Open Source Soccer: Building a Youth Club in Public
The Precedent
In 2016, Dennis Crowley — the co-founder of Foursquare — started a soccer club in Kingston, New York. Kingston Stockade FC plays in the NPSL, a fourth-division amateur league in a city of about 19,000 people. By every conventional measure, it was a small-ball operation.
What made it remarkable was what Crowley did next: he published everything. Revenue numbers ($93,072 in their first full season — $50,647 from merchandise, $32,425 from tickets, $10,600 from sponsors). Expense breakdowns. Attendance data. Operational mistakes. Strategic decisions and the reasoning behind them. He called it "open source soccer" and put it all on Medium for anyone to read.
The impact was disproportionate to the club's size. Crowley has spoken to over 50 clubs that said they exist because they read his blueprint. Kingston Stockade FC didn't just build a fourth-division team — they created a replicable model and gave it away.
That's the idea behind open source: you don't lose value by sharing how you work. You create value.
The Build-in-Public Movement
What Crowley did for lower-division soccer, a generation of tech founders has been doing for startups. The "build in public" movement — popularized by communities like Indie Hackers and founders like Pieter Levels — is built on a counterintuitive premise: sharing your process, your numbers, and your mistakes makes you stronger, not weaker.
Pieter Levels built a portfolio of products generating over $3 million per year. He did it by sharing his Stripe revenue screenshots, his code decisions, his product ideas, and his failures in real time on social media. No stealth mode. No "we'll announce when we're ready." He built in public and let the audience watch — and the audience became his customer base, his feedback loop, and his distribution channel.
The Indie Hackers community formalized this into a movement. Thousands of founders now publish monthly revenue reports, share their growth experiments, and document their failures alongside their successes. The logic is simple: transparency builds trust, trust builds audience, audience builds business.
But here's what interests me: this movement has been almost entirely confined to tech. Nobody's applied it to youth sports. The organizations that shape millions of kids' experiences — youth soccer clubs, leagues, governing bodies — operate almost entirely behind closed doors. Fees are announced, not explained. Decisions are made, not debated openly. Financial data is proprietary. Coaching philosophies are marketing copy, not published curricula.
Why?
Why Youth Sports Resists Transparency
The standard answer is competitive advantage. If we publish our coaching curriculum, other clubs will copy it. If we publish our finances, families will question our fee structure. If we publish our decision-making process, people will second-guess us.
I understand the instinct. But let's examine each of these fears.
"Other clubs will copy our curriculum." Good. If your coaching curriculum is genuinely effective, the sport benefits when more clubs use it. And if your competitive advantage depends on nobody else knowing what you do in training, your advantage isn't very deep. The best development programs in the world — the KNVB in the Netherlands, the DFB in Germany — publish their frameworks openly. They compete on execution, not secrecy.
"Families will question our fee structure." They already do. Every parent who writes a $3,000 check wonders where the money goes. The difference is that without transparency, they fill the gap with assumptions — usually uncharitable ones. Published financials don't create scrutiny. They redirect scrutiny from suspicion to information. That's better for everyone.
"People will second-guess our decisions." Yes. That's the point. Second-guessing by informed stakeholders is called accountability. It's uncomfortable. It's also the mechanism by which organizations improve. Decisions made in daylight are better decisions, because the people making them know they have to defend them.
The real reason youth sports resists transparency is simpler: opacity is easier. Not having to explain your coaching hires, your fee increases, your playing time decisions, your financial priorities — that's just less work. Transparency creates obligation. Most organizations don't avoid it because they have something to hide. They avoid it because accountability is expensive and uncomfortable.
What We Publish
Solstice FC is building in public. Not as a marketing strategy — though it functions as one — but as a structural commitment. Here's what's already published and available:
25 debate transcripts. Before we made any major design decision, we ran structured debates. AI agents argued opposing positions on governance models, fee structures, competition formats, coaching standards, promotion/relegation mechanics, and more. The full transcripts — including the positions we rejected and why — are published. You can read the arguments for and against cooperative governance. You can see why we chose metro-scoped competition over national travel. You can trace the reasoning, not just the conclusion.
