About 40 miles south of Los Angeles in the Costa Mesa area of Orange County, TOCA Soccer’s headquarters demonstrate a vision of why USWNT Women’s World Cup stars Alex Morgan and Emily Sonnett have previously been to visit.
The premise for its beginnings were simple: former United States international and Premier League player Eddie Lewis wanted to share his secret. As a youngster, Lewis was a talented but unremarkable soccer player, by his admission. He was good enough to earn a scholarship to UCLA as an outside recruit, but a career as a professional — let alone an international playing in the most recognised league in the world — was far from a given.
He had all the physical and mental attributes to succeed but lagged behind his team-mates technically — his first touch was often stray, and he describes his weaker right foot as “shocking” (shockingly bad, that is). As a youngster, he spent too much time trying to get the ball under control while his head should have been up looking for a pass.
In his view, the catalyst for an eventual career at the game’s top level was a chance encounter with the UCLA basketball team. With the soccer locker room in the basketball arena, he’d see the basketball players practising on the court and once noticed they were using smaller balls and smaller baskets.
The idea: if you can shoot a three-point shot into a smaller hoop, you’d be able to do it on a regulation-size net. So, Lewis grabbed a few tennis balls and started practising against a garage wall. If he could control a smaller ball, he’d be able to master a size-five football.
In a matter of weeks, his touch had improved significantly. He then bought a tennis ball machine, set up his own “studio” between two parking garages, and fired 1,000 balls a day to himself. He credits this for taking him from a fringe college player to an eight-year career in England, playing for Fulham, Preston North End, Leeds United and Derby County, and an 82-cap U.S. international.
Eddie Lewis against South Korea in the 2002 Gold Cup. (Photo: Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)
While inching towards retirement with the LA Galaxy, he started researching how to evolve his training methods. Tennis balls were great for improving control, but they were too small to shape and curl, limiting how he could strike and manipulate the ball once it was in his possession. He started researching engineers to develop a machine similar to a tennis ball machine but with a smaller-sized and lighter football. After developing a prototype, the first TOCA Soccer venue was opened in 2014 in California. Nine years later, the company are closing in on 40 venues across the globe, with the majority in the United States and Canada.
The layout is relatively simple. In the Costa Mesa location, where founder Lewis, chief executive Yoshi Maruyama and most of the company’s day-to-day executives are based, the action area is split into five netted segments.
Each segment has one ball machine (touch trainer) controlled by a dedicated coach on an iPad. The small goals (smart targets) can be moved between all areas of the zone and have LED lights attached, indicating at what height the ball should hit the goal for that activity.
Houston Dash goalkeeper Jane Campbell training at a TOCA facility.
For example, if it is a ground-passing exercise, the lights will be lit on the floor. If a shooting exercise, the coach will illuminate the entire goal. Sometimes all goals will be lit up, sometimes just one, developing a player’s awareness and body positioning. Over a one-hour session, the player will touch the ball at least 200 times at different speeds, accelerating their development through constant exposure.
“We see it all the way down from five years old,” Lewis tells The Athletic. “The ability to control a real gentle ball that comes out and having players learn how to control and kick the ball without it hurting their foot and helping them feel comfortable kicking it with both legs. It does a couple of things. No 1, it improves their technical ability but also their confidence. Instead of playing on the periphery of games, we help them have the confidence to go in and win the ball because they’re going to feel comfortable knowing that they can do something with it. Our goal is to eliminate that technical barrier.”
While children make up a significant portion of TOCA’s customer base, some of their most effective work has been in helping professional and college players recover from injuries.
As The Athletic toured the venue, 18-year-old Mia Stuart was playing in a net named after Christen Press, one of many USWNT players, including Morgan, Sonnett, Mallory Swanson, and Kelley O’Hara, to have used TOCA resources in the off-season. As Stuart prepares for the upcoming season at Westmont College, an NCAA Division II school based in Santa Barbara, she is using TOCA to recover from an ACL injury. The prevalence of this injury in the women’s game is not lost on Lewis, who views their resources — using softer balls and a turf surface — as a perfect way to help players at the return to play (ROP) stage in recovery.
“There is a certain period in recovery when you’re fit enough to play, but you still have to be careful,” Lewis said. “The club doesn’t want the player in a 100 per cent game-like environment, and maybe they’ll put them in a different colour bib, but it’s not an ideal set-up because you can’t control the variables. What if they over-stretch after a bad touch, tweak something or react incorrectly? At TOCA, we control all of those elements.
“We can control how much a player moves, the pace at which the ball comes at the player and the physical load they’ll be working at. We find we get the players back quicker, but in many cases, much better than they were even before they were injured. Over their recovery period, we’re able to spend so much time not just helping them get back from their injury but in improving their technical deficiencies.”
Last year, TOCA announced a 10-year partnership with MLS “aimed at growing the sport and developing future players in North America.” Outside of branding opportunities, TOCA and MLS will collaborate to develop training programs for young talent in MLS academies using TOCA’s player development, analytics and data-capture expertise, benefitting from the companies’ full-time engineering and coaching teams.
This filters into the MLS Next programs, where several clubs’ youth affiliates train using TOCA facilities, including the Colorado Rapids and FC Dallas. The NWSL hasn’t reached a formal partnership, but two of the most recent success stories, Olivia Moultrie and Melanie Barcenas, have used TOCA for years. Moultrie became the youngest player to score an NWSL goal in 2022, and in April, 15-year-old San Diego Wave forward Barcenas became the youngest player to ever play in the league.
The model of extra individual training is common across American sports, with young athletes known to hire coaches for one-on-one sessions to develop skills. While there’s an acknowledgement from TOCA that it will be more difficult to integrate this training style in more developed soccer nations, with a single 50-minute session ranging from $20 to $69 depending on location, there is an appetite to grow overseas.
There are two centres in Sweden, and the Middle East, Australia, Japan and South Korea are considered sensible markets for expansion, given the cultural appetite to pay a premium for individual coaching. Even the Hungarian federation, in an attempt to qualify for their first World Cup since 1986, has contacted TOCA regarding a widespread rollout of their technology.
TOCA plans on developing its social brand, too. With the first 30,000-square-foot location up and running at the O2 Arena in London since 2021, it provides football-themed entertainment based on the principles of Topgolf, where users can engage in football activities over food and drink. There are plans to open venues in Birmingham, England; Dallas, Texas, and several locations in Mexico.
“The initial question was, ‘Could we create a soccer entertainment experience that isn’t just aimed at soccer fans?’ The answer is an overwhelming yes, based on what we’ve experienced in London,” says Maruyama, whose background is in themed entertainment at Universal Parks & Resorts and DreamWorks Animation. “We did additional research in Dallas where we set up a social box, and the guests — both in the family demographic and adults — overwhelmingly supported the concept. The enthusiasm around the sport because of Lionel Messi, the upcoming World Cup and the growth of MLS will only accelerate that further.”
This business is backed by the West River Group, which made early investments in Topgolf, and counts Tottenham Hotspur striker Harry Kane and Arsenal defender Leah Williamson among its ambassadors. For Maruyama, the potential of TOCA, given the simple pick-up-and-play nature of soccer, is around 20 to 30 times greater than Topgolf. For context, Topgolf draws over 20 million guests annually to more than 60 locations across the United States and was acquired by golf brand Callaway in 2021 in a deal valuing the company at $2 billion.
Chances are, it won’t be long before you’re watching a player developed using TOCA facilities for your favourite team, or using TOCA on a night out with friends.
(All photos courtesy of TOCA)
