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About the Book
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What Every Parent, Coach &
Sportscaster Should Know about soccer -- but probably doesn’t
 Soccerhead:
An Accidental Journey Into The Heart of The American Game
is a light-hearted history of a youth soccer team and its
quest for the elusive “perfect season” in the
soccer-crazed suburbs of Washington, D.C. But it is also
a many-layered look deep inside the life and times of the
21st Century American Star Child. Often hilariously funny,
it veers sharply from one chapter to the next to take on
issues of modern parenting; children’s health and
psychology; the politics of kids’ sports; and the
multibillion-dollar industry that is youth athletics.
The College Park Hornets formed when they were in Kindergarten,
and played together for eight seasons – bonded by
their love of a mysterious game that their coach and most
of their parents knew almost nothing about when the “accidental
journey” began in the autumn of the year 2000.
They are the sons and daughters of lawyers and carpenters;
Democrats and Republicans; Latino immigrants, African-Americans
and white middle-class suburbanites – Catholics, Baptists,
Hindus and Protestants. They come from private and public
schools, bungalow enclaves and leafy subdivisions. At home,
they speak three different languages. On the field, they
speak the world’s language. Were it not for soccer,
they never would have met, much less become friends.
Soccerhead examines what all of this might mean
for the future of an increasingly “poly-cultural”
nation now permanently enmeshed in the role of global leader.
For this simple game is now a full-fledged social movement
– the second largest participation sport in the U.S.
after basketball and a unifying center of American life,
the new “town square” for some 20 million families
who build their social calendars and weekend plans around
soccer seven months a year. For the kids, it is the “prep
school” for global citizenship and a passport to a
future unlike any their parents ever knew.
 In
alternating chapters, Soccerhead explores the fractious
history of the game in America from the 19th century to
the present day, the far-reaching impact of Title IX and
its role in fostering the “Youth Sports Boom”
of the 1970s, and the significance of soccer’s governing
rules and philosophies. Amid a cacophony of government alarms
about adolescent obesity, diabetes and attention deficit
disorders, Soccerhead also takes a hard look at
the “dark side” of kids sports in the age of
supervised “play dates” and hyper-organized
pay-for-play leagues.
Soccerhead: An Accidental Journey Into The Heart of
The American Game will be available in bookstores in
April, 2006 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers of
New York. Advance orders may be placed at Amazon.com
and Overstock.com.
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