9 spec documents. The detailed specifications for how Solstice FC works — governance architecture, financial model, competition structure, player development framework, coaching standards, technology stack, and more. These aren't marketing summaries. They're the actual architectural documents with the actual numbers.
Financial model. How we plan to fund operations, what our fee structure looks like, where the money goes, and what our break-even assumptions are. Not "competitive fees" — actual fee ranges with actual cost breakdowns.
Governance architecture. How decisions get made, who has voting power, what the oversight mechanisms are. The cooperative structure isn't a vibes statement — it's a constitutional framework with defined roles, responsibilities, and accountability mechanisms.
This isn't typical for a youth soccer organization. Most clubs publish a mission statement, a fee schedule, and maybe a coaching bio page. The decision-making process is invisible. The financial model is proprietary. The governance is "the board decided."
We think that's backward. Parents are being asked to trust these organizations with their kids' development, their weekends, and thousands of dollars per year. They deserve to see how the sausage is made.
Transparency as Competitive Advantage
Here's the counterintuitive part: publishing everything doesn't weaken our position. It strengthens it.
Trust accrues to the transparent. In a market where every club's website says "player development is our priority," the club that publishes its actual development curriculum, its actual coaching evaluation criteria, and its actual retention data stands out. Not because the claims are different — because they're verifiable.
Feedback improves the product. When we published our debate transcripts on promotion/relegation, we got feedback from coaches, parents, and club operators that changed our implementation plan. The inputs we received from people who actually run youth soccer programs were more valuable than any consultant we could have hired. Building in public isn't just about showing your work — it's about letting the audience improve it.
Replication is a feature. If another city wants to build a Solstice-style club using our published specs, that's not competition — that's mission fulfillment. We're not trying to be the only good youth soccer club. We're trying to prove that a different model works. The more clubs that adopt transparent, cooperative, development-focused structures, the better the ecosystem gets for every kid.
Accountability keeps you honest. When your financial model is public, you can't quietly raise fees without explaining why. When your coaching standards are published, you can't hire an unqualified coach and hope nobody notices. When your governance architecture is documented, you can't make autocratic decisions and call them democratic. Transparency creates internal discipline that benefits the organization, not just its stakeholders.
Kingston Stockade FC demonstrated this at the semi-pro level. Crowley's published financials and operational data didn't help competitors steal his fans. They built a community that felt ownership over the club because they could see how it worked. Transparency created loyalty, not vulnerability.
What We're Not Doing
Building in public doesn't mean building by committee. We're not putting every decision to a public vote. We're not crowdsourcing our coaching curriculum from Twitter. We're not publishing individual player evaluations or sensitive family financial information.
The line is: organizational decisions and structures are public. Individual and private information is not. You can see our fee structure. You can't see who's on scholarship. You can see our coaching evaluation framework. You can't see an individual coach's performance review. You can see our governance model. You can see the debates that shaped it.
This is the same distinction that open source software makes. The code is public. Individual users' data is not. The architecture is visible. The implementation in any specific context adapts to local needs.
The Invitation
If you're a parent evaluating youth soccer clubs, ask yourself: how much do you actually know about how your club makes decisions? Can you see the budget? Do you know the coaching credential requirements? Can you trace the logic behind the fee structure?
If the answer is "no" to most of those questions, you're trusting a black box with your child's development, your family's time, and your money. That might be fine — plenty of opaque organizations do good work. But it's worth asking why the information isn't available.
If you're a club operator, I'd challenge you to consider what you'd lose by publishing more. Your fee breakdown. Your coaching requirements. Your development outcomes. Your financial model. What are you actually protecting by keeping these private? And is the protection worth the trust deficit it creates?
Kingston Stockade FC proved that a soccer club can publish its financials and its playbook and still thrive. The build-in-public movement in tech has proven that transparency scales — that companies sharing everything from revenue to roadmaps can build sustainable businesses.
Youth sports is one of the last sectors where opacity is the default. We think it should be the exception.
Everything we're building at Solstice FC is available to read, critique, and learn from. Not because we think we've figured it all out, but because we think the process of figuring it out should be visible.
The beautiful game deserves an open playbook.
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