Jordan Allen on the inner workings of Real Salt Lake’s youth academy

Jordan Allen is the head coach of the Real Salt Lake’s U-16 team, which recently won the U-16 final at the 2025 Generation adidas Cup. Allen’s team won all six games en route to the final, where RSL dominated the LA Galaxy 4-0.

Allen first joined RSL’s academy staff in 2021, but the Rochester, New York, native has a long history with the club outside of his coaching career. He first joined RSL’s academy as a teenager before signing a homegrown contract a couple years later in 2013. Allen, now 30 years old, went on to make 50 appearances for the club over five years before he announced his retirement in 2019.

As a teenager, Allen was a prodigious talent. He was a part of the U.S. Soccer U-17 residency program in 2011 and he earned caps for the United States at the U-17, U-18, and U-20 levels. 

SOCCER AMERICA: How did it feel for you, as a former Real Salt Lake academy graduate, to lead the club to a GA Cup title as a coach?

Jordan Allen: I’ve been with the club for a long time, and through a lot of different phases. My first interaction with RSL was playing as a guest player with them at GA Cup back in 2011, so to fast forward 14 years and to be on the other side of it, coaching and working with players that I’ve been with, some of these kids, for three years now, to see the progress that they’ve made and show their best self on that type of stage with different international opponents that we played, some of the top MLS academies that we played, it feels great. It’s a great reward for the work that they’ve done. And for me personally, just to be on both sides of it was a really cool experience.

SA: What allowed your team to reach the levels of success your team did last month?

JORDAN ALLEN: I think it’s just consistency. Working with these players for as long as I have along with the amount that these kids train, sometimes twice a day, a lot of them living away from their families—you only have success when you’re consistent. That comes from training at their best every single day, being good teammates, being good people off the field. And when you’re consistent for long periods of time, good things start to happen. I think that’s what that week was for a lot of these guys: in the biggest moment, for a lot of these kids, individually, things clicked. And for them as a team, things clicked. It just comes down to the consistency of their work ethic and who they are as kids, as players, as people.

SA: What were your expectations and confidence level going into the tournament?

JORDAN ALLEN: In youth soccer, it’s hard to really get a gauge of where teams are at because, for example, this team last year made it to the Round of 16. They qualified for playoffs, and we thought that we had a good team that needed to add some pieces. Then in the summer of last year, we added those pieces, but at the same time that we did that, some of our top players for that 2009 age group we bumped up to the U18s. 

Someone like Van Parker has been playing up with the U-18s all season. Cris Rios—who actually got injured throughout the tournament, so he didn’t play in the knockout stage—he’s been up with the U-18s. We had Linkon Ream, who stayed with the U-18s, but he’s a 2009 that’s playing up. So we felt going into this tournament that we hadn’t really seen the best group that we have in our club for the U16 age group, because we’re trying to push players on. And some of these kids have developed to the point where they deserve and have earned the opportunity to play up. 

So we were confident going into the tournament, because we knew we had a really good team last year. We had made it stronger, and we’d gone this whole season without seeing all those pieces together. So I think that’s maybe why we caught teams by surprise, or we maybe weren’t in previews as one of the top teams, but we knew in terms of talent at the club, we are one of the premier academies, and we work a certain way where we move our best players on at times, and maybe that hinders our results. 

But we’re not really about results at the academy level. We’re about developing players, and then when we get to a premier event, like GA Cup, where we get to playoffs, that’s when it’s like, “OK, let’s see what our best group looks like.” And we found out that our best group looked pretty good in comparison to a lot of other academy teams, both domestic and internationally.

‘Different paths in our academy’

SA: Three of your players—Parker, Rylan Hashimoto, and Konstantinos Kyriazis—seemed to really stand out. Talk about these players’ contributions to the tournament run…

JORDAN ALLEN: I think the three of them really embody what we want to be as a club. We have someone like Van Parker, who we brought in as the younger age group when it was the U-15 team. He came in as a 13-year-old player who was playing with our U-15s. Two years ago, he played in our first GA Cup with us as a supporting player. He maybe played 15 minutes in the group stage, 10 minutes in the knockout stage, and then he played more of his minutes in the showcase. And over the course of the last two and a half years, each year, he’s improved his technique and his holdup play in that final was top tier. As the tournament went on, he got better and better. 

Then on the flip side of that, you have someone like Konstantinos, who was goalkeeper of the tournament this year, but last year was our second choice goalkeeper all of GA Cup. He’s been here grinding behind the scenes, getting better, and after a year of really being a second choice goalkeeper for us, is now starting every game, getting to show himself at the highest level and earn that type of award. So you can see the short term growth that’s been happening behind the scenes with someone like Tinos.

And then the last piece for us, and it’s the benefit that we have at RSL, having the dorms. Rylan Hashimoto, who last year had a great season, and we’ve been tracking him for a while at Sacramento Republic, and he’s just too far to away from San Jose to make that commute to play for the Earthquakes, wanted to expose himself to a better challenge to play in an event like GA Cup. So he joined our academy last summer, and the beginning part of it was a little bit of an adjustment period for him—getting used to being at an MLS club, getting used to the standards that we wanted him to perform at. Over the course of eight months, we got to GA Cup, and he’s the very best version of himself. His game has gone up another level, and he’s gone up another level where he can be a difference maker against top-tier competition. 

