| What Every Parent, Coach
& Sportscaster Should Know about soccer -- but probably
doesn’t, from…
SOCCERHEAD: An Accidental Journey
Into The Heart of The American Game
by Jim Haner
- Soccer is an American game. The sport arrived on the
continent long before it was ever introduced into Brazil,
Germany, Italy or France – and at least 200 years
before baseball, football and basketball were invented.
Prior to the Great Depression, soccer had spawned more
than 50 professional and semi-professional leagues and
rivaled baseball in popularity as a spectator sport.
- With more than 18 million registered players –
half of them under the age of 12 – soccer has become
the second largest participation sport in the United States
after basketball. There are now more youth players in
the U.S. than in any other country in the world.
- There are three times more girl soccer players in America
than there are Girl Scouts; and eight times more than
in any other industrialized country. From just 28 high
schools in the year Mia Hamm was born, more than 8,000
now field girls’ soccer teams. The number of young
women playing high school soccer has risen over the past
three decades from 700 to 290,000. The sport now captures
five times more players than field hockey – and
nearly as many as softball.
- As the growth of boys soccer programs overtook other
sports at the high school level, Major League Baseball
began “importing” half of its prospects from
overseas. Boys’ soccer has grown at three times
the rate of baseball – from about 49,000 scholastic
players in 1972 to more than 300,000 today.
- With median household incomes of $78,000, soccer families
coalesced during the 1990s into grassroots political action
groups, pushing through millions in bond issues for elaborate
“soccerplexes” that dwarf traditional hometown
sports facilities. In one of the biggest construction
booms in youth athletics since the New Deal, major soccer
complexes sprang up in such places as Albany, Philadelphia,
Virginia Beach, Raleigh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Indianapolis,
Boulder, Denver, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Dallas and
at least seven cities in California. Built at a cost of
$22 million, The Maryland Soccerplex outside Washington,
D.C. features 23 soccer fields, a 66,000-square-foot arena
and a 3,200-seat stadium – exclusively for youth
league games.
- Of the 38 million American kids who are enrolled in
sports leagues, about a third quit every year, complaining
of burnout and pressure from adults. Budget cuts for physical
education programs have reduced the ranks of degreed professional
coaches, so 85 percent are now amateur-Dads – and
fewer than one in 20 has been certified to work with kids.
Remarkably, soccer is the only mass participation youth
sport with a nationwide training and licensing program
for coaches overseen by a single governing body (the U.S.
Soccer Federation).
- Soccer now attracts so many kids that only about 7
percent of youth players under the age 12 will ever qualify
for their high school team. Of those who do, there is
only one college soccer scholarship available for every
seventy-eight male high school players. Among collegiate
varsity players, the odds of playing professionally in
the U.S. are no better than one in a thousand.
SOCCERHEAD: An Accidental Journey
Into The Heart of the American Game,
by Jim Haner, will be published in hardcover by Farrar,
Straus and Giroux
on April 18, 2006 / 0-86547-694-2/ $24.00
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