The Small Business Project: Football coach turns passion into growing Kiwi kids’ skills venture

Monday, 2 February 2026

Mauricio Rojas of Kiwi Kick Stars says fun is front and centre of his coaching business.

The Small Business Project is a weekly series that shines the spotlight on Kiwi small businesses doing interesting and unusual things.

Colombian-born, British expat Mauricio Rojas, a licensed football coach, spent more than 15 years working in youth development and in high performance and community sport. After a career as an academy coach with Fulham FC and Crystal Palace, and a subsequent move to New Zealand, Rojas tells Aimee Shaw why he started a coaching company for school-age children ‒ and why he thinks promoting football is a good development and economic decision.

What has your venture set out to achieve?

Kiwi Kick Stars is a coaching company aimed at football and physical skills development. We are all about building good relationships and memories between physical activity and sports and children. We use fun activities and storytelling to create happy memories, where kids feel they are playing a fun game exercising, and that is the way we get them engaged to learn new skills. We use football as a tool. Our outcome is not to create a footballer, but to create a child who loves sports and physical activity. We have coached 3000 children since inception in 2019 and hold 10 classes each week for children aged five to 11.

Mauricio Rojas founded Kiwi Kick Stars in 2019. He is club director of North Shore United in Auckland and runs the business part-time.

It all started when my eldest daughter, Salome, was at primary school, and she wanted to play football, because I'm involved in football. She wanted to have some coaching for her and some of her friends at school. I started this little group, then more kids started joining. I saw there was a little opportunity so I began looking at what was going on in other schools. We were in a new area, and the new schools didn't have any after- school activities involving football. I started offering them and doing sessions, and the children loved it.

The business was growing well but all of a sudden the pandemic hit and we were in lockdown. To keep the kids engaged we came up with the idea of doing some fitness- themed videos, sessions on YouTube and Facebook.

They were basically PE sessions at home and they had themes like Harry Potter, Hairy Maclary, even New Zealand. We had 25 sessions over 25 weeks and that was great. After Covid, I got back to to the business, and then started looking for more schools.

Today, we have six coaches and we’re in about 10 schools, where we do after school and lunch programmes. We have done projects with-low decile schools or disadvantaged schools, where we have found our approach makes a huge difference. Some of that had received funding.

What’s your background?

I left Colombia when I finished university. I did my degree in sport science, and I’ve always been involved in football. I didn't want to do my coaching badges in Colombia or in South America, so that was the reason that took me to the UK. I’ve been in New Zealand for 13 years.

How much time and money have you invested?

I had a set of goals that I started using in the first session. But to get it going, I spent about $800 on equipment, gear, shirts for coaches and the website. The main investment was the marketing side.

What’s the biggest challenge your business is facing?

I would say the financial situation of consumers is being reflected in our numbers, even though our fee is one of the most affordable in the market for the product that we are offering. You can see the decrease of registrations. The other one is the coaching side, - finding coaches that want to stay is difficult. Because this is not a fulltime job, you get students that come here for six months, and then they move on. That is tricky, because you have spent time training them.

What’s the biggest issue impacting your industry?

There are quite a few companies doing similar propositions.

What’s next for Kiwi Kick Stars?

Mauricio Rojas’s Kiwi Kick Stars classes have trained 3000 children.

We’re starting to expand into other areas. We will be introducing a school holiday programme, and an academy programme for kids that want to develop their skills further.

At the same time, we want to offer classes to a younger group; preschoolers. We’re looking at setting up a programme to go into preschools and kindies, to encourage physical activity with coordination games.

What’s one thing you wish you’d known before starting the business?

The website was quite casual, and the Facebook page as well. If I would have started this business again, I would have started with a little bit more focus on the marketing side, and on the website. I focused on the delivery side, which is important and it has worked, but complementing it with the marketing side, it would have been a different business. Whatever we do on the ground is great, and we're doing an amazing job, but the only people who get to know what we're doing are the people affected by it, however, if we spread it on social media or on the website that helps to make sure everybody is aware of what we're doing. We missed that at the beginning, and now we're trying to play catch up. In the last year year we invested massively on our website.

Most helpful piece of advice you have ever received?

Treat every session as a showcase, because parents and word of mouth is one of the best ways to get a reputation and to get more customers in. If you have happy customers every session, they’ll keep coming back.

If you would like your business to feature in The Small Business Project, email Aimee Shaw at aimee.shaw@stuff.co.nz