So I think through the three of those kids, all of them really important to the team, you see three different paths in our academy and how we’re trying to develop kids and how each path is really important.

SA: Who were the unsung heroes of the cup run?

JORDAN ALLEN:  I think there’s a lot of kids. Javi Martinez made the team of the tournament, and he was playing alongside Rowan Martin. I think the combination of the two of those players were phenomenal. They’re two of the kids that we’ve been working with for three years. They came in the same time as Van and played in the double age group as second choice, and each year they’ve gotten better and better. The reward for me is watching those guys go from the younger kids in a double age group, kind of learning from some of our 2008s—our national team kids like Omar Marquez and Luca Moisa—to now, you fast forward a couple years, and they’re the main guys making a team go at a really, really high level. It was amazing to be able to see that with my own eyes and experience that and see the confidence that they have after the journey they’ve been on the last couple of years.

SA: You took on this role as a head coach in RSL’s academy a couple years ago. What have you learned along the way to get where you are now?

JORDAN ALLEN: My career had to come to an end early because of my knee surgeries, and that was a big lesson for me before I even started coaching. After I retired, I realized what I cared about most wasn’t necessarily getting to a certain point and achieving something specific, but it was more of how much I loved the process of training every day, working with other people that were like minded, and focusing on the sport. That’s something that I’ve carried on as I’ve become a coach now, and I got a great opportunity when I retired and went back to the University of Virginia. I got to work for three years as an assistant and learn from a staff that had been working together for 20+ years, and got to learn what the process as a coach looks like there in the college landscape at an ACC school. 

Coming to the academy, it’s a little bit of a different experience, because it’s younger kids. It’s more about the development. It’s not as much about the result on the weekend each week. And the lesson is not getting too focused on results, in terms of where I want to get myself as a coach, and more just focusing on how I can get better and how I can help improve these players. It’s the biggest lesson that I’ve taken from my experience as a player, and I think it served me really well. It served the players really well, because I can always communicate with them on a day-to-day basis where they’re going to find fulfillment, where they’re going to look back and really find joy in their experience with the sport. It’s the work that they put in every day, the relationships that they create, the progress that they see in themselves, and not necessarily the milestones that they accomplish. Although those will be exciting moments. 

This is a really exciting moment. What makes this exciting and special for the kids is that they’re doing this with people that they work hard with every single day, and they’ve had failure together, and now they’ve been able to have success together.

SA: Describe your coaching philosophy, and any influences you’ve had along your journey

JORDAN ALLEN:  You’ll hear a lot of coaches say, especially now, that you learn really quickly, and being a player helps. You understand how important it is just to work with the players as people and we’ve had a little bit of a shift in the way that we do our individual development here where a lot of it is focused on giving the players information, tips, cues, and creating exercises that will allow them to learn within the work that they’re doing. But a lot of it, as well, is having conversations with them, seeing where they see their flaws, how they think that they need to improve, and then coming up with plans from there. 

So I would describe my philosophy as being very fluid. It depends on the player that I’m working with. It depends on the team that I’m working with, and you have to be able to adapt to different personalities, different play styles, different cultural backgrounds. We have players that come from California, Florida, Michigan, all with a little bit of a different experience of the sport, and it’s my job to be adaptable to all of them and to find different ways that they can all improve and how I can be a part of that process.

SA: How was it for you to make the transition to coaching at such a young age?

JORDAN ALLEN:  It was actually really, really easy. My dad [Howard Allen] played in the USL in [the mid-1990s] for the Rochester Rhinos, and retired and became a coach for the Rochester Junior Rhinos, the club team that I grew up playing for. So I always tell people I was Coach Allen’s son before I was Jordan Allen. I didn’t become Jordan until I was 16. 

So I grew up with a coaching background. I went to all my dad’s training sessions. I read all of his player evaluations. I watched the old Coerver Skill VHS tapes with him. I always knew that at some point in my life I was going to be a coach, and it happened a little bit earlier than I was anticipating it to happen, but it’s what I always wanted to be, and I never felt out of place as a coach. 

It maybe took me a day to adjust just to having the different color shirt on to start practice, and I’m learning all the time the new best methods for teaching players and working with players and designing sessions. That’s an ongoing process that I’m gonna be getting better at for the rest of my life. But I always wanted to be a coach, so the transition for it felt very natural. 

SA: What makes you the most proud of working with RSL?

JORDAN ALLEN: When you get into sports, it’s really challenging because you’re always in a competitive environment with competitive people, and a lot of the focus for people can just be making it through the next day. 

