LouCity | Racing Offers Pitch Perfect Support to Athletes With RealResponse

The Louisville, Kentucky-based youth soccer program prides itself on fostering a strong culture that creates invaluable opportunities for its athletes—including the chance to play for professional, collegiate and national teams. At the heart of this environment is LouCity | Racing Academy’s PITCH culture model, which outlines five values that are instilled across players, coaches and staff: personal accountability, intellectually engaged, trust, commitment and humility.

As Academy Executive Director Guillermo Sanchez explains, “Everybody plays a part in the environment we create, and the behaviors we want to see in our institution.” With RealResponse, Lou City | Racing Academy has a platform that reinforces the trust and accountability it expects from everyone in their community.

Inspiring growth in and out of play

LouCity | Racing Academy prides itself on offering valuable pathways to all of its youth athletes, whether it’s building an initial soccer affinity through its Academy Kids program or opening the door to professional opportunities via the club’s first teams.

“We have so many players who never would have thought college was an option for them, but soccer has given them the opportunity,” said Kristen Wallace, LouCity | Racing Academy Business Academy Director. “I love seeing some of these kids come back at 20, 21 years old and all of a sudden their whole life has changed.”

A driving force behind their programs is to empower LouCity | Racing Academy athletes in all aspects of their development, whether that is on or off the field. Setting scoring records and winning games is just one facet of a larger mission.

“There is some success you can measure, like the number of kids in both academies being recruited,” said Sanchez. “But there’s other success that you can’t measure as easily, which align with our PITCH
model. [Becoming a trustworthy teammate] is success athletes can carry with them later in life, throughout their careers.”

For academy coaches, instilling players with transferable life skills picked up through experiences like traveling for away games or navigating defeat—can be even more important than mastering footwork and defense.

“I always say we go through life as a tree. The roots are our families, and the branches are the different paths we can take in life. But what’s more important is the trunk. As an academy, we’re part of making sure each person’s trunk becomes stronger.”

Protecting everyone in the LouCity | Racing Academy community

LouCity | Racing Academy brought in RealResponse in the fall of 2022 to provide coaches and staff with an anonymous, two-way platform for reporting concerns and other incidents. After seeing success with employee adoption, leadership opted to expand the tool to players and families as well.

“It provides everybody with a level of comfort. Whether or not [families] use the platform, it shows that we want to protect our players as best as we possibly can,” said Wallace.

Staff regularly shares details about RealResponse with its community (for instance, in weekly newsletters) to reinforce the platform’s purpose and let people know it’s there if needed. Even though the club has fortunately not received many reports, leaders have embraced RealResponse as a critical component that helps bring the PITCH culture model to life.

As Sanchez explained, “Trust is at the heart of our philosophy, and we expect everyone to demonstrate it on and off the pitch.” When something as important as player safety is at stake, you need a mechanism you can trust to keep everyone protected.