The Academy's Missing Line Item: Why Clubs Are Treating Education as Infrastructure

Every academy budget accounts for coaching staff, travel, medical support, and increasingly, sports science. Fewer account for the classroom. That is starting to change.

Over the past five years, a growing number of MLS, MLS Next Pro, and USL clubs have moved to formalize academic infrastructure for their academy players, not as an afterthought, but as a structural requirement for competing at the elite level. The driver is not idealism. It is risk management.

"In the past five years, out of the 35 years Laurel Springs has existed, this has been the great surge in North America. Teams are recognizing that the rigorous demands of travel and training require a complementary academic system, because for parents, the decision to buy into elite programs often hinges on academics not being compromised."

Jack Dempsey, Strategic Partnerships and Development Manager, Laurel Springs School

The problem clubs are solving for is structural, not motivational. A traditional school calendar is built around fixed schedules, bell times, and a single academic year. An athlete training internationally, missing weeks for tournaments, or logging morning training sessions before school does not fit that structure, regardless of how supportive the school is. The result, according to Dempsey: missed credit, eligibility risk, and families reaching a breaking point by the time winter break arrives.

The more instructive insight for club operators may not be about education specifically. It is about how clubs are learning to evaluate any infrastructure partner in a post-COVID market flooded with new entrants.

"Post-COVID, a lot of online schools popped up because it was a trendy thing to do," Dempsey said. "But clubs don't want to take a risk on something trendy. They want to take a leap into what they know is factual and authentic. A GM, an investment group, a coach, whoever is making that call, they're vetting based on what can be fact-checked."

That logic, track record over branding, verifiable outcomes over marketing copy, is a useful filter for any operator evaluating a services partner, whether the category is education, sports science, or facility management. The clubs Dempsey cites as active academic partners, including New York City FC, Colorado Rapids, and San Jose Earthquakes, are notable less for the specific vendor they chose and more for the diligence pattern behind it: a multi-year track record, third-party verifiable outcomes, and a model that survives scrutiny from university admissions offices, not just parents.

Dempsey's vetting framework has a counterpart on the academic side, and it is where Head of School Alyssa Tormala's answer gets specific rather than promotional. NCAA eligibility, she notes, is not a claim a school can simply make. It is cross-checked against a second, independent catalog.

"Our courses have been pre-approved by the NCAA as being legitimate academic courses that can be used toward that student's college career. It's not just getting into the college of their choice, it's that from a student-athlete perspective, they qualify to be performing college athletics at that college. That means you can trust, and the NCAA can trust, that what we provide is going to get those students academically prepared for college and beyond."

Alyssa Tormala, Head of School, Laurel Springs School

That double approval, first by the school, then independently listed in the NCAA's own course catalog, is the kind of detail that distinguishes an accredited academic program from a vendor asserting rigor in a sales deck. Tormala also points to a structural advantage that has nothing to do with online learning being more permissive, and more to do with it being unconstrained by a physical building. In her prior role running a traditional college-prep program, she says schedule conflicts routinely forced students to choose between courses they wanted: "We often had conflicts between science classes. For example, a student might want to take AP biology and AP chemistry in the same year. But often those two classes only had one section each and/or had to happen at the same time in the schedule, and that made it impossible for a student to take both if they wanted to." Without a shared-facility constraint, students can stack a full slate of AP and honors coursework without those collisions, one of the reasons Laurel Springs reports that a third of its graduating class over the past two years has been admitted to highly selective institutions, including Ivy League schools, MIT, and Juilliard.

The question that comes up most often with prospective club partners, according to Dempsey, is resourcing: does formalizing an academic pathway require building a physical campus at the training facility?

It does not. Clubs can start with a model that scales alongside their stage of development, from a single course covering a missing NCAA credit, to a fully remote arrangement, to an embedded on-site cohort model where one group of players trains while another studies, then the groups rotate. None of it requires the capital outlay of a dedicated academic building.

"You don't have to build out a high school campus at your training facility. You could partner locally with a quiet space within a few miles of where you train and get it done."

Jack Dempsey

That flexibility matters most for clubs earlier in their academy build-out, where capital is going toward pitches, coaching staff, and scouting infrastructure first. Education can scale in behind it rather than compete for the same budget line.

The outcomes data is the part of this that should interest investors evaluating academy return beyond first-team call-ups. Roughly 40 percent of the Laurel Springs student population is composed of competitive athletes or pre-professional pursuits. Dempsey has personally worked with nearly 3,000 students across his nine years in the role, close to one per working day, while Laurel Springs as a whole has served tens of thousands of students over its 35-year history and graduated more than 7,000. Its class of 2025 recorded a 90 percent pass rate on AP exams, an 86 percent acceptance rate into at least one of a student's top three college choices, and acceptances spanning 460 unique colleges and universities in a single graduating year.

Those figures are the school's own reporting. Applying the same standard this piece opened with, verify before trusting the brand, a sample of Laurel Springs soccer alumni checked against official team and university sources shows the pathway claim holds up in both directions: the professional track and the elite academic track.

• Trinity Rodman, Washington Spirit, NWSL
• Peter Molinari, New York City FC, MLS
• Kobi Henry, Real Salt Lake, MLS
• Ethan Kohler, New England Revolution, MLS (originally committed to Stanford)
• Vlad Danciutiu, Austin FC II, out of Xavier University's 2025 signing class

• Lucas Benuce Sarvas, Harvard University
• Philip Pak, University of Pennsylvania
• Astrid Wheeler, Stanford University
• Pearl Cecil, University of Virginia
• Fritz Volmar, Northwestern University
• William Hayden Evans, University of Michigan

Sourcing: official MLS and NWSL player pages, university athletics rosters, and official team announcements.

For clubs, that is not just a feel-good statistic. It is a retention and reputation asset. A verified academic pathway becomes part of the pitch a club makes to a family deciding whether to commit a young athlete to a demanding travel and training schedule. Get the pathway story right, and a club becomes more competitive in recruiting talent whose parents are, by definition, evaluating risk on both the athletic and academic side of the ledger.

As capital continues to flow into North American soccer in the wake of the 2026 World Cup, the visible investments, stadiums, training centers, scouting departments, get most of the attention. The education layer is quieter, cheaper to stand up than most infrastructure, and increasingly treated by serious academies as table stakes rather than a nice-to-have. Clubs evaluating their own academy build-out would do well to ask the same question Dempsey says he fields from prospective partners nearly every day: what do we actually need to dedicate to get this right, and who has the receipts to prove their model works?

Laurel Springs School is a WASC and Cognia accredited, NCAA and UC system approved online private K-12 school serving students in all 50 states and 70+ countries, with education partnerships spanning MLS academies and clubs across North America. Learn more here: https://partners.laurelsprings.com/OneSoccerNation

Soccer Insider is produced by One Soccer Nation. Reach the newsroom at kr@onesoccernation.com.