Who is Philly’s next soccer star? The SWAG is trying to find him before he reaches the third grade

The sky over Upper Darby’s Observatory Hill Playground was darkening, allowing time last week for just one more drill before a summer rain storm swept through.

Ryan Griffith, The SWAG’s assistant director of coaching, positioned four miniature soccer nets into a square and instructed a player to guard each goal. A fifth player was placed in the middle, assigned to steal the ball as it was passed from net to net.

The drill — known as a “rondo” — implores the four players to work as a team and make quick decisions as they pass the ball away from the player in the center. And the drill pushes that kid in the middle to force one of the four players into a mistake by applying pressure near the net, which felt like a fitting drill for a program intended to find the area’s next male soccer star before he finishes the third grade.

» READ MORE: Meet the coach behind one of Philly’s top college football recruits: his mom

The SWAG, which launched in 2018, brings soccer for free into the region’s Black and immigrant communities while also mining for youngsters who could graduate to the Philadelphia Union Academy when they turn 9.

The program looks for glimpses of promise on a spotty patch of grass in the outfield of an Upper Darby baseball field or a Southwest Philadelphia playground. It tried to find talent at a school in Chester and soccer fields in North Philly.

It’s looking for the next Brenden Aaronson, who went from Medford to the Union Academy to Major League Soccer before becoming the first area player to ever score in the English Premier League. His goal for Leeds United — which came just a day before Griffith positioned those nets in Upper Darby — occurred after he pressured a goalkeeper into a brutal mistake.

Aaronson was the kid in the middle of the rondo, rushing to steal the ball, just on a bigger stage. And now The SWAG is trying to find the next one who can do it.

“That’s the goal,” Bibbs said. “It would mean that we’ve done our job. That’s exactly what we’re looking for.”

It’s strange to think of the Phillies or Eagles hoping to find their next star in a group of 8-year-olds, but the Union’s academy system has long been common overseas. There is no perfect science to tell an Aaronson from an Adams at such a young age, but The SWAG — which reaches 2,000 boys per year from ages 5 to 8 — is trying.

“You never really know since they’re so young, right? But this kid here, Miles, just started playing soccer with our program,” Bibbs said as Miles Brown ran into practice. “And once you see him break out in a sprint, you can pretty much tell, ‘If we can get a ball on his feet, he might be pretty good.’ You know what I mean? The way a kid moves or changes direction, you can be like, ‘Oh, there’s something there. Let’s get this kid more involved and see what we can do.’”

Bibbs grew up in West Philly, often feeling like the only kid in his neighborhood who played soccer after being introduced to the game through his stepfather’s Jamaican roots.

“I wasn’t telling people that I was playing soccer,” said Bibbs.

He was an all-state player at Lower Merion and played at Syracuse before turning pro. He played two seasons in Sweden and finished his career in 2016 on the Union’s second-division team. He directed the academy for Syracuse FC before returning home in 2021 to run The SWAG, a program he said would have been “a game changer” if it was around in West Philly in the 1990s when he was learning to play.

“I’d probably be playing in the Premier League,” Bibbs cracked.

» READ MORE: Is Philly a women’s basketball city? The WNBA wants to know before it expands here.

Now he’s tasked with finding kids in Philly with the talent to get there.

The SWAG was the idea of Steve Graham, the brother of Union minority owner Richie Graham, who created the Wayne high school attended by players in the Union Academy. The SWAG is aligned with the Union as most of the coaches — including Bibbs — also coach at the team’s academy, which has teams with players from 9 to 17 years old. The academy has placed 10 players on the current Union roster. Now The SWAG aims to feed the academy.

The SWAG is philanthropically funded with Steve Graham’s foundation — the Silverback Foundation — being the primary supporter, and the Union’s foundation is a partner.

The SWAG finds players either through its in-school and after-school programs or at “starter days,” which are their free clinics open to the public. Promising players are then invited to their select team, which practices three nights a week and plays games on the weekends at no cost for the players.

“It’s a challenge because they’re in the discovery stage, discovery meaning they don’t have any technical ability,” Griffith said. “You’re looking at a clean slate. Basically, if I was an artist, I would be looking at a blank canvas and trying to figure out, ‘What’s the potential there?’ It’s fun because for me personally, every kid has the potential. That’s how I look at the game.”

