Sorry for the long callback,but... It's been shown that top-level mids run seven miles or more during a game.While it's true that a lot of that is jogging,this is a significant amount of movement over 90 mins. with only one extended rest period requiring an outstanding cardio base. Without strong cardio,you simply can't compete.It's why the practically unlimitied subs in college soccer infuriate me.It makes it a different game.
I was the one who moved it here. The MLS forum is for stuff going on in MLS. This is three steps removed from that, and not a literal MLS news story (notice MLS isn't mentioned in it) but more of a cultural phenomenon, which is what this forum was created for. By "don't expect it bodes much for the pro game" I simply mean that these new kids playing HS soccer are not to be expected to translate to more pros. HS soccer is very far removed from pro soccer--maybe 0.1% of those playing HS have a real shot at the pros, and for those club soccer is more important than HS. Not that I don't agree with your cultural point, I do, but heck I put my own thread here. And a forum being more popular is a bad reason to locate a thread there. On the general growth I agree--but that's still not MLS, that's national teams. And HS soccer is only tangentially related to that, in the sense that the growth tends to cause both our NTs to get better and more kids to play in HS.
Totally agree with this....in the late 70's I used to scout college games for the Dallas Tornado....I hated going to watch Indiana games as every 15 minutes or so the entire outfield would be subbed and this crap went on for 90 minutes. To this day I will not bother going to any SMU games and I live 10 mins from the campus......As another pro scout I ran into often back in the day said about college soccer...."It's a hell of a game....but it'll never take the place of soccer".....
I have always wondered, and especially when I reffed HS ball, why the high schools, and maybe even colleges, don't use USYSA rules. NFHS rules are not so different from USYSA that a smooth transition couldn't take place. Don't most college club leagues go by FIFA rules? Perhaps the situation in NCAA soccer will keep the pro leagues from looking to the colleges as a minor league, and rather establish either a true reserve system (like MLS is doing), or, by some miracle, have the USL become a true minor league for MLS. I imagine, though, that MLS will have their own reserves, and USL will too (PDL?).
Hay muchos estudiantes hispanos que estan jugando el futbol en la escuela ahora. La poblacion de los hispanos es grande y va a ser mucho mas grande en el futuro. Not perfect but its readable!
Updated numbers for 2007/2008 season: baseball: 478,029 soccer: 383,561 Difference: 94,468 Last year's difference was 99,431, so soccer made up about 5,000 of the gap this past year. At that rate, soccer would catch baseball in a little less than 20 years.
Not to mention the usual Mexican Americans/ or other ethnic 1st generation immigrants who dont end up going to high school, who are usually playing in the streets or dirt fields somewhere, the millions of them. Also i would like to add American Football(NFL) has i believe 55 players on a team compared to Soccer which has about 27-30 players on the 1st team give or take. Then you get into the fact that High school football is walk on, so on some teams have close to 80 players at one point(like my high school team did), and on high school soccer its a team based around 25 players that need to fight for a spot rather than walk on. So Soccer in terms of American kids would also/or might pass American football, if American football was not walk-on and if did not require 2x as much players.
Coincidentally, I looked that up recently. There are 34.5 players per high school team. Some of those guys, I suspect, get no PT for the senior team and are mostly on the JV, but technically it counts.
I think this here is a very interesting discussion, however, I am still not sure what the exact reasons for the fact that soccer isn't so popular here in the US are. I guess it is just not part of our culture unlike American football or baseball, but it seems that they are catching up. When doing a little online search I found one argument that it might be because of soccer being a British sport and America trying to be independent and doing something different. They see this as the reason why soccer didn't get popular in the states from the start.
Soccer has come a very long way in the 40 years I've been here. and it still has a very long way to go. Progress is definately being made in all areas, youth participation,professional league,tv coverage, general exposure, facilities (both recreational and pro) for the game, national team etc. In 1978 a few of us had to fly from Dallas to San Antonio for a weekend just to catch some of the world cup games on tv as there was zero on tv in Dallas....and that's only 30 years ago. These days we have FSC,Goltv, Setanta,PPV,local coverage and the several Spanish channels. Soccer is getting there and the naysayers have as much chance of stopping the inevitable as King Canute had of stopping the tide. Kids give up a lot of things including in some cases, soccer as they become teenagers. Just the way it is and nothing to get in a twist about.
I apologize if this has already been covered (I am working and am in a bit of a rush,) but dont soccer and baseball play on opposing seasons? baseball (spring), and soccer (fall?) Seems like a comparison might not be as valid since people could technically play both in one school year.