Sports are somewhat of a short-term type of environment, and what’s unique about ourselves is that when you look around the club, we have Jason Kreis, who’s working here in a leadership position. He has a really long tenure with the club in different forms, different respects, as a player, as a coach, now as a front office member (Director of Operations & Special Projects). You have Tony Beltran (Assistant General Manager), that’s the same—longtime career here as a player. On the coaching side, you have Nick Rimando, who’s working with the Monarchs (goalkeeper coach). You have Jamison Olave, who’s working with the first team (assistant coach). And then on the academy side, you have myself and my assistant coach Eti Tavares, who was my academy teammate and played on the Monarchs, and now he’s an academy coach here within the club.

So what I love about this place, and why things matter so much to me here is that this isn’t a short-term environment. It’s a place where if you care about people, if you give your best, if you work hard, if you treat people with respect, this place has shown that it can reward you, and you get to be a part of an environment that fosters that type of culture. The longer you’re somewhere, the more things start to mean something and a lot of us here within the building have been here for a long time.

SA: What’s your club’s vision when it comes to talent recruitment and your player pathway?

JORDAN ALLEN: We have three pillars of our academy that we talk about all the time with the kids and when we go to the recruiting process, and that’s academics, citizenship, and soccer. We’re a residential place, so the academic side is really important. We want kids that work hard in the classroom. We don’t care too much about what their grades are, but we do care that the kids care about their grades and that they’re willing to work with tutors and spend extra time on their assignments to show progress. We believe heavily that the work that they show in the classroom translates, personality wise, to the work that they’re going to put in on the field. So that’s a starting point.

As well as the citizenship aspect where these kids have a lot of responsibility to be living away from their families. They need to treat everybody that they encounter, whether it’s on the field, off the field, the dorm staff, the academic staff, the people that work within the building, they need to treat them with respect. And when we travel places, we expect to have the hotel staff giving compliments to the kids in the way that they act. We want to create relationships with players that are going to be here for 15 years, and they need to be good people for that to be possible. 

Then on the soccer side, there’s a lot that goes into it. We want players who are hungry to train, who are good teammates, who have a special skill that we think we can mold and develop and see a pathway to them being a first-team player. That gets into a lot of our player profiles and our game model, but a lot of it comes down to the first two parts, which is the academics, and then who they are as people.

The Benefits of Residency

SA: Can you speak on the growth you’ve seen in the academy structure since you were a player?

JORDAN ALLEN:  It’s incredible. I ended up at RSL, but I had a couple of friends who were in the first year of the residential academy in Casa Grande, and I went to, at the time, the U-17 residency program in [Bradenton, Florida]. I was looking, once I left, for where else can I go so that I can get this type of experience? Where can I train every single day in a professional environment? And in 2011, the only place that I could go to and get a similar experience in the whole country was RSL in Casa Grande. That was the only place that had residential that we were able to train every single day. 

Now you look at the landscape and MLS and there’s a host of different residential programs. There’s different ways that clubs are doing it. The facilities that the kids have are unbelievable. That’s the same here at RSL. The Barca Residency is now at where RSL Academy used to be in Casa Grande, Arizona. In 2018, we opened up our facility here in Utah, where the school, the fields, the dorms, it’s all right here on campus here in Salt Lake and Harriman, Utah, in a way that wasn’t true in 2011 when I was living in Arizona. The resources that these kids have, the facilities, and then, across the country, the options that they have and the competitive environment that there is to get the best players at each club is a completely different world to what I existed in as an academy player.

SA: In your experience, what are the keys for players to succeed into becoming successful professionals and people?

JORDAN ALLEN: This is a quote that I tell the players that Arsene Wenger said. We talk about how it’s not necessarily the intensity of the players’ motivation, but it’s the stamina of their motivation to be day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, no matter the ups and downs that they’re feeling consistent in the way that they work—consistent and how hungry they are to get better and to push themselves over a long period of time.

That’s why we put so much emphasis on who they are off the field. Because no matter if these kids in the U-16 team had a great event, a ton of success—a lot of them had really good performances—but if they drop off over the course of the next six months because they just came off this high, and they take their foot off the pedal, and their motivation drops a little bit, then when they need to be the players that they want to be at 18, 19 years old that are pushing into the first team, they won’t be because their their motivation dropped after having a moment of success. 

So for us, it’s a lot about the stamina of the motivation. We’re preaching to these kids that, again, it comes down to consistency. How willing are you to work hard every single day? And if you’re willing to do that, then you give yourself the best chance possible.

SA: If you had a magic wand to get rid of your club’s biggest challenge, how would you use it?

JORDAN ALLEN: If I had to get rid of one challenge at the academy level, it would be to find a way to minimize the effect of social media on the kids. Talking about what’s different about the landscape now is how much these kids can be built up based on the way that they see themselves on social media. The gift of that is that it’s amazing for these kids to get that experience and that exposure. But the curse of it goes back to what I was talking about in the stamina of the motivation. It can get these kids on such a high that they lose focus, they lose concentration, and that’s something that’s not going away. 

We’re teaching the kids how to deal with that. One of the biggest challenges across all academies, when I talk to coaches about players, is how they deal with the ups and downs of these kids becoming superstars in their own world at the ages of 14, 15, 16, and keeping them focused on where they need to get.

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