It’s the second week of August. The pool is still open, the cleats are somewhere in the garage under a boogie board, and a text lands from another Valley Stream parent: tryouts are next month, are you going? You didn’t know there were tryouts in the fall. You thought that happened in May. So now it’s 10 p.m. and you’re four tabs deep on a club website trying to work out whether your kid missed the window, whether there’s still a spot, and whether six weeks is enough time to get ready. Here’s the honest version, week by week.
Written by Fernando, founder of Tiempo Soccer Academy (Rockville Centre, NY). Last reviewed: August 2026.
Are there really soccer tryouts in Nassau County in the fall?
Most of them already happened. The main club tryout window on Long Island runs in May and June, when clubs build the rosters that play the following fall and spring. If you’re reading this in August, you are not in that window — you’re in a smaller, quieter one that almost nobody writes about, and it works differently. We covered the May–June scramble in the Long Island tryout preparation guide. This post is the other one: what’s open now, and what six weeks of real preparation looks like when you actually have six weeks.
The scale explains why the fall doors are narrow. LIJSL runs about 60,000 players across 97 member clubs, 3,500+ teams, and 1,600+ travel teams (NY Red Bulls / LIJSL, 2026). Those rosters are mostly locked by July. What’s left in August is gap-filling, school sports, and next-cycle preparation — and knowing which of the three you’re in is the whole decision. If you’re still working out where your kid sits in the Long Island pyramid, start with the Long Island youth soccer development guide before signing up for anything.
The four doors that are actually open in August and September
Parents type “fall soccer tryouts” into Google and get one result set covering four different situations, with different timelines, evaluators, and stakes. Find yours before you build a plan.
| Door | Who it’s for | Typical window | What’s actually being decided |
|---|---|---|---|
| School tryouts (middle and high school) | Grades 7–12 in Valley Stream, Lynbrook, RVC, Malverne, Oceanside districts | Fall practice opens in late August — your district’s athletics page has the exact date | A full roster in three or four days. Fitness testing is real and it is early. |
| Club late-adds and guest spots | Kids who got cut in June, moved into the area, or skipped the spring window | Rolling, August into September | One or two open slots on a specific team, usually at a specific position |
| Academy and ID sessions | Any age; no roster attached | Late summer into fall | Nothing binding. It’s a look, and often a sales funnel. Treat it as low-stakes. |
| Prepping for next May | U8–U14 families who want a real shot next cycle | Nine months out | Nothing yet — which is exactly why this is the highest-leverage door on the list |
Nobody says the next part out loud: door four is the best one. A kid who spends September through April getting genuinely better walks into the May tryout as a different player. A kid who cram-trains in August walks in tired. If your tryout is nine days away, close this and use the five-day plan in the tryout preparation guide instead — six weeks of work compressed into nine days makes your kid worse, not better.
The six-week plan, week by week
Built for a kid roughly 9 to 14 who already plays. It assumes two club or school sessions a week plus what you do at home — not six days of soccer. All of it is designed to leave your kid fresher at the tryout than they are today, which is the opposite of how most families run the last six weeks.
1. Week 1 — establish the floor, not the ceiling
Do nothing impressive. Set the two habits everything rides on: a 20-minute ball-touch block four days a week, and a fixed bedtime. Inside-outside, sole rolls, laces control out of the air — the boring stuff, alone, against a wall. The goal is that the ball stops feeling like a stranger. Then write down your kid’s actual position, and what they’re bad at in it. Weeks 3 through 5 get built on that answer.
2. Week 2 — add the engine
Fitness testing at school tryouts is often the first thing that happens and the only thing scored objectively. Two short conditioning sessions this week, neither of them long: repeated 30-to-40-yard runs with walk-back recovery, and one longer continuous run. Twenty minutes each. Keep the touch block. Do not add a second club team to “get more reps” — highly specialized youth athletes carry roughly 2.25 times the odds of an overuse injury compared to lower-specialization peers (Post et al., American Journal of Sports Medicine, 2017). August is the month families most often break this rule.
