River City Rangers Soccer Club

RCR is dedicated to serving the needs of all the players and has lived under this motto since it began in 1991 (now the oldest standalone club in the area). The board and the coaches believe in offering all players at every level a quality developmental program at a reasonable cost in a fun environment. This includes providing clinics and support for DIV and DIII with NASA and WAYA. Scott Placek, the first director of coaching ("DOC") for River City Rangers explains the meaning of our motto:"For the player tied into the basis of why and how we started. It was my belief that the money paid to the Big 3 at the time (Capitals, Longhorns and Flyers), had a very negative impact on player development. It was more about winning games and justifying your fees than what was best for the player. Since we had a volunteer staff, we could afford to put the player first. As DOC, I didn't want the staff coaches to have to worry about getting any results to keep their job and keep a paycheck coming in. All they had to do was develop the players, and they would be retained. So rather than worry about this game or that game, we worried about the players getting better. It was about them, not our coaches, not our paychecks and not anything else. It conveniently happened that we had a lot of success using this method. In five years I can only remember two or three problems between our technical staff and the parents/board about soccer issues or results. At the end of the day, the technical side prevailed on all of them, largely because as a volunteer staff, there really wasn't any leverage to force the coach to make popular decisions rather than soccer decisions. I mean, think about it, what are you gonna do? Fire the coach so he can go off and get paid by the Longhorns, Flyers or Caps? Not a big hammer. It still applies today, albeit differently. Soccer in Austin has changed, in many ways for the worse, since the early days of the club. You used to be able to put a team together, develop it and move it along. Today there is way to much pressure for immediate results. Parents are quick to pull their kids from a team and club hop looking to be frontrunners. Some will go back and forth between two clubs as they switch position in the standings, and if the player is good enough, the club puts up with it. Today for the player has to mean a willingness to do the right thing for each individual player. Sometimes it may mean letting a player go to a higher level, sometimes it may mean losing a team even, rather than accede to unrealistic expectations or demands of parents. Most of all, it needs to mean a shared culture, hopefully bought into by the parents, that we judge success on our players and their progress. Parents who don't buy that can leave. In the end, that focus on the player will produce successful teams."