From Losing by 20 Goals to Winning the Championship

The scoreboard was ugly. A girls high school soccer program had entered a highly competitive winter indoor league — one where opponents came from schools twice their size, with teams that had played together for years. Losses in every game, most of them lopsided. When a team falls behind by more than ten goals in indoor soccer, the rules give them an extra player. This team spent most of the season playing six against five. And still lost. Sometimes by more than twenty goals.

John Hoffman — FGP’s CFO Lead and a Six Sigma Green and Black Belt — was the assistant coach. He watched a few games, looked at the numbers, and recognized the real problem immediately: they were measuring the wrong things.

The initial stats tracked what most coaches would track: shots on goal, goals allowed, plus/minus by player. Standard metrics. Reasonable instinct. The problem was that those numbers only confirmed what everyone already knew — the team wasn’t good enough yet. They were lagging indicators. They told you what had already happened. They gave the players nothing to act on.

John had spent years working directly with Toyota as a sole supplier, absorbing their approach to process improvement. The core lesson: if you want to change outcomes, stop measuring outcomes. Find the leading indicator — the decision point upstream where the result is actually determined — and measure that. He identified it quickly: the ball almost never stayed with them. He shifted the entire focus to two KPIs: good passes sent and good passes received.

The first game after the new tracking started, the data was stark. Three potentially good passes in an entire game. One received. John sat the team down and walked through the numbers. At first, they stared at him — certain that couldn’t be right. So he asked each player to name the passes they’d sent that were actually received and used. One by one, they confirmed it.

That moment of shared recognition changed everything. From that point forward, every player knew exactly what she was responsible for — not the scoreboard, which was out of her control. Whether she made a clean pass and whether she was in position to receive one — that was entirely within her control. The KPIs gave the team something to improve on, not just something to feel bad about.

By the end of the season: over 30 good passes per game, with 28 or more received. The teams that had beaten them by 20 goals earlier in the season? This team beat them before the year was out — with the same roster they’d started with. The following summer, they won the championship. The roster didn’t change. The competition didn’t get easier. What changed was the measurement system — and with it, the behavior of every person on the field.