3. Week 3 — fix one thing, on purpose
Take the weakness you wrote down in week 1 and attack it alone. One thing. If the weak foot is a passenger, this is a weak-foot week: every pass, every touch, every wall rep, left only. If they lose the ball under pressure, it’s a first-touch-away week. Coaches at tryouts don’t see growth. They see a snapshot. One visibly repaired flaw changes the snapshot; four half-fixed flaws change nothing. That’s the difference between technique and skill, and the whole idea behind how we stage training by age in the PaC Method.
4. Week 4 — put it under pressure
Whatever you built in week 3 now has to survive someone taking it from you. Small-sided games. Pickup at the park. 1v1 in the driveway with a sibling who cheats. Kids look great in warm-ups and disappear in the scrimmage because they practiced the move and never practiced the decision. That’s the application gap, and it’s where most tryouts are lost. Keep the conditioning, the touches, and the bedtime.
5. Week 5 — rehearse the actual day
One full dress rehearsal: same wake-up time as tryout day, same breakfast, same bag packed the night before, warm up alone the way they’ll have to when they don’t know anybody. Then have them introduce themselves out loud to an adult they don’t know. That sounds soft. It isn’t — at a fall late-add your kid is often the only new face on a field of kids who’ve played together since U9, and the ones who speak first get looked at first. If English is the second language at home, rehearse that introduction in English this week. More on that in the guide for Spanish-first families on Long Island.
6. Week 6 — taper, and stop coaching
Cut volume by roughly half. Short touch blocks, one light conditioning session early in the week, nothing new. No new moves, no new cleats, no drills you found on Instagram on Thursday. And this is the hard one for parents: stop giving feedback. The car ride to a tryout is not a coaching session. “Have fun, go be brave” is the entire pre-game speech. Every additional instruction you give in that car is one more thing your kid is thinking about instead of playing.
What a fall evaluation is deciding that a spring tryout isn’t
In May, a coach is building a whole team and can shape roles around who shows up. In August, that coach already has 15 kids and a hole. They aren’t looking for the best player on the field. They’re looking for the specific thing they’re missing — a left-sided defender, a keeper, someone who can actually receive on the half-turn in midfield.
That changes your kid’s job. At a fall late-add, being versatile is worse than being obviously good at one identifiable thing. Ask the coach directly, by email, before the session: what are you looking to add? Most will tell you. It is not a pushy question — it’s the same question you should be asking when you evaluate any program, which we laid out in how to choose a soccer club in Nassau County.
The pool is different too. Fall late-adds draw kids who got cut in June and kids whose families just moved, and the June-cut kids often arrive flat. A kid who shows up in September fit, warm, and talking is competing against a field that mostly isn’t.
Most training builds technique. Tiempo builds skill.
Valley Stream, Lynbrook, and Rockville Centre: what the fall actually looks like
Valley Stream. Big district, three high schools, the deepest late-summer competition for school roster spots in this corner of Nassau. If your kid is going out for a school team here, the fitness test is the gate — build week 2 seriously. Valley Stream is also where the bilingual reality of Nassau shows up hardest on a sideline: a tryout run entirely in fast English filters for language, not ability.
Lynbrook. Smaller pool, which cuts both ways. Fewer kids competing for a school spot, but fewer club teams inside the village, so late-adds usually mean looking at East Rockaway, Malverne, or RVC. If the local door is closed, the honest move is to skip the scramble, train through the fall, and target May with a real plan.
Rockville Centre. Our home field, and the pattern is specific: strong school programs, an active club scene, and families running both at once. That’s the overload risk. A seventh grader on a school team, a club team, and a private session in the same September week isn’t developing faster — they’re accumulating load. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended delaying single-sport specialization until around age 12 for most kids, partly for this reason (Brenner, Pediatrics, 2016).
Same fall trap in all three towns: parents buy training in the last two weeks. Inside the final fortnight you’re not buying development — you’re buying anxiety relief for yourself, and your kid pays for it with tired legs. Don’t. We’ll tell you the same thing on the phone.
If your kid doesn’t make it
A fall cut lands harder than a spring one, because in May another club is holding tryouts next weekend and in September nobody is. Say the true thing out loud: this season’s door is closed, the next opens in May. Then make the eight months in between count.
