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The first thing you notice about Santiago Blasco Gómez is what he doesn't lead with. Three seasons of Division I soccer. Thirteen years inside one of Spain's professional academies. Two degrees, the second one finished while he was still playing. Ask him who he is and none of that comes first. He starts with Valencia, and with the people still there.

Everyone here calls him Santi. Three years ago he left home and came to America chasing two things at once — his education and his soccer career — and he refused to trade either one for the other. His parents, his sister, and most of his relatives are all still in Valencia. He is the one who left.

He finished his undergraduate degree in Health Science with a concentration in Exercise Science. Then he finished a master's in Healthcare Informatics and AI. If that pairing sounds like two different people, it isn't.

They Don't Train Athletes. They Train People.

Santi started playing at five, on his town team. At six he was at Levante UD. At eight, the academy stopped charging his family to keep him there.

Thirteen years he stayed — a long stretch of someone's childhood to hand over to a football club.

Ask him what he got out of it and he doesn't talk about touch, or tactics, or how many levels he climbed. He gives you one sentence that explains almost everything about how he coaches now.

He improved technically, tactically, and physically. He says that part almost in passing. What he actually kept was a set of human values that he says he still carries every single day, and that made him a better person. That is the thing he brought across an ocean.

There's a photo from those years of him mid-match — small, long hair, arm straight out, pointing. It looks like a kid organizing his teammates.

It isn't. He had just scored, and he was pointing at his mother in the stands.

The Showcase

American college soccer doesn't usually find you in Valencia. You have to go stand somewhere it can see you.

For Santi that was a showcase run by Eture, the biggest company in Spain doing this kind of thing. College coaches fly over to watch. Players get one window to be seen by programs on another continent.

It worked. Clemson came in. George Mason came in. And Reuben, who would become his head coach at Bryant, flew to Spain to watch him play in person.

He picked Bryant. Not the biggest name on the list — the one where somebody spoke his language. Bryant's assistant coach is Spanish, and for a twenty-three-year-old about to live outside Spain for the first time, that mattered more than the logo did.

It's the same instinct, over and over. He goes where the people are.

Three Seasons

None of what follows is in anything Santi told me. I had to go find it.

Year one, 2023, he barely played. Sixteen appearances, two starts, 598 minutes — a Spanish transfer scrapping for time on a team that went 16-2-2 and won the first America East championship in Bryant history, then reached the program's first NCAA tournament. He was a role player on a history-making team. He scored once.

Year two he never came off the field. Twenty games, twenty starts, 1,736 minutes — roughly every minute available to him. The team around him dipped to 10-6-4, but he'd become the anchor of the best defense in the conference, and Bryant reached the America East final anyway.

Year three was the one nobody at Bryant will forget. Seventeen starts on a 17-2-3 team that won thirteen straight — the longest active streak in the country — and climbed to No. 2 in the national rankings. They earned the first top-16 NCAA seed in program history, then won the program's first NCAA tournament game. The run ended in the Round of 16 against Saint Louis: 2-2 through double overtime, gone 4-3 on penalty kicks.

He made Second Team All-America East that year, and Academic All-District with a 3.5 GPA, while finishing the master's.

Across all three seasons: 57 games, 39 starts, 3,863 minutes, four goals. Three yellow cards and not one red. That last number is the one that tells you what kind of player he was. Defensive midfielders who can't read the game foul constantly. He almost never had to.

His teams went 43-10-9 with him in the middle of them.

Two Degrees and One Question

He started in Exercise Science back in Spain. Arriving here, academic requirements pushed him into Health Science instead — so he kept taking every class he could find that tied back to sports science anyway.

The master's decision says a lot about him. Of everything on offer, Healthcare Informatics was the degree he could most connect back to sports science. It also let him stay at Bryant for his final year of college soccer rather than transferring somewhere else just to get a master's. He wasn't willing to give up the last season to chase the credential, so he found the version of the credential that let him keep both.

Underneath both degrees is the same question he has been circling since he was a kid: how does the human body adapt to everything we ask of it? He has been passionate about sport his whole life. The data is just the newest way in.

How He Found Us

Santi found Prototype through his head coach at Bryant, who put him in touch with Steve Cimino about a summer internship at the gym. That was the whole plan — a summer. Then the summer ended and we asked him to stay.

What surprised him once he got here wasn't the programming or the equipment. It was the room.

Which is close to the same sentence he used about Levante, twenty years and four thousand miles apart. People first. He recognized it here because he had felt it before.

What He'll Be Doing Here

Santi coaches on two sides of the same athlete. Strength and conditioning — the physical foundation that decides whether a young player holds up over a season. And soccer skill — the technical and tactical work, taught by someone who was doing it at a high level nine months ago, not a decade ago.

His advice for young athletes chasing the next level is not what most kids expect to hear from a former D1 starter. There is nothing in it about doing more.

Enjoyment first, then training, then rest. That's the order he said it in.

He came to America for a degree and a soccer career. He got both. What he didn't plan for is the part he has now — a gym full of people who knew him as an intern and now call him Coach, four thousand miles from the stands he used to point at.

If you're a parent watching your kid fall in love with a sport, and you've wondered who should be shaping the next few years of that — this story is for you.

"I'd love to spend my future helping athletes use science and data to perform at the highest level possible while keeping their health in the best shape possible. Basically, to have a real, meaningful impact on people's performance and health."

I'm very optimistic about Santi joining the team. We met him through RSA, where he was part of the team that were doing the tryout evaluations for Westborough Youth Soccer. Coach Steve built a relationship with his coach and Santi, and when he needed an internship in this field, he reached out to us.

He's been a breath of fresh air since joining as an intern, and now as one of our newest coaches. He has a great athletic background and depth of knowledge in the sport of soccer, but what makes him stand out to me is his curiosity to learn and his humility. On paper, you would think Santi would walk around with a big ego, but it's the opposite... he wants to continue to get better, he wants to learn and he wants to help athletes. The future is bright for Santi, and my hope is he becomes a big part of what we are building here at Prototype!

This story was developed through written responses submitted by Santi and shaped with the help of AI writing tools. The facts, quotes, and experiences are Santi's own — AI helped organize and present them in a format worthy of the story he's lived.