North Carolina FC Youth

★James Scott

This club is only about money and most of the coaches only care about winning. They may be interested in helping your child build skill but they care nothing about developing your child's character. This is our 3rd year here and every year we witness bullying and jealousy-inspired sabotage between teammates, and the coaches cannot be bothered by it. Most coaches are hardly more mature than the kids they coach. They do not know how to positively motivate kids. They throw tantrums when losing and resort to negative reinforcement to get the kids to perform, which lowers the kids' self esteem and probably contributes to the bullying within the team. My kids are pre-teens and it makes me sick that this is what you have to put up with just so your kid can play competitive soccer. What happened to sportsmanship, character-building, TEAM-building, and most importantly, the fun? Also, for the life of me I do not understand why pre-teens need to travel upwards of 6 hours one way to play a couple of soccer games. It's lunacy that more local games can't be organized. Why can't we play against Wake FC? I heard it's because no one wants to have their ranking upset by a local competitor. I wonder if it's collusion between the clubs. Life is really too short to sit behind a windshield traveling all weekend for games plus getting to and from at least three practices a week.

★★Laks K

NCFC Challenge group is the same as NCFC Recreation as both teams are coached by parent volunteers! Unless your child is eligible to play in or above Juniors level where professional coaches are used, it's not worth spending time and money. It is fine as long as your child wants to play for fun or you are the parent coach/volunteer keeping close watch on how your child is being set up in team formations, or else they'll end up being sidekicks of other kids!

★★Darren S

NCFC has been a great club for challenge level, but their Rec level is a joke. Teams are stacked with higher level players, and the rest are put on a team with no experience. Rec is supposed to be fun for all children, but how can it be fun if you are constantly losing to teams who are obviously higher level. I also get that couches are volunteers, but if you volunteer, actually couch your team! If they can ever find a way to make it more fair for all teams then NCFC might be a good rec club to play for. Otherwise, stay far away.

★Hadi

The organization has been the worst I've seen in all the years of putting our child in sports. There seems to be no assigned practice or game day and time. The practice timing has changed on the day. It's been regularly reduced (even after daylight savings). They change the date of practice, which makes it extremely difficult to plan ahead and consistently with other activities you may want your child in. We were told game days will be Saturday, but a few are on Sunday evening. They change the field for each event (practice and games), and there is no one at the location to guide you to the right field. They don't seem to have booked any actual fields. The spots my son has been playing in the past month are mostly public first come first serve locations. Some have had uneven and unkept ground, impacting the quality of play. It's much too expensive for the service offered. I understand the coaches are volunteers, but they should at least have regularly booked fields for the price they charge. Otherwise, using volunteers and free fields, and charging what they do is just theft.

★Karen Carroll

We've played with NCFC for years and it used to be a good experience, but this year has been terrible. My son's Challenge team hasn't had a win since 2019 and has been outscored 5 to 111 this year. The coach is very dedicated and enthusiastic but there are really obvious problems (the kids have been taught to take goal kicks in such a way that they immediately hand the other team a scoring opportunity, for example, plus others), and the previous coach was poor, so it has been several years since the team had effective coaching. The team has no hope of being competitive - of even having a close loss rather than a blowout - and when I emailed the Challenge director about it, he replied fairly unhelpfully to my first email and not at all to my second. My kid used to love soccer.