LOS ANGELES — Eddie Lewis played his final soccer game at the age of 36, old for a midfielder but young for just about everybody else. So with more than half a lifetime ahead of him, he had plenty of time to build a new career.

Yet like many former players, all he really knew was soccer.

"A lot of players retire with quite a bit of soccer experience. It almost becomes somewhat of a detriment in the sense that they haven't gained a lot of other experiences along the way," he said.

Lewis had a lot of soccer experience, having played 399 professional games in a 14-year club career spent mainly in England while making 82 appearances and playing in two World Cups with the national team. However, none of that was going to help land a job that required him to wear long pants to work.

He was offered a coaching job with Real Salt Lake and a front office position with his final team, the Galaxy, he said. But Lewis had another idea, one that would allow him to take his soccer knowledge into the business world. So in 2016 he started TOCA Football, a technology-based training platform that now has warehouse-size facilities in 39 cities in 15 states and has become the largest operator of indoor soccer centers in North America. The company also operates TOCA Social, a soccer and dining experience in the United Kingdom.

"I was very passionate about this concept, which is really all it was at the time, and felt strongly that I needed to go all in and really make it happen," Lewis said.

The concept is built around a training method Lewis stumbled upon while at UCLA. The team's locker room was inside Pauley Pavilion, so the soccer players would often stop and watch basketball practice on their way to the showers. One day coach Jim Harrick rolled out a hoop that was smaller than regulation size for shooting drills, reasoning that if his players could score in the narrow basket, playing with the bigger one would be easy.

"I thought, 'OK, that makes sense,' " Lewis remembered.

So he took a tennis ball to a nearby parking garage and practiced dribbling, passing and shooting.

"I started to notice improvement," he said. "Because not only was I trying to control this very small ball, I was also starting to work on some of the areas that I wouldn't typically work on in training."

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