A former Dartmouth captain and three-sport All-State athlete now spends his weeks coaching four-year-olds. The work is smaller in scale and larger in stakes than the game he grew up playing.
A Conversation That Kept Repeating
The same sentence kept finding its way to Matthew Lewis Labarre. Parents in Dover, New Hampshire, would describe a child who lit up at the sight of a soccer ball, who asked about practices, who watched older siblings on the field with the kind of attention adults reserve for things they cannot have. And then, almost word for word, the parents would arrive at the part of the story where someone had told them their child was too young.
Labarre and his wife heard it often enough that it stopped sounding like an isolated frustration. It started sounding like a pattern. In 2021, working from their living room, they founded Never Too Young FC.
A Background That Stayed Useful
Labarre’s path into youth coaching is unusual mostly because of how decorated it is for someone whose current students are four years old. He was named to the High School All-American Soccer Team and earned All-State honors in basketball and baseball, the kind of three-sport résumé that has become rare in an era of early specialization. At Dartmouth College, he studied sociology, played on the men’s soccer team, and was eventually named captain. He was invited into Regional and National team pools.
The competitive instinct shaped him. The leadership role shaped him more.
He often returns to a lesson from his Dartmouth years. Captaincy, he has said, was not about being the loudest voice in the room. It was about consistency. Showing up prepared. Taking care of the people around you. That definition has aged well. It also translates almost directly to a job where the people around you are still learning to tie their shoes.
The Field as a Different Kind of Classroom
The sessions Never Too Young FC runs do not look like youth sports as most people picture them. There are no scoreboards. There are no tryouts. Registration is limited to fourteen participants per session, and the fee is eighty dollars per family. The structure is built around small groups, parental presence, and the rhythm of children who lose interest in twelve minute increments.
Labarre talks often about what success looks like at this age. He has said that younger children do not care about scores. They care about how something makes them feel. If it feels fun and safe, they want to come back.
That standard sounds soft until you watch it produce results. Coaches at the program describe children who refused to step onto the field during a first session and who, weeks later, were leading warmups. The change does not come from pressure. It comes from feeling safe, included, and capable.
The Nutrition Piece
One feature that distinguishes Never Too Young FC from other introductory programs is its nutrition component. Conversations about water breaks, about snacks that help a body run longer, about why food matters during movement, are woven into sessions in language that three to five year olds understand.
Labarre has been clear that he does not condescend to the children he coaches. They understand more than adults give them credit for, he has argued. The session is not a lecture. It is a series of small, repeated moments that connect food, water, and movement in a child’s mind before any of those associations have to be relearned later.
A Sociology Major’s Approach to a Soccer Field
It is hard to ignore the academic background. Labarre studied sociology at Dartmouth, and the influence shows up in how he describes the program. He talks about children learning how to be part of a group. He talks about the lessons of trying, missing, falling, and trying again as lessons that matter far beyond the field.
His framing places early childhood sports somewhere between physical education and social development. The soccer ball becomes a tool. The field becomes a setting. The actual subject is the child’s first negotiated experience with belonging to something larger than the family unit.
This is not a small claim. It is also not a promotional one. Anyone who has watched a four year old hesitate at the edge of a group activity has seen the stakes.
The Local Texture
Never Too Young FC is anchored in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire, with families coming from Dover and surrounding towns including Portsmouth, Rochester, Somersworth, and Durham. Labarre has built the brand around local character. The program celebrates the towns it operates in. It encourages families to participate together.
The choice to keep sessions small is partly logistical and partly philosophical. Fourteen children is a number that allows every child to feel seen. It is also a number that resists the gravitational pull toward larger, more impersonal programs that can reproduce the very gatekeeping Labarre set out to challenge.
Four Years In
The program has now run for four years. The original problem, parents being told that their three or four year old was too young for organized sports, has not disappeared from American youth athletics. But in one corner of New Hampshire, a different option exists, and the families who use it return.
Labarre does not describe the work as a mission. He describes it as a response. A response to the parents who kept saying the same sentence. A response to the version of youth sports that filters children out before they have had a chance to discover whether they like the game.
Where Matthew Lewis Labarre Goes From Here
The questions waiting for Never Too Young FC are familiar to any program built around a strong local model. Whether the approach can be transferred to other regions. Whether the small group structure can be preserved at scale. Whether the philosophy survives the pressures that tend to push youth sports toward earlier competition and earlier specialization.
For now, the work is concentrated, and it is local. Labarre continues to coach the children most other programs turn away. The argument behind the program remains simple. A child who leaves a session smiling has had a good first experience with sport. That experience, repeated, becomes a habit. The habit, eventually, becomes a relationship. And relationships with movement, formed early and well, tend to last.
