Preps benefit from club play

OREM — Girls soccer in Utah County has been taken by storm — Celtic Storm, that is.

The valley's club program already is having an impact on local high school play and producing Division I players in the college ranks. And it all started out when Robyn Bretzing, the former Timpanogos High girls soccer coach, saw the need for basics and fundamentals to be taught before players reached the prep programs and not during.

Before Bretzing formed the multiteam developmental club in 1996, girls' soccer players in Utah County had few opportunities to play inside the valley, besides the two-month high school season. At the time, there were only two teams, coached by Ron Asay and Mark Graham.

That was something Bretzing wanted to change. "I wanted to expand the training of soccer so we could develop more players in Utah Valley at a higher level," she said.

Bretzing offered Gabe Smart — currently the UVSC women's soccer coach but then just having finished playing on BYU's team — a chance to coach one of the age-level Storm teams. Smart jumped at the opportunity to coach. But when she first started, her team struggled to win.

"People expected to walk all over us every year," Smart said. "Our goal when we first got started was to get Utah Valley soccer better and better."

In order to increase the level of play, Bretzing and the coaches had to start teaching the basics to their Celtic Storm players.

"They did not have a good grasp of how to control or dribble the ball," Bretzing said. "It was a lot of kick-ball game. The biggest need I saw was that we needed to develop more technical abilities in our high school players."

Once the technical abilities were taught Bretzing turned her attention to improving the girls' tactical understanding of the game. It was those two areas — fundamentals and tactical understanding — that she realized were lacking on the prep level during her three-year coaching at Timpanogos.

"When I took the job, we didn't have any developmental teams," she said."Because of that, our high school program really struggled because we were trying to develop these kids too late."

In order for that to change, Bretzing knew she had to get out of coaching high school soccer. "I realized I'm coaching at the end, when I needed to be coaching at the beginning," she said.

When she formed the Celtic Storm, she had four teams at different age levels with primarily Orem-based players. By November, she'll have a dozen teams, with players coming from all over Utah County and even from Salt Lake to play for the Celtic Storm.