Eddie Lewis, the former U.S. men’s national team soccer player who had a late start in the sport, found a way to get ahead of the curve when he began juggling tennis balls with his feet.
Now, after a long and successful domestic and international soccer career that included stints with Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Galaxy and London’s Fulham Football Club, Lewis has launched a company called TOCA that seeks to accelerate training for future soccer stars using smaller-than-regulation balls, a smart dispensing system and app that quantifies data.
Lewis wants TOCA to do for soccer what pitching machines, batting cages and more recently smart bats have done for baseball. He wants to revolutionize the way people train, recover from injury and recruit talent in the sport.
“We really want to impact the largest sport in the world,” Lewis said in a recent interview with SportTechie. “I’m convinced that this won’t be an issue of whether your team has the TOCA platform, but that you’d almost be left behind if you didn’t have one.”
Since 2014, TOCA has deployed professional-grade soccer ball dispensers, which have been available in beta at select training facilities. They issue smaller-than-regulation soccer balls — size-3 balls vs. the size-5 balls players see in games — so that players can tighten up their skills.
The system integrates with a mobile app so that coaches can tweak the kinds of serves players get, while analyzing feedback in real time and progression over time.
More recently, the TOCA system has started to expand beyond dedicated training facilities to professional soccer teams as well, including England’s Queens Park Rangers, the Galaxy, NYCFC and Colorado Rapids.
Later this year, Lewis plans to add smart targets to the suite, which will add an additional layer of complexity that will help soccer players not only analyze their reception of the ball but hone in on their passing skills as well.
Tennis balls
The idea for TOCA derived from an unlikely place: tennis balls.
Lewis, a Southern California native who didn’t start playing soccer until he was 14, was a good enough athlete through high school to earn him a spot on the team at UCLA. However, he always felt behind the curve and went through great lengths to try and catch up.
One day, when watching the UCLA basketball team practice 3-point shots on a smaller-than-normal rim, he realized that the same kind of idea could be applied to soccer.
“It made sense to me that it would make 3-point shots easier in the game,” Lewis said. “So I thought, “OK, if I reduce the the size of the ball — a tennis ball — it’d have the same effect.”
Lewis saved up his money and bought a tennis ball dispensing machine a few weeks later. After class and on weekends in a warehouse parking lot, he’d set the machine up and practice for hours, sometimes getting in thousands of extra practice touches in between regular team training sessions.
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The smaller balls helped him to grow his ball-handling skills rapidly, making regulation-sized balls a piece of cake when he’d return to the field with his team. The private sessions also helped him to work on problem areas, such as passing and receiving with his non-dominant foot, which he’d shy away from using during regular practice sessions.
“In a very short period of time, my skills were very rapidly developing,” Lewis said. “I was getting essentially a month’s worth of practice in an afternoon or two.”
That same kind of mentality is what prompted him years later to launch TOCA.
Cognitive training and quantification
While the TOCA balls and dispensing machines have helped players increase the volume of touches they’re getting, the smart targets, expected to launch in the fourth quarter of this year, will add a new layer of complexity.
The targets will use sensors to calculate the accuracy of player passes and shots. They’ll be fitted with green and red lights so that players can learn to react more quickly to hit the correct targets (green) and avoid the incorrect ones (red) once they receive the ball.
Altogether, the system is designed train players on a cognitive level, improving their reaction times and mimicking a fast-moving real-life game scenario.
“Everyone is going after the untapped muscle — the brain,” Lewis said. “In soccer, every player on the field is the quarterback. There aren’t set plays, you’re constantly processing information and determining which is the best pass at the moment and then executing.”
TOCA aims to use quantitative analysis so that players can track information about how many balls they’ve received, how many touches they’ve had, and how accurate their passes were, so that they can improve against themselves over time.
In later iterations of the app, TOCA might also integrate a community platform, which would enable players to compete with other TOCA users from around the world, or perhaps even download the practice drills of pro players to try and beat their score.
Further down the road, Lewis envisions a world where the TOCA system might be used for scouting purposes as well, providing scouters a way to quantify and rank potential recruits.