Our Story

Most of this website is about you. Your development. Your weaknesses. Your game.

This page is the one exception. This is where Beast Mode Soccer came from, and why it works the way it does.

How David Copeland-Smith Started Beast Mode Soccer

I was sitting in an advertising office in London. Good job. Decent money. I looked around the room one afternoon and thought, I cannot do this. I am going to die in this office.

So I left. Did a summer at Camp America, ended up driving across the country to California, and in 2003 I stayed.

I started playing pickup soccer on a converted tennis court up in the hills above Beverly Hills. It was not much to look at. One thing led to another and I started training players there. No business. No plan. Just me, a field, and players who wanted to get better.

The players who turned up were not beginners. Abby Wambach. Kelley O'Hara. Christen Press. Word moves the way it always moves in this game. If you are good enough, people talk.

For a while I did not even have a name. I had a website called The Soccer Guru, which makes me wince now. Then one evening Ali Riley took a shot in training. Caught it clean, top corner. She said, that was beast mode. Nobody thought anything of it. I went to bed. At 2am I was lying there awake and thought, I wonder if beastmodesoccer is available. It was. The players loved the name. The parents hated it. I went with the players. I have always been a players' coach.

Beast Mode Soccer became the business in 2011. But the work had been going since 2003.

Why Beast Mode Soccer Only Develops the Individual Player

Here is the part that actually matters.

For years I coached teams. And a dad in Florida kept asking me to do individual  sessions with his kid. I thought it was pointless, to be honest. You develop players in a team, with the ball moving and decisions to make. One kid and a coach felt like a step backwards.

I did it anyway. And that kid got better, faster, than anyone I had coached in a team. Not a little. A lot.

That is when it clicked. Team training runs for the team. It has to. But the individual player, the specific weakness, the detail that is quietly costing someone their level, that gets lost. Nobody is coming to fix it. Someone has to sit with one player and go straight at it.

So that became the whole thing. One player. One focus. The weakness named and attacked until it holds up in a game. Because that is the only test that counts. The work has to transfer to the game, or it does not count.

That belief has not changed once since 2003. The players have. The tools have. The standard has not.

Beast Mode Soccer Today

Today Beast Mode Soccer trains players at every level of the game. Grassroots kids on their first competitive team. College players chasing offers. Professionals and internationals preparing for the biggest competitions in the world. More than 200,000 players have trained inside the system. 13 of the 24 players on the United States squad that won the 2019 World Cup had trained with us.

Some of those relationships go back a long way. Alex Morgan, 12 years. Ali Riley, going on 16. Rachel Daly, from a college kid at St. John's to a World Cup final and a European title. You do not keep the same trainer that long because the sessions looked good. You keep them because the work shows up on the field.

How you train with us depends on where you are. In-person one-on-one sessions in Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Ciudad de México. The Online Development Academy for players anywhere in the world. Beast Mode Soccer Plus, the training app, for the work between sessions. And all of it now runs on PlayerRX, the Individual Development Plan platform we built so a player's plan, weaknesses, goals, and progress live in writing, tracked and visible.

Along the way the methodology got written down. The Better Soccer Blueprint in 2013, one of the first individual development guides anyone had published. The Soccer Vortex after it. We have presented on the field at the United Soccer Coaches Convention four times, and partnered with US Club Soccer on its Players First initiative since 2015. None of that is the point. The point is the player in front of us, and whether the work transferred.

Our Mission

Our mission is one number. One million players who own their development. Players who stop waiting to be picked, stop waiting for a coach to notice them, and start building the player they want to be.

Not every player we train will go pro. That was never the promise. The promise is that every serious player can train with a real plan, real accountability, and a clear picture of what they are working on and why.

Every player deserves real development, not random training. That is the whole mission.

Start Where Every Beast Mode Soccer Player Starts

With a plan.

The Individual Development Plan shows you your real strengths, the weaknesses you have been avoiding, and the targets that actually move your game. The players who get where they want to go are rarely the most talented ones. They are the ones who decided to own it. It is free. Start there.