Soccer - "The Un- American Activity"

No, the more we talk about soccer, the more your incessant "America loves soccer, it really does!" cheerleading is exposed.

 

Crass what parts of article do you disagree with?

One thing I found interesting from article that I had not realized was the lack of minorities on US World Cup team -- few blacks and no latin americans.  I am surprised that this has not become an issue. Also may account for US lack of success.  

 

That is the biggest thing holding U.S. soccer back. Back in the late 80s, early 90s, the best USA player was a Latin American named Hugo Perez. I've lived in Hispanic-rich areas before, and I've seen some fabulous talent go unrecognized. I'm talking Division-I/pro talent. I've seen a kid from El Salvador (American citizen) who was the most skilled prep player I've ever seen, and I've been around prep soccer (playing, watching, refereeing, covering) since 1991. But he only got to stay at the local juco to play. Sad.

Another kid from Mexico (American citizen) was one of the best finishers I've ever seen, and right now he's playing at a tiny NAIA school because he never got another look. Youth Latin Americans is an untapped but vital resource to the future of American soccer.

 

Just for argument's sake (and basing it on my own kids' experiences with the early level of youth sports), I'll take it upon myself to refute and/or expand upon some of the statements made on this topic:

1. It's true that soccer has been taken on as every kid's first organized sport. As mentioned earlier, that's because the concept is very easy to explain to even the smallest kid -- take that ball, kick it in the goal in that direction. Watching coaches try to teach five- and six-year-olds baseball, it's like Stephen Hawking explaining quantum physics to the rest of us.

2. The "everybody gets a trophy" thing is not so much to protect the kids' fragile egos. Believe me, they know when they've lost. When I coached my son's 6- and 7-year-old coed basketball team a few years' back, it was a no-score-kept league, but somehow my kids always knew what the score was. The "everybody gets a trophy" thing is to protect the fragile egos of the kids' parents.

3. Kids sports is not more "pussified." In fact, it's more cutthroat than ever. Maybe coaches can't yell and swear at 7-year-olds anymore, but the whole system is ruthlessly efficient at identifying the best athletes and giving them all the perks. (Don't we have a thread on a 10-year-old basketball player getting adidas money?) We used to laugh at Communist countries for their early-age youth-sports intensive training -- taking them away from parents and spending hours upon hours concentrating on one sport -- but what is the IMG Academies but a free-market version of that? Plus, traveling teams are getting younger, and the whole system demands that if you're good at one sport, you can't do anything else. The three-sport athlete is a dying breed. Heck, my son's Pony League (Mustang -- third- and fourth-graders) kept talking about how this wasn't Pinto (the younger league) anymore, and that it was time to get serious. My son played soccer and baseball in the spring -- the demands of both now dictate he can do only one or the other. With soccer, it's easier to get back into it if he misses a year. If he misses a year of baseball, he may as well announce his retirement.

4. Back to soccer, I would argue that soccer isn't a good cardio workout. For five- to 10-year-old kids, who will be put anywhere and everywhere on the field, it's relentless running. It might not look like much to adults, but they're really working. Baseball, obviously, is the sport that has no cardio value whatsoever.

5. Wrapping it up, I would say this phenomenon is not restricted to sports. From academics to performing arts to whatever other activity you can put your kid in, there's no middle ground, at least in the hegemony of parenting these days -- you're either training your kid relentessly for greatness in something, or your kid is doomed to be a shit-shoveler. That might be part of the reason for giving trophies to everybody -- to assauge parents' fear that their kid is falling behind. If there are kids who take that as participating is enough, that's because their parents are raising them with nothing but positive reinforcement (not that positive reinforcement is bad, but too much of positive or negative is not good).

 

The U.S. started three African American players out of 11.
That's as large a percentage as you're getting in baseball now.
Fewer African American athletes are playing anything but basketball and football now.

 

That's true but there was not ever one latin american player on team. The largest minority with perhaps the greatest interest in the sport does not have one player on the team.

 

Dead on Ragu - its also the point that Toobin makes about US World Cup team - they showed no mettle - which he attributes partly to how they have been conditioned from their youth soccer days.

I wonder if they all received trophies.

Also wonder if Bruce Arena set up a parent snack schedule for the boys after their games and practices.

 

Boom, the very idea that everyone on the national team was some sort of mini-van driven child of luxury is not only lacking in evidence but insulting.

Ask Eddie Johnson what he was doing when he found the sport. What about the conditions of Dempsey growing up? Why don't we talk to Claudio Reyna. I'm sure he'll talk about his "luxury" life in Patterson, NJ. Or, we can go over what Tim Howard dealt with growing up with tourettes and then dealing with it again in England.

The idea of "everybody gets a trophy" didn't start with soccer.


Now, if you want to discuss the racial make-up of the team, we can dive in and discuss that. However, that doesn't seem to be where this wants to go. This was posted solely as an attempt to degrade what the author and yourself dislikes.

 

I heard Bode Miller played soccer as a kid. His results in the Olympics speak for themselves.

 

Crass, Boom is playing you like a fiddle. He doesn't believe any of the stuff he's writing... it's just his flavor of the month.

 

How am I degrading Jeffery Toobin? I think he is a tremendous writer and this piece is dead on. It's a story that does take a lot of directions and also fosters very solid debate in a number of areas. Hence the reason why thread has taken off in many directions.

Surely it must seem odd to you that there was not one latin american player on the US World Cup team.