How Boulder Indoor Soccer’s founder built a 20-plus-year community fixture on paid coaches, low pressure and remembering every kid
By Lewis Jolly
Boulder Weekly
“He’s cherry-picking just like his dad!” Coach Peter Ambrose yelled across the fields at Foothills Community Park on a sunny Saturday morning in October.
This is the kind of line only someone who has been around a while can deliver.
Ambrose, founder and owner of Boulder Indoor Soccer and Longmont Indoor Soccer, has been coaching for more than three decades. Today, BIS serves roughly 800 youth players in Boulder, and its Longmont sister facility, LIS, serves another 500. Together, the two facilities host approximately 115 adult teams as well.
This successful business, now a cornerstone of the Boulder Valley soccer community, was never the plan for Ambrose.
Coach Peter Ambrose walks the sidelines while monitoring youth soccer matches at Foothills Community Park in Boulder on Oct. 17. Photo credit: Lewis Jolly/Boulder Weekly
Originally, Ambrose hoped to go pro after an illustrious soccer career at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, where he was a two-time Regional All-American.
“I played soccer throughout my whole career, and I thought I’d be a professional soccer player like everybody else,” he said.
After several tryouts for clubs around the country and a brief stint with the now-disbanded Colorado Foxes, Ambrose realized he needed to find something else.
“I got cut for the first time ever in my life, and I was like, ‘Man, now what am I gonna do?’ So I moved up to the mountains, and I skied, and I ran the local club up there.”
That was in 1983. Several coaching jobs and one graduate degree later, he decided that Boulder could use an indoor soccer facility.
In 2002, while also coaching the University of Colorado Boulder men’s club team, Ambrose raised enough money to open what would be the first iteration of BIS. It opened in 2003 in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse at 28th and Valmont in Boulder. When that got too small, he rented the building that is now the Rayback Collective.
After a decade of renting in one of the country’s priciest markets, he did the math. Buying land and building a new facility would cost “not much more” than renting, and he would own it.
So, in 2013, he took out a $5.8 million loan to build the current BIS facility on Pearl Street in Boulder, and the LIS facility on South Sherman Street in Longmont.
“It was a huge leap of faith,” he said.
According to Ambrose, what has kept families coming back is a simple concept.
“In here, you’re not a number, you’re a name.”
That was evident at Foothills Community Park on a recent Saturday, where he gave players coaching tips by name while chatting with parents along the sideline, all without missing a beat.
Coach Peter Ambrose speaks with parents while overseeing youth soccer matches at Foothills Community Park in Boulder on Oct. 17. Photo credit: Lewis Jolly/Boulder Weekly
Every player in the program is coached by a paid coach, not a parent volunteer – a rarity for youth soccer in the United States. Parents notice this differentiation.
Frank D[LJ1] ., whose twin 7-year-olds and 3-year-old have played in LIS for three years, said that his kids listen better to the coaches because they don’t know them personally.
“We did do a different league that was parent-taught … and when the kids know the parents, they just don’t listen as well,” he said. “The kids respect these guys a little more because I think they don’t know them.”
A coach with Longmont Indoor Soccer instructs players during a youth soccer match at Dry Creek Community Park in Longmont on Oct. 17. Photo credit: Lewis Jolly/Boulder Weekly
Frank also said that he appreciates Ambrose’s balanced approach to training.
“He has the right balance between participation and execution,” he said. “I think he definitely wants the kids to be better people at the end of this.”
This is Ambrose’s stated philosophy as well.
“I think developing young children is more important than developing professional soccer players,” said Ambrose, who puts the odds of going pro in any sport at “0.00001%.”
That balanced line of thinking shows up early.
One morning in early October at the Pearl Street facility, Ambrose led a group of two and three-year-olds through obstacle courses and balloon juggling, loosely related soccer drills that were likely meant to burn off their energy for the parents – not to shape them into future MLS players. Parents and grandparents watched from the sideline, laughing along with the kids at the running commentary of “Coach Peanut Butter,” the name Ambrose uses for his youngest sessions.
Coach Peter Ambrose leads children through an obstacle course during a youth soccer class at Boulder Indoor Soccer on Oct. 5. Photo credit: Lewis Jolly/Boulder Weekly
That emphasis on fun brings kids back year after year, some even returning as adults with children of their own, like the cherry-picking son and father duo from earlier. Several current coaches across BIS and LIS also grew up in these programs.
Ambrose said that seeing his former players grow up in the community he helped shape is why he still does it and what he would miss most.
“The rewarding thing is that over the last 30 years of living in this town, coaching soccer, I know everyone,” he said. “I go everywhere, and it’s rewarding to see kids or adults run up and say ‘Hey Coach Peter, I had you when I was four’, or ‘Hey Coach Peter, I am four and I can’t believe I’m seeing you on the Pearl Street Mall.’”
Throughout the 20-plus years of his business’s existence, Ambrose has set the infrastructure for it to continue long into the future, but he isn’t done quite yet.
“I’m not ready to hang up my boots yet.”