Most youth soccer leagues play a spring and a fall season and at least in Texas the high schools play in the winter so the better players are at it 9 months of the year. The way to develope the skills of the game is to play the game...and IMO play the game at the expense of all other sports. I doubt there are ANY Brazilian kids who play soccer along with other sports.
Well I agree. Playing in BOTH seasons would be most beneficial from a development standpoint, no doubt there. I just know in the New england/Tri state area, Soccer is a "fall" sport for the most part. I was looking from an american perspective (since that is what we were looking at), not an international one.
I realise that. The point is that to really develope the skills of this game then two/three training sessions per week, followed by one game, for 4 months of the year just will not do it. I know times have changed but I will relate this story told by Rinus Michels at a coaching clinic several years ago. After WWII (and between 1946-1950 or so) there was nothing for the Dutch kids to do in their war ravaged country except play soccer in the streets all day every day. From this play, with no adults/coaches involved AT ALL arose the finest generation of Dutch players in history. 25-30 years later these same kids managed to reach 2 consecutive world cup finals. Over the years the Dutch have managed to translate this success into their current youth development programs and their national team of the 70's is still held in very high regard, not only in Holland but throughout the world. Michels was a believer in ball work throughout training sessions and was of the opinion that the way to improve was by using the ball at all times. He likened it to the line "How does a great pool player get better, by running laps around a pool table or by playing pool"..?? Too many kids coaches in the USA focus on lap running and the like at the expense of skill development.
Too many kids coaches from my dad's generation that learned the game from a book focus on the lap running you speak of '66, I agree. My generation of U.S. soccer coaches have a very different point of view. It is night and day when I am out training at one of the club's field and there is an older dad sharing the field with me. It's like a freakin' circus and he's the bumbling ring leader. But the point is well taken and the quote is one I will take back to my boy's club BOD. I'm 32 and the more my age group (lil' lads of the NASL) and my little brothers age step into youth coaching ranks, not to mention the ex-pat dads that are intimate with the game, the U.S. youth soccer landscape will jetison its old baby boomer coaches and me thinks American kids will unknowingly grow to love the sport even more.
Another thing the Dutch do at every level is hammer home the importance of short sided, 4 v 4 games, either with full size goals about 35 yards apart (with GK's), small goals or no goals at all (possession only)...the idea being that if a kid can't get 4v4 right he has no chance of ever getting 11 v 11 right. With 4 v 4 games it is easy for the coach to point out mistakes in skill, decision making,positioning, communication etc as whenever something breaks down it invariably leads to a 4v3 or 4v2 situation and a goal or goal chance. After a warm up period youth coaches would be better served using the above to fill out their remaining practice time, rather than the mundane and boring laps, doggies or whatever.
I agree that it is a running issue. As you can see by the obesity problem in this country amongst kids. Soemone once told me that soccer is the most popular sport amongst young kids in the US but also the number one drop out sport for kids between 14-16. If that is what got this thread started I'm sorry for restating the point. http://www.cool-soccer-videos.com
I can confirm this stat as sad as it makes me. Of the 17 boys (ages 12-14) I had on my son's team this past spring...only 1 returned to the club for the Fall season. And that was my assistant coach's son. I mean I ran with those lil' men to get them fit, we worked on off the ball movement, seeing the game and it was fun. I was literally handed the scrap heap of the local league when my son wanted to join the club and my assistant coach and I turned them into a cohesive football team that could play the game proper. They enjoyed their football and it showed in the spirit of the team. It's just that in our U.S. sports culture, 8th and 9th grade is when boys from this new generation decide to quit something, stick with something or just move on to something new. So right there, that was 16 boys to add to that stat.
There something I'd like to point out in regards to projections, especially social and cultural ones like in this thread. The internet and global connectivity was a big game changer for linear statistics. Linear statistics to project future trends are only going to become more and more inaccurate. The potential for an extreme generational change has never been more possible than it is now. I don't know how soccer in the US will be affected by future changes, but trying to predict what will happen has never been more difficulty. Our current inefficient forecasting techniques and past experiences are certainly not good ways of trying to predict where the sport will be in ten or twenty years.
Yep, that's exactly right. The culture not only moves much, much faster now, it moves faster in far more unpredictable ways.
