDrawerSoccer in an email interview. “Under normal circumstances, we work with approximately 40,000 soccer players each year, and we felt an overwhelming responsibility to help keep them entertained and engaged, but most importantly – safe.”

Each week, the Red Bulls Youth Programs team provides a range of videos that demonstrate technical skills at various levels of difficulty, offering freestyle tricks as well as game understanding components to help the audience grow in the knowledge of the Red Bulls, Major League Soccer and the sport itself.

First team players have also joined in, with Homegrown signing Ben Mines among them. Leveraging an email list, every week a new round of tips, tricks and drills hits the inbox, offering all kinds of ball mastery activities that can be performed in tight spaces.

Part of the exercise for Barrow and his team was simply figuring to best deploy resources that they’d previously compiled for other programs. But there were tweaks and additions that had to be made.

“Much of our technical video content existed already, as we’ve long been committed to providing free tools that players can utilize in their own time,” Barrow said. “The concept of reaching 10,000 hours of purposeful practice is well documented, and anything we can provide to help them reach this benchmark has immense value for our player pool.

“This said, we had to mobilize our teams quickly to generate the freestyle and physical elements of the platform, which we did not yet have available. Not only did this allow us to provide more comprehensive and diverse content, but more importantly it allowed us to show our freestyle team, athletic trainers, and first team players training in the same isolated environment that the players now found themselves in.”

Along with that, Barrow also said the new content they put together was filmed on a cellphone in living rooms and yards, as opposed to the grass at Red Bull Arena.

He also indicated that the feedback has been extremely positive, both locally and around the soccer globe.

“The response has been fantastic, initially from our existing club partners and camp participants in the New York metro area,” he said. “However, word has spread to the soccer community in general, and we’re seeing more and more players from around the country utilize the tools. Parents can sign up for the weekly updates, and have the freshest content sent direct to their inbox every Monday, so it’s something for the players to look forward to a weekly basis – wherever they live.”

Like other organizations, the creation of the platform has been over the Internet, with more than 30 staff members involved in putting it all together.

“We’ve all had to adapt and learn in so many ways, utilizing new technologies to stay connected and collaborate efficiently in order to deliver a product we’re proud to put our name on,” Barrow said. “As such, we’ve all become better team-mates as a result of this process. We genuinely believe we will come out of these times stronger, and we hope this tool can be a metaphor for how we all can grow and develop, even in the most uncertain of times.”

Visit the Red Bulls Train at Home Website to learn more. You can set yourself measurable goals and track your progress by using the print-at-home scorecard.

---

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU

TeamRank Presented By TeamSnap - Boys

Midwest High School Roundup - Nov.

Top Men's Second Round Pro Prospects