The Latino Coaches Advocacy Group distributes a monthly newsletter to keep its members up to date on news, deadlines and other association happenings. The newsletter also serves to let members know what the group is working on, highlighting group members and information on how you can get involved. Below is a letter from group chair Julio Serrano. To read the full newsletter, click here.
My Fellow Coaches,
Over the next few months we will be having a rotation of our “Letter from the Chair” with each of our Strategic Team Chairs kicking off the monthly newsletter. I look forward to each of our 4 group chairs sharing their voice.
Please if there are questions, concerns, or you are if you are interested in being a part of the Latino Advocacy group send us an email.
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Latino Advocacy Chair
Julio C Serrano
latinocoaches@unitedsoccercoaches.org
Latino Advocacy Vice Chair
Jacob Morrison
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Please allow me to introduce myself. I am John B. Orozco a High School Coach from Toledo Ohio. I am a 20 year member of United Soccer Coaches and a member of the original Latin American Soccer Coaches Association (LASCA), the founding group of the present Latino Coaches Advocacy Group. I am pleased and honored to be writing this article as a perspective from the Chairman of the Recruitment Committee. As a Committee our role is to Recruit and Promote Latino Leadership. We have worked to initiate a line of communication between new prospective members as well as to promote the 30 Under 30 Program to our younger member coaches as an educational and advancement platform.
Recently, our Chairman of the Latino Coaches Advocacy Group Julio Serrano announced an increase of latinos who submitted applications for consideration to the 30 Under 30 Program from 4% to 14% to the United Soccer Coaches. According to United Soccer Coaches, since this program’s inception in 2013, “we were able to select the most diverse class in the history of the program”. We are pleased to see another latina Jacquelinne Herrera (Indianapolis, Ind.) and three latinos Miguel Guittierez (Morgan Hill, Calif.), Mauricio Lozada (Denver, Colo.), and Jose Rodriguez (Athens, Ga.). This is a doubling of the 2019 class where Natasha Flores (Bremen,Indiana) and Gabriel Rocha (Tucson, Arizona) were successful candidates. We believe that today we have a better understanding of the process that makes for a successful candidate. It is now incumbent that we begin to recruit more young latinas and latinos so they can take full advantage of this program. We also believe that we need to begin the mentoring process at our grassroots level in order to help them through the process. We hope that we can collaborate with the present and previous latino participants to help us continue to grow the numbers of latino candidates and participants.
We were reminded by Chairman Serrano that according to United Soccer Coaches there are 1200 members in the organization listed as latinos. It is our belief that those numbers may be even greater. We encourage every Coach to accurately identify his nationality category when registering. This awareness in our organization’s database allows us to continue to grow and provide even greater opportunities for our Advocacy Group. The other issue that is sometimes lost is that our focus does not solely extend itself to the Coach who may be latino(a) but also to those who coach or mentor latino(a) athletes. It is our feeling that we need to serve that sector of our membership as well. We need to understand how we can better serve these athletes so as to increase the player’s opportunities to play at the next level and eventually become the Coaches of tomorrow.
In a recent conversation with one of our newest members of our Recruitment Committee, we discussed the importance of extending ourselves into the collegiate ranks. We want to identify Collegiate Coaches and begin to work with them to network in anyway possible. This is a sector of our United Soccer Coaches membership which is under represented within our network. It is important that our next step is to see how we can integrate Collegiate Coaches into our Latino Coaches Advocacy Group.
In closing, I encourage you to consider how we can better serve a young coach by introducing him or her to any of our Advocacy Groups. https://unitedsoccercoaches.org/ what-is-advocacy/ I believe for us to grow internally, we would be better served by possibly helping other coaches find a group that would help them in their coaching development. It is my belief that to grow internally is to grow together. Please feel free to get in contact with us if we can assist you.
-John Orozco