Meet Oldsmar Soccer Club’s Director of Coaching Perry Van der Beck
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — When it comes to the world of professional soccer, Perry Van der Beck has done and seen it all. He’s been a player, a manager, a technical director, and even a VP and director of player development. While his list of accolades could fill up multiple pages, his journey to the top might not be what you expect.
Perry grew up in Florissant, Missouri, one of the many suburbs of St. Louis. He grew up playing baseball and soccer, his house being mere feet away from not just one but multiple soccer fields.
“I lived 30 feet from my grade school,” Perry explained. “There was a playground, two soccer fields on one side, and another soccer field on the other side.”
Perry’s introduction to organized soccer came thanks in large part to a gentleman by the name of Monsignor Meyer who created the Catholic Youth Council or CYC. Not only did Van der Beck immediately take to the sport, but he also learned that he was not the only soccer player in the family.
“Unbeknownst to me at the time, I found out my mom played soccer in 1950 for the first women’s soccer league in the United States.” Van der Beck said. “She didn’t talk a lot about it but I’ve seen pictures in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.”
By the time Perry reached middle school, he was playing soccer year-round. By that time he had decided that baseball just wasn’t for him anymore and turned his focus exclusively to soccer. At the same time that he made the decision to focus on soccer, the CYC was starting club soccer and his coaches were two players from the St. Louis Stars of the North American Soccer League (NASL).
“From as early as I can remember, I was a student of the game,” Perry explained. “So if I wasn’t playing soccer I was watching it. Now all of a sudden I’m being coached by these professional players. We would train two to three times a week, and on the weekends I would go watch them play if I didn’t have a game myself.”
As his foray into the game continued, so did the accolades, even from an early age. During high school, Perry was selected to play for the U17 United States National Team. Not only did his time playing for the youth National Team lead to trips around the world including Germany and France, but it also put him in front of coaches and scouts from the NASL.
“I got scouted by the Tampa Bay Rowdies, the New York Cosmos, and a couple of other teams,” Perry said. “The St. Louis Stars, which was my hometown team, came to me and said ‘We’re going to draft you with the 2nd pick’. So here I think I’m getting drafted by St. Louis and next thing I know I’m getting called down to the office in school and it was because there was a phone call for me telling me that the Rowdies had drafted me. They traded up to the number 1 pick and took me.
I went from playing on this CYC team to playing on my high school team to playing with the youth national team and now to a professional league.”
What set Perry apart from many professional athletes is he always knew that a time would come when he wouldn’t be able to play professionally anymore. As a result, even while he was playing he always had “Plan B” in mind. He knew that he wanted to stay in sports and started getting more involved with doing camps and clinics for kids.
Once his playing days were done, Van der Beck had an opportunity to enter the coaching ranks, something he had gotten a taste of during his playing days doing camps and clinics. While coaching may have seemed like the logical endpoint for Perry’s sports and soccer career, he didn’t stop there continuing to climb the ladder of the executive ranks within the new Tampa Bay Rowdies, the same place where it all began decades earlier.
Perry later served as the Vice President of Competition and Operations for the United Soccer League (USL), which consists of both men’s and women’s professional and amateur leagues throughout the United States and Canada.
Today, Perry is still giving back to the game he loves as the Director of Coaching for Oldsmar Soccer Club, as well as various volunteer and consulting opportunities.
While his role in the game has changed over time, the one thing that hasn’t changed is his mindset about not just sports, but life as well.
“You get out of it what you put into it.”
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