With an eye toward building the future not only of the Philadelphia Union but the next generation of American talent on the pitch, the Philadelphia Union Academy was featured in an article on The Athletic.
"I just look at the ingredients that we have in this country in terms of athletes, population, infrastructure,” Richie Graham, YSC’s founder and a minority owner of the Union, told Pablo Maurer . “We have a lot of the ingredients to be a superpower. There’s no reason to believe that a country that has demonstrated that we have a world-class champions and performers in pretty much every sport you can think of—there’s no reason to think that we can’t do it in soccer. But we have to work for it.”
The piece talks about the talent that the Union Academy has already produced in the likes of Auston Trusty, Mark McKenzie and most recently Brenden Aaronson. While the Academy is preparing kids for the soccer field, they are also preparing all the students for life beyond soccer.
"You can’t solve player development in soccer without solving education,” says Graham. “You have to think about those things together so that you can align both the athletic and the academic. So for the 90% or whatever of kids who don’t make it, we’re providing them a great education and they’re using that to get into some great schools and go do other things in life.”
The complete article can be read here with a subscription to The Athletic.