Yeah, I knew there was something like that out there, but this thread is meant to show how this phenomenon is slowly but surely changing. First I'd say there's a little less than meets the eye in that stat, because most sports aren't well adapted for younger kids to play in the first place. You look at the list of the most popular high school sports that I posted before to show the change over 20 years, from the NASL era to the MLS era: Code: Sport 79/'80 04/'05 % Change Baseball 415860 459717 +10.55% Basketball 569228 545497 (-4.17%) Crss Ctry 163094 201719 +23.68% Football-11 937677 1045494 +11.50% Golf 117273 161025 +37.31% Soccer 133649 354587 +[B]165.31%[/B] Swim/Diving 84204 103754 +23.22% Tennis 131290 148530 +13.13% Track 524890 516703 (-1.56%) Wrestling 273326 243009 (-11.09%) Most of them are awkward to get large numbers of younger kids to play, either for facilities reasons (swimming, track, golf) or physical ones, like football. Pop Warner covers ages 5 to 16, a span of 11 years, and has only 400,000 participants, whereas high school football has over 1,000,000. High school football is the grass-roots lifeblood of the game. I suspect it's because football is a fairly silly game until kids hit their growth spurts. Even basketball, you have to play with lowered rims and lighter balls until kids get a little bigger, and the sport doesn't have the widespread infrastructure to get masses of kids doing that. I'd argue only baseball has the infrastructure to provide a version of the game (t-ball to underhand) that kids of all ages can and do play.So if soccer catches baseball in high school, it's no longer then a matter of how 'few' kids play in high school, the dropoff is just a result of how many play at younger ages. There's really been two completely distinct 'soccer booms' in the US: The first, starting in the 1970s or so, was among younger kids, driven by parents who wanteda sport where their kids could be active and outdoors, but where the injury frequency was lower and there wasn't a hypercompetitiveness issue. If the pro game was relevant at all, a lot of these parents viewed it vaguely as a nuisance. That boom plateaued in the mid 90s, as the raw number of people playing the game in a year peaked at about 18 million. It has not gone up since. But what has happened is a second boom. This one has occured at more competitive levels like HS (which is my metaphor for the most basic competitive level--meaning the level of widest involvement where there actually are some cuts) and travel teams. I don't have a way of measuring the participation level of travel/select/club teams, but if one watches carefully, it becomes clear that, starting roughly in the late 80s, that level of play has exploded. What does this add up to? The notion once was that the sport was a harmless way to keep your kids active until they were old enough to play 'real sports.' My belief is that the increase in HS participation is one of several signposts that the participation patterns are changing. Eventually, public perception is more or less fated to catch up with reality. I don't know guys. People thought that about the Space Age too. I think it's too tempting to think that the lastest technological wave causes culture to change suddenly or easily, but when you're talking about people here, and their long-held notions, I tend to think it doesn't, except when vital events happen--the Depression, WWII. Heck, many are still fighting a Culture War that is a legacy of the late 1960s. I actually think soccer has a tangential connection to that Culture War, which is that the sport has been tagged unfairly as the sport that the children of the counterculture put their kids into to express their new agey values. Franklin Foer describes it in "How Soccer Explains the World." I think that has something to do with why Joe Sixpack, with relatively conservative values, begrudges it, and why it was once slandered as "a Communist game." (Luckily, we've gotten past that point.)
Communications technology is the one that can cause quick and massive cultural changes, especially the internet. This is what was predicted back in the Space Age as well, except the development and widespread usage of advanced communication devices took longer than some expected. But we've now reached that point. As Mark Twain said: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." The internet brings a lot of the advantages of travel without actually having to travel. I'm not saying that people are all of the sudden not going to be prejudiced any more. But as more and more people are forced to use advanced technology, they will be more susceptible to cultural changes happening in other parts of the world. Our current globally connected society is far more dynamic than anything we've seen in the past, and it will keep on being this way even if no further advances in the technology occurs. At least this is true for countries with no state repression. The differences between the 20th century world and the 21st century world are going to be vast. In terms of soccer, it will be harder and harder for the US to isolate itself from the global sports world like it has in the past. Sure there are going to be people clinging on to the hatred of the past, but that ultimately won't matter. So am I saying that soccer will be the sport of the future like many said in the NASL days? Yes, I am, though like I said in my previous post, there are so many unknowns that it's very hard to predict this with a high degree of certainty. In many ways all this is actually harmful to local culture and localized things. That's why all the major US sports are now in a hunt to make their brands international. And of course, the one league that is having the hardest time doing this is none other than the NFL. Right now it is completely dependent on the US having total control over the world. But as the notion of one country controlling most of the world's economy becomes replaced with a global market with no specific center, they will have a hard time growing any further. I know many others will disagree, but I don't buy the notion that the NFL is certain to remain as powerful as it is now. Playing games internationally is not something the NFL is doing simply because they're greedy and want even more money (though that's always part of it). Growing internationally is necessary to maintain a steady growth, or else it's possible that they could experience a steady decline. Keep in mind that they have almost completely