About us
We're local, we've known each other most of our lives, and we still play together.
Josh plays semi-pro, and after finishing high school he won a Long Island championship with his private team. He's spent over a thousand hours coaching kids, which is a number that sounds impressive until you realise it mostly means he's very good at remembering twenty names in under ten minutes.
Tilli played through high school and then college club soccer. He and Josh have known each other essentially their whole lives. Same fields, same teams, same arguments about who's quicker, and they still play together now.
We'd both been coaching for other people for years, and we kept noticing the same thing: the kids who needed it most were the ones having the least fun. Sessions were being run for the players who were already good, and everyone else was quietly working out that they weren't the point.
One day we asked each other the obvious question: why were we doing this for somebody else? We came up with the name that afternoon and started that week. Neither of us had to learn how to be good with kids. That part has always come naturally.
Coaching is about caring for the kid first. The soccer follows.
We want children leaving a session with a better touch and better habits: being disciplined, showing up, working hard, being kind to the person next to them. Those last a lot longer than any drill does, and they're the reason parents keep bringing kids back long after the initial skills have stuck.
The soccer itself is real, though. We're not running a glorified playdate. Kids get taught properly, corrected properly, and pushed to get better. It just doesn't have to be miserable to work.
Every kid plays and no kid sits out. We get children in the same session who have never kicked a ball and children already playing competitive club soccer, and our job is to make sure both of them leave having improved at something.
If your child is shy, that's genuinely fine. Most kids are on the first day. We learn names before we do anything else and nobody gets put on the spot in front of the group. Quiet kids get exactly as much of our attention as loud ones.
Some kids show up already sure of themselves. We don't try to knock that out of them. Confidence is hard to build and easy to break. Instead we put it to work: show them how to bring the quieter kid along, how to make the group better rather than just standing out in it.
It turns out that's also how they improve fastest. A kid who can lift the people around them gets better than a kid who's only ever measured against them.
Our Winter Indoor Clinic runs December through February, for ages 4 to 15. Small groups, both of us coaching, and indoor sessions all winter. For pricing, dates and location, call Coach Tilli at (516) 316-4528.
Questions about any of it? Call or text us on (516) 316-4528, email joshsschoolofsoccer@gmail.com, or message us on Instagram and one of us will actually reply.
Our Winter Indoor Clinic runs December through February, for ages 4 to 15. Call and we'll tell you honestly whether it's the right fit.
Call (516) 316-4528 for pricing
