Amy Schweizer didn’t touch a soccer ball until she was sixteen. Today, though, with twenty years of playing experience under her belt, she runs Tiny Troops Soccer. Schweizer also played professionally in the WUSL for the Cincinnati Ladyhawks. In this podcast episode, we talk with her about Tiny Troops and its goal of offering developmental training for children who are under five.
Schweizer founded Tiny Troops while she was living overseas in Okinawa, Japan, with her husband who was stationed there, and her young son. She felt a strong need for social interaction and physical activity. As she put it, “we all know that soccer and physical activity also benefits mental health and emotional health. And so, we really needed that to happen. There was a lack of developmental programming, a lack of any programming really, for kids under the age of five.” Today, Tiny Troops is in 17 states and several countries.
Tiny Troops focuses on developing skills to help children transition into recreational leagues. And in order to maximize this with children so young, much of what they do might not look like soccer but is integral to the foundations a successful soccer player will need. This includes activities like using balance beams to play different balance games and playing games where students have to pick up something while they’re dribbling the ball. As Schweitzer shared, “We’re using both right and left brains, working on things that are local motor skills, like how my body moves, vestibular input, and how am I responding to the different things around me.”
It’s a lot of gross motor skill work for children who are so young, and some of the fundamental education then comes back to ensuring that the parents can better understand the game. We discussed the idea of clubs creating a basic handbook that explained soccer terminology such as “offsides,” as well as basic concepts and some things that students could practice at home.
If you’d like to dive deeper into our conversation, you can find it on YouTube or your favorite podcast source.