Why VOLTA became AOS Sports
At a John Maxwell Team event, my mentor, Ed DeCosta, poked me in the chest and asked, "What do you do?"
"I coach soccer," I said.
"No. What do you do?"
"I coach college soccer."
"No. Get back to me when you figure it out."
I started VOLTA in 2015, after 20 years of coaching college soccer. The idea was to take leadership into corporate America through the universal language of sports. I had a knack for it. But you can be good at something and still not be called to it. I was climbing the wrong mountain, and Ed saw it before I did.
The answer had been in front of me since I left college coaching. When I posted that I was stepping away, the notes from players and parents surprised me. Nobody mentioned the championships. They talked about lessons they still remembered, some I didn't know I was teaching. SIGNIFICANCE was already happening, I just hadn't named it.
I'd first heard the word Significance from John Maxwell, at one of his events. I didn't know it then, but the seed was planted. A couple of weeks after Ed's question, on one of our mentorship calls, his first question was the same one. This time I had an answer: "I change the lives of young men and women at a point in their lives when they are leaving the nest and finding their wings through a sport I love, soccer."
Not long after, I woke up in the middle of the night, grabbed my journal and wrote in big letters: AOS, Athlete of Significance. I didn't know what it meant that night. The dream didn't create the idea. It named something that had been forming for decades.
That was the turn. In literature, a volta is a turn in thought, and VOLTA was mine. It's the company that started AOS, Athlete of Significance, which has become AOS Sports. AOS Sports is where the work lives now: camps, college recruiting, coaching education and more, all built on one belief. Significance over success. Soccer is the vehicle. People are the mission.
Someone believed in me, so I spent my life believing in others. If you found your way here through VOLTA, thank you for being part of the turn.
About Christian. Christian DeVries has coached for more than 30 years. He founded VOLTA Sports Ventures in 2015. He is a certified John Maxwell Team Leadership coach, trainer and speaker. He's in the University of Minnesota Morris Cougar Hall of Fame as head coach of the 2003 women's soccer team, inducted in 2022.
