Foothills Fire: Vision, Mission, and Values

What is it we want of our team? Is it to win at any cost? Is it just a way to get fresh air and exercise? Is it merely to be a social club for young women? No, of course none of these things encompass what we want from our team. In order to understand what our team is and what our expectations of each other must be, we have to ask ourselves what is the vision, mission, and values of our team.

Our vision is that we compete with a commitment to excellence. This doesn’t simply mean that we play hard in games; it means that we individually and as a team compete in everything that we do – and when we compete, we passionately pursue being our best. It is through competition that we are going to challenge each other to be the best we can be.

Our mission is to develop character, develop players, and win through highly competitive soccer. I don’t think it is a secret that we are a highly competitive soccer team and that it is our goal to win. However, whether we win or not we focus on developing players as individuals and as a team, and more importantly on developing each player’s character.

Anson Dorrance, the head coach of the University of North Carolina’s highly successful women’s soccer program, often states that sports is not a “character developer” but instead is a “character exposer”. This is no doubt true at his level of coaching. However, in youth soccer, I believe that character is still being developed and that each of us has an outstanding opportunity to positively impact the character of each player.

Our values are the common attributes that we agree to share and follow no matter what – our values are the foundation upon which we build everything we do. Our values are development, competition, respect, and commitment to excellence.

Development. We are committed to both individual development and team development. I believe that we have the opportunity to not just expose character, but also to develop and hone character.

Competition. We are passionate about competing in every aspect of what we do – individually and as a team in both practice and games. We have a proud history of superb team competition; this year we’re going to step up to challenging each other individually as well.

Respect. We will continue to respect our teammates, our coaches, our parents, our opponents, our referees, and all others with whom we practice and play. As we focus increasingly on helping each other through competition, it is incredibly important that we equally pursue respect as a core value.

Commitment to excellence. We are committed to excellence in all that we do, including both practice and games.