Improving American soccer, one Brian McBride at a time

Interesting yet complicated theory.

Social and Media pressures and influence do self perpetuate the consistent reign of the gridiron. Which is why originally I said, improving high school soccer would do much more to spread the gospel than cherry picking kids and putting them in isolated camps would.

That being said, the problems facing high school soccer are seen as intractable, lack of money and will leads to lack of good coaching and infrastructure. Same with college soccer.

So what to do? I think a happy medium is a structure similar to what hockey development has. You have high school programs and college programs but you also have minor league teams as well (junior hockey fills the void in Canada).

The growth of NASL and USL will provide more opportunities for young players to play professionally in the USA.

Still, what needs to happen is some sort of organization between all these parties, ala hockey or baseball. Otherwise, we will stay in neutral.

 

I just saw this article and did a search, wondering if anyone had posted it. I came to pick at the logic of it.

I think there's at least one fairly clear analytic leap in it (and then at least one old, silly fantasy): McBride is talking about switching back and forth in elementary school, and the article then gives you participation statistics from high school. Different world completely.

When it then says:

It becomes misleading, because the situation described (playing soccer because that's the team they had) isn't rare at younger age groups, and hasn't been quite for some time. McBride was born in June 1972, meaning he would have been in first grade in 1978. What was true in 1978 was already hugely changed by the mid-80s at that age group--the registered youth participation rate in soccer went up by a factor twelve times between 1974 and 1985, (see: http://www.usyouthsoccer.org/media_kit/keystatistics/)--and that's already older than our National Teamers are now (if you were in first grade in 1985, you'd be 35 now, older by one year than our oldest player, Tim Howard).

The author caught McBride at the early edge of the 'soccer boom' and tried to prop him up to make the old 'hey, what if LeBron played soccer?' argument that is neither complicated nor interesting. Soccer has a fairly understood disadvantage in terms of its ability to reach out to some US neighborhoods, but it has a compensating advantage in that it is more accessible to younger children, who have often cottoned on to the fact that they're pretty good at it before they would even be in position to pick up a ball in american football.