What not to do: sign them up for a lower-level team two towns over just to have a jersey, 40 minutes each way, nobody in the family wanting it. What to do instead: take the one thing from week 3 and work it September through April with no tryout attached. Kids quit because it stopped being fun and stopped being theirs, not because they lacked ability (Changing the Game Project). A cut only ends a career if the adults turn it into a verdict.
And if your kid was cut from travel and genuinely isn’t ready for it, that’s information, not a wound. Our travel-soccer readiness checklist and the rec vs. travel vs. academy vs. ECNL breakdown will tell you whether the level was right to begin with.
Where Tiempo fits in a fall window
We’re not a club. We don’t run LIJSL travel teams and we don’t compete in tournaments. We’re the structured individual development layer that sits next to your kid’s club or school program, on fields in Rockville Centre, Lynbrook, and Valley Stream.
So our honest answer to “can you get my kid ready for a tryout in three weeks” is no. Nobody can. What a six-week block is genuinely good for is week 3 — one identified weakness, worked deliberately, under pressure, until it holds. That’s the Athlete Development Blueprint, built on the four values we coach in the language we coach them in: Confianza, Responsabilidad, Habilidad, Pasión.
If your kid is six and you’re asking about tryout prep, we’ll tell you to go play. If your kid is 13, got cut in June, and wants it badly enough to work through a New York winter with no roster spot waiting — that’s the family we can help. The point is to be in the right place, not in our place.
FAQ
When are soccer tryouts in Nassau County?
Club tryouts for LIJSL travel teams run mainly in May and June for the following seasonal year. School tryouts for middle and high school teams happen in late August, when fall practice opens. What runs in September is usually a late-add for a specific open roster spot, or a non-binding ID session. Check your district athletics page and individual club sites directly — dates move year to year.
Is six weeks enough time to prepare for a soccer tryout?
Yes, if you use it to repair one specific weakness and arrive rested. No, if you use it to cram new skills. The plan above front-loads conditioning and touch volume in weeks 1 and 2, isolates one flaw in weeks 3 and 4, rehearses in week 5, and tapers in week 6. Kids who peak in week 5 and taper outperform kids who train hardest in week 6.
What do coaches actually look for at a fall tryout?
Something different from a spring tryout. In the fall a coach usually has a nearly full roster and one hole, so they’re evaluating fit for a specific role, not overall ranking. First touch under pressure, defensive effort when the ball is lost, and whether your kid speaks and organizes are visible in the first 20 minutes. Email the coach and ask what position they’re adding.
Should I pay for private training before tryouts?
Not in the last two weeks — that’s buying reassurance, not development. Private soccer trainers list from around $50 a session on marketplaces like CoachUp, and Long Island academy rates commonly run $75–$125 per session. At 30 sessions a year that’s $1,500 to $3,750 on top of club fees. If you’re going to spend it, spend it in the eight months between tryout cycles, where it compounds.
My kid got cut in the fall. What now?
There usually isn’t another club tryout until May, so stop shopping for a roster spot and start building for the next window. Keep them playing — school, futsal, pickup, indoor. Work one weakness deliberately from September through April. Nationally, cost and access already push large numbers of kids out of soccer entirely; about 32% of families cite fees as the primary barrier (Aspen Institute Project Play, 2026). A cut shouldn’t be the second filter.
Does my kid need to speak English to try out?
To play, no. To be seen, it helps more than it should — instructions come fast, and a kid translating in their head arrives half a beat late. That’s a language gap being scored as a skill gap. Rehearse the introduction and the common instructions in English during week 5. Tiempo coaches in both languages, and the first conversation with us can be in Spanish.
Sources
- NY Red Bulls / LIJSL league partner page, 2026. newyorkredbulls.com
- Post et al., American Journal of Sports Medicine, 2017. PubMed
- Brenner JS, Pediatrics 2016;138(3):e20162148 (AAP). PubMed
- Aspen Institute Project Play, State of Soccer NYC/NJ, 2026. aspeninstitute.org
- Changing the Game Project, why kids quit sports. changingthegameproject.com
- CoachUp soccer marketplace, accessed August 2026. coachup.com
¿Prefiere leer en español? Lea esta guía en español: pruebas de fútbol este otoño en Nassau County.
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— Fernando, Tiempo Soccer Academy · Rockville Centre, NY · tiemposoccer.com
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