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In 1994, Michael Kodama was granted an incredible opportunity as a high school soccer coach. He, along with a group of other coaches, was invited to watch the U.S. men’s national team and Bora Milutinovic train ahead of the home World Cup to be played later that year.
“It was very informal and to be able to do that with the U.S. national team coach meant so much, but there weren’t that many of us there,” Kodama said. “Now, there’s so much more available to people.”
In 2024, with yet another home World Cup on the horizon, Kodama’s high school soccer days are far in the past, but coaching remains ever present in his life. For the past couple years, he has served as the Community Relations Manager for United Soccer Coaches — the non-profit founded in 1941 that educates and provides resources for coaches across the country. Last month, he led the launch of the organization’s Communities Initiative Grant, which aims to develop coaches in underserved communities.
For successful applicants from high schools, clubs and coaches serving underserved communities, the grant provides financial assistance for educational courses and memberships and gives access to coach-specific conventions and diplomas.
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“There’s a lot of coaches in marginalized communities or high schools or community-based organizations that have a need for help, and that’s what this grant is all about,” Kodama said. “Our emphasis [is on] membership in United Soccer Coaches as well as our education courses, which can be made available to communities.”
Kodama worked together with U.S. Soccer to get the grant funded through its “Innovate to Grow” program, which originally launched in 2017 to help its member organizations grow participation in soccer.
“When we put in the application [to U.S. Soccer], we talked about how to do this, and we said we wanted to flip the model, which means that we’re making it all about the communities: ‘How do we help the communities? What do the communities need?’” Kodama said. “But the trick to the whole thing was not [making it] about United Soccer Coaches and not about U.S. Soccer, but how do we help the community? That’s the key to this whole thing.”
“It’s based on what the communities are currently doing, and how we can help them to be better. It’s not just soccer — it involves educational institutions, it involves local jurisdictions. So a wide range of different people are involved, which is pretty neat.”
Leaders of the United Soccer Coaches’ “Communities” took part in an Advocacy Hour with California State Treasurer Fiona Ma at last Janauary’s Coaches’ Convention in Anaheim.
Before Kodama taking his current position with United Soccer Coaches, he was an urban planner who specialized in transportation. His career took him across the country and the world — consulting with local governments on how to improve their infrastructure and working with communities to serve their day-to-day needs.
Although he embarked on a career that many would think would be devoid of soccer, Kodama found there were connections between his day job and his sporting passion. He came to this realization early on when working on the board of a Los Angeles neighborhood-building initiative in the 1990s. After talking to community members, Kodama found himself working with the Los Angeles Galaxy and the U.S. Soccer Federation to help build soccer programs.
“Soccer is just one of the things that, in underserved communities, is big,” Kodama said. “If you work through soccer, there’s so many things that you can do. Soccer itself leads to other life lessons and other things, whether it’s teaching English or teaching people the combination of wherever they’re from combined with being here in the United States and how it all works together. All of it can relate back to soccer, so I was involved with it all the time.”
“It’s amazing how many times we’d be talking about a work-related issue, related to transportation or community or economic development, and these soccer communities would come out and they would find out I’m nuts about the sport.”
As fate would have it, his expertise in fostering community engagement eventually led him back to soccer coaching — this time helping the individuals on the touchline instead of being on the touchline himself. In a sense, he now gets to pay forward the opportunity granted to him 30 years ago tenfold.
“With the World Cup coming up, the timing of this couldn’t have been better,” Kodama said. “Part of that, though, is including our underserved communities and making sure everyone has a chance to enjoy it […] If we’re able to do that, what an opportunity to not only grow the game, but also bring the country together.”
Photos courtesy of Michael Kodama
- More on United Soccer Coaches’ Communities Initiative Grant and to apply HERE.
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