“I’m really building a house from scratch. The foundational pieces are key. Once you build a foundation, the house is on solid ground. Shoot, I wish I could get them at 3. If I get them early enough, they’ll get a solid foundation and be able to go off to play at whatever level they want to. Just being realistic, not everyone is going to play at an elite level, but some may play in middle school, some play in high school, some may play at the collegiate level, some may play at the high collegiate level, and then there’s a small percentage that goes on to play pro.”

Chris Clark grew up in North Philly, won two Catholic League basketball titles with Speedy Morris at St. Joseph’s Prep, and played at Temple for John Chaney and Fran Dunphy. He’s been a college coach since 2009 and is now a Temple assistant under Aaron McKie.

Basketball has always been his life. But Clark is lucky if he can watch it at home.

“We argue about the remote,” said Clark, whose son Chase is in his second year with The SWAG. “I’m like, ‘Yo, we’re watching basketball.’ He says, ‘No, we’re watching soccer.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, nah, nah, nah. We’re watching basketball.’ He’s really into it. He’s starting to develop a passion and a love for it, which is good to see. I don’t know how good he’s going to be, but if he loves it, that’s all that matters.”

Chase Clark is the type of player The SWAG is targeting as it looks for kids who normally would have played basketball or football and convert them into soccer stars. And now dad, who watched practice in Upper Darby from the bleachers, is learning to love another game.

“They just invest in the kids,” Clark said. “It’s a lot of time. As a coach now, you realize how much time you spend with the kids. For them to invest that time with these kids at an early age and take their time, I appreciate that. I’ve seen them invest into Chase and it’s not just soccer. You can tell they really care about the kids.”

Youth soccer is often expensive and connections can be essential for a kid to play at the club level. The SWAG looks to eliminate both of those as it covers the cost of players in the program while putting them in line when they age out to play at programs like Lower Merion Soccer Club or F.C. Delco. Or it funnels them to one of the coveted spots in the Union Academy, where seven of the 12 spots on the Under-9 team last season went to players from The SWAG.

“It’s open to everyone. We don’t say ‘no’ to anyone. That’s part of growing the game. You want as many people involved and engaged as possible,” Bibbs said. “But, we do want African American and immigrant communities to take advantage of this program because we know the limited resources in those communities and how they can’t afford the ‘pay to play’ model that the U.S. soccer model has been so far. This is a new idea and we want those demographics to take advantage.”

Griffith moved to Yeadon in 1999 from Barbados when he was 17 years old and played two seasons at Delaware County Community College. The athletic director there noticed that Griffith was running the practices as a player and asked him to coach the team after he was done playing. Griffith stayed there for 18 years.

“It definitely wasn’t about the payroll,” he said. “I just loved the experience.”

The school, he said, was “The United Nations of Soccer” as each season’s roster was mostly immigrants. It felt like everyone gravitated to play there, he said. The SWAG hopes to reach the region’s immigrant community just like Griffith’s community college team did.

Immigrants brought the sport to Philadelphia in the 1880s, popularizing it in riverward neighborhoods like Kensington and Fishtown. But the rising cost of the sport has since made soccer a sport with a suburban focus. The SWAG is trying to bring the game back where it started with immigrants in the inner city.

“The pool of players and talent is huge and really untapped to this point,” said Griffith, whose son, Riley, was on The SWAG team that captured the national 3v3 championship in July. “We’ve gotten a lot of players, but there’s so many more out here and we plan to hit all of them. Being in the schools and having these starter days are key because the select groups are small. My goal is to literally impact as many kids as possible using the game as a tool.”

» READ MORE: ‘Fighting for Joey’: A Bucks County community used basketball to help one of its own

Griffith’s rondo drill lasted for more than 10 minutes as the four players passed the ball around while the kid in the middle played chase. Whenever the middle player stole it, he traded his spot with the player he nabbed the ball from. When two kids fell to the grass in front of the net, the player in the middle scooped the ball with his hands and tossed it into the net. The defender petitioned to Griffith that it was illegal but the coach let it slide. Everyone laughed, a reminder that it was still a practice for 8-year-olds.

The storm soon hit, abruptly ending the sessions and sending the players — including perhaps the next Brenden Aaronson — scurrying to their parents as the rain poured down. In a decade, one of those kids could be pressuring a goalkeeper on a bigger stage.

“It might be sooner than we think,” Griffith said of a player from The SWAG turning pro. “But yeah, 13 to 15 years from now, we’re going to be saying, ‘We did things the right way and here’s the results of that.’”