Soccer Mom. School Builder.
- Jason Longshore
- 3 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Stewart Lathan didn't come to Atlanta United as an educator. She came as a parent. Six years later, her school is the quiet engine behind everything the academy is becoming.
She did not plan to build a school.
In 2020, Stewart Lathan was the assistant head at the Lovett School, twenty-five years deep into an education career that had taken her from Atlanta to London and back. COVID had worn her down, and she was stepping away to start a consulting practice. Her son, who had been an Atlanta United academy player since 2016, was still training with the program. She knew Tony Annan, the academy director. When the person doing her eventual role left, Annan called.
"Will you come and just help a little bit?" he asked. So she did.
Then they moved practice to the morning for the older age group players. And Lathan looked at what that meant for her son, whose trajectory was college, not professional soccer. And she thought: this is insane.
"Our goal is to go to college," she said, "and we are actually going to mess up their education by essentially making it impossible for them to do both high school and go to college."
She called Annan again. This time the idea was bigger: what if they started a school at the training ground? Annan brought it to then-Vice President and Technical Director Carlos Bocanegra. They said yes.
That was six years ago. They started small, a handful of students learning through a remote platform built by YSC Academy outside Philadelphia. It worked well enough, but Lathan knew it was not the full picture. In 2023, she reached out to Atlanta International School, a place she knew well as both a parent and a former employee, and proposed a partnership. AIS sent teachers to the training ground. The hybrid model took shape.
Today, forty boys are enrolled across grades nine through twelve. Twenty-five have graduated. The school runs with four full-time teachers, six part-time teachers, a learning support specialist, and a college counselor, all housed in dedicated learning spaces at the training ground. Every Monday, the academy players drive to the AIS campus in Buckhead, where they take classes alongside what Lathan calls, with a laugh, "normal kids." She should note, she adds: especially girls. You should see the outfits when they come back from Buckhead.
The story of how that school came to exist is, in a lot of ways, the story of what Atlanta United is trying to build across its entire development system. Javier Pérez, the club's Director of Methodology, came aboard around the same time and brought a clear mandate with him: turn the academy into something that could be a reference point not just in MLS, but nationally, and eventually internationally. His changes were structural. More staff. Smarter scheduling. A revamped nutrition program. A defined style of play that stretches from the U-15s all the way to the first team.
But the thing Lathan built, in her role as the club's Player Welfare and Education Officer, sits underneath all of it. You cannot develop a whole player if you are only developing the soccer player. Pérez, it turns out, built his entire recruitment philosophy around exactly that premise.
Pérez is direct about what he looks for in the academy's recruitment process. When the club evaluates a young player, the criteria run in this order: character, skills, and support. Not the other way around.
"The mental aspect," he said. "That is number one. How strong the athlete is, how able to adapt to difficulties, how they overcome adversity."
He has worked with five World Cup winners across his career, from Real Madrid to the US national team under Jurgen Klinsmann in Brazil. All of them needed mental support. Champions are not exempt from being human. The idea that professional athletes operate at some level above the rest of us is a comfortable fiction fans construct, and Pérez has watched it break in real time against real people at the highest levels of the game. So when he is sitting across from a fifteen-year-old in Georgia, character is what he is watching.
The skills part, the technical, tactical, physical stuff, those can be developed. Character is harder. Support, which Pérez defines not as parents hovering and pushing, but as the people in a player's life giving them room to breathe and fail and recover, is sometimes the difference between a player who gets through the hard moments and one who doesn't.
The classroom, Lathan has found, does something the training pitch cannot.
The academy has players at every level of development. Some are extraordinary on the field. Some are not. But put them all in a group project setting, ninth graders through twelfth graders, players from different teams who do not know each other well, and something shifts. The kid who might be third-string gets to lead. The star who struggles academically has to figure out how to follow.
"It kind of evens the playing field," Lathan said. "The kid who maybe doesn't play as often gets to be the leader in this other setting. And I love that."
Lathan talked about something she calls executive functioning, the ability to plan ahead, meet deadlines, manage a project over multiple days. Players who cannot do that on a Tuesday in the classroom, she said, tend to struggle with it in the professional environment too. The discipline carries. The habits carry.
AIS is a good partner for this work for a specific reason. The school is international by design. When you look at the Atlanta United first team roster, Pérez pointed out, you are looking at players from Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, France, Spain, England. The academy players who will one day compete for spots on that team need to know how to work alongside people from anywhere. AIS sets them up for that.
