Winter Garden Stars Academy is reshaping youth soccer

“The kids aren’t numbers to us.” 

It’s the motto Stars Academy founder Connor Williams lives by at his Winter Garden-based youth soccer academy. 

Rather than allowing the young athletes to try out in large blocks of 200 kids, he blocks tryouts in time groups and limits it to 30 to 40 athletes per slot. By doing this, he and the other coaches are able to look at each athlete individually and for their own unique talents. 

When Williams founded the academy in 2024, he began with five teams. Now after the academy wrapped up its second year, Williams looks toward creating 18 teams for its upcoming season. It’s an accomplishment he credits to the values within the academy and the staff’s pure love for the game. 

The academy closed its final tournament the ASG Capital Cup, which is the largest it competes in, Friday, May 15, to Sunday, May 17, in Tallahassee. Although the bulk of the academy’s teams have finished their regular seasons, others will prepare to play overseas in Paris, while the academy begins its summer camps in June and pre-season play begins Monday, July 20. 

Williams said the ASG Capital Cup was an important accomplishment for the academy this year. It brought 10 of its teams there. Eight made it to the semifinals, and six to the finals. 

“Those numbers don’t really exist,” he said. “Clubs that have been around for 15 to 20 years can bring 20 teams and maybe three or four can make it to the final and we’ve been able to do stuff that’s taken big clubs 10 to 20 years to accomplish.” 

ASG showcased the smaller and newer Stars Academy could compete with the well-established academies, and it’s just only getting started. 

STANDING OUT

Stars Academy’s training sessions begin with 30 minutes of ball mastery and technical work, then working on one-on-one scenarios of how to apply it against a real person. Then they go into small decisions and scenarios that were a weak point in games and translate all of it to becoming a better player within each game. 

Williams said what allows Stars Academy to be successful across its three teams, top, middle and bottom of an age group is its equal care for the top team and bottom team’s development. 

“You get a lot of issues at other clubs where it’s a different coach, different coach for practices, different coach for games,” he said. “We operate with a full-time staff, so our staff is very committed and this is what we want to do and we’re out there every day, truly caring about the kids.” 

The coaches’ dedication plays a big factor in the academy’s recent growth but so do the athletes who have bought into a loving culture. Rather than looking at each team individually and only supporting their own, the academy’s players are at tournaments to represent Stars Academy as a whole. 

Williams said one of his teams lost the final at the ASG cup, but rather than being upset, they turned toward him and said, “Coach we gotta go support our team over there.” There was another team that was competing in the penalty shootout of their final, and all of the players who freshly came off a loss ran over to support them. He’s even had a 13U girls team go over to support the 9U boys team that was competing. 

Over the seasons, Williams has seen the emphasis on loving the game pay off. 

The U10 boys team was able to play Inner Miami, one of the biggest names in youth soccer, in a semifinal game. The Inner Miami team was No. 20 in the nation, while Stars Academy’s team was a top team in Florida and Williams’ squad almost won the Regional Academy League. It finished second. 

In the tournament, Stars Academy was the only unrecognized MLS program to make it that far. The team actually was winning 1-0 but fell behind by one point at halftime and ended up losing. 

Williams walked away from that experience shocked. All he could think about was those 10 boys, who had only been with him for four to five years, were able to be on the same level as a top team in the nation. 

“That was really cool to see what they accomplished and the doors they opened from there, and even one of our players from that got reached out to by the actual Orlando City Youth scout,” Williams said. 

Seeing opportunities like that fuels Williams. He wants all his players to have the opportunity to find their own success, which is why he allows them to guest play on other academies’ teams. 

“The answer always should be yes (to guest play),” he said. “Go get extra minutes. Go learn under a new coach. Go have a different challenge, go develop. But what other clubs do is they lock a kid’s pass and they won’t allow this kid to go play for other clubs.” 

EDUCATING THE PARENTS

Since the season concluded, Williams has been in meeting mode. He’s spent every day of the past week from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. having one-on-one meetings with every parent for every player in the academy. In the meetings, he’s giving the parents a full-development evaluation and breaking down what they want to do next, good traits about the athlete and bad traits. 

He does this in order to teach the parents because many don’t know the proper culture of soccer. 

“I’m very reachable with all the parents, and I care about the kids so I have the uncomfortable talks with parents and I tell them very transparently what level their kid is at, but I also say, ‘Here’s what we can do to help them,” he said. 

Going into the next year, Stars Academy is going to push an initiative that goes out every month, and it’s going to require parents to have a one-hour conference call with him. He’s calling it “Educating the Parents.” 

It will teach parents about certain ways they act and how they handle situations that impact their kids on the field as well as what development looks like. 

“We run on a curriculum that you would get at school where it’s very focused on what you need to be doing to develop and has a pathway of not just talking about it, but we can actually show it and have a pathway of moving kids around and getting the extra opportunities,” Williams said.