Cooper Sanchez is one of four current seniors in the academy school who has already signed a first team contract. Jonathan Ransom is another. Dominik Chong Qui and Adyn Torres round out the group. All four have been called up for national team duty, which in the case of Cooper and Ransom meant missing nearly six weeks of school during World Cup preparation.
None of that would have been possible, Lathan said, without the school structure that exists at the training ground. A fully online program could not flex around international absences the way this one can. A full-time teaching staff, a learning support specialist, and a college counselor who know these players personally, who notice when something is off before anyone else does, make the difference.
Sanchez starts for Atlanta United's first team. He is also, by his own admission, a few weeks from finishing school and ready to be done with in-person classes. Asked about balancing everything recently, he was honest about it: "I need to do a better job of it, but I was in a busy schedule. It's pretty hard." Then he added that Atlanta International School has been good about working around his needs, letting him go at his own pace when he can get the work done.
Weeks left until graduation. He is walking at the ceremony. After that, he said, he wants to study something that helps him with coaching eventually, and maybe find a way to help out with the academy.
Lathan, for her part, is still flagging him down in the hallway about that English project. Every time she sees him.
That is the whole-person model in practice. The kid can hold both things at once because the institution around him is built to hold both things at once.
The question of what comes next for academy players has also changed substantially since Lathan arrived six years ago. She is frank about it: the average MLS retirement age is 31. The average MLS career runs two and a half years. Those numbers should scare every eighteen-year-old in the program, and most of them, being eighteen, do not fully absorb the weight of them yet.
Her goal is not to dampen ambition. It is to expand it. Standing at the training ground, academy players get to see what an analytics department actually does, what social media work looks like from the inside, how a podcast gets made. Arjun Balaraman, the club's Head of Analytics, has come in to talk to students about the scouting models he builds. The math-inclined players start to think differently about their options.
What has opened up in recent years is the pathway between professional and college, which is less of a binary than it used to be. Rodrigo Neri spent time with the Atlanta United 2 roster and then returned to Spain, and Lathan spoke to him recently: he just signed with the University of Maryland. That kind of arc, professional experience followed by college, was not really possible before NCAA eligibility rules began to shift around lower-tier professional contracts. Now it is.
Will Reilly went to Stanford. Matt Edwards left college early, turned professional, and finished his degree later. Every player's path is different, and the academy's job is to make sure they are ready to walk whichever one opens.
On the field, Pérez has spent two years installing something he can actually describe in specific terms, which is rarer than it sounds. The Atlanta United way of playing, as he defines it, comes down to three things: play fast and forward, defend compact, and play with intensity in the attacking half.
That last piece means keeping the defensive line high, keeping the game in the opponent's half, capitalizing on opportunities before the other team can settle. It requires fitness. It requires trust between defenders. It requires players who have spent thousands of hours internalizing the same ideas.
When Pérez first arrived, he estimated the academy had one or two players who could potentially step into the first team. Cooper Sanchez is now starting. Jonathan Ransom is the third-choice goalkeeper for the first team and still U-18 eligible. The U-16 group at the 2010 birth year, Pérez said, has three or four more he can already see making that jump.
The academy's U-16s recently won the premier bracket of a national tournament, beating Columbus Crew in the final and knocking out Cincinnati, NYCFC, Montréal, and Philadelphia Union along the way. The U-15s lost to Valencia CF of Spain in a narrow match, conceding a late penalty in a 3-2 result. Valencia went on to win the tournament's final 4-0. Atlanta was the only team that gave them a real game.
Two years in, the benchmarks are real.
Atlanta United has a 100% graduation rate in the academy school. That is the number Pérez leads with when he talks to parents, and it is the number that reframes the conversation. The worst thing that can happen to your son, he tells them, is that he goes to a great college.
Pérez builds the methodology. Lathan builds the person. They come from different worlds, one shaped by Real Madrid and World Cups, the other by London boarding schools and a son who needed a path. But they are building the same thing, and every kid who walks across that graduation stage is proof that the sync is real.
Lathan came in thinking she would help with homestays and parent communication. Five years later she has 40 boys in a school she built from scratch, four teachers on-site every day, and the phone number of every college coach in the country.
She did not plan to build a school. But she saw what was needed, and she built it. That is, more or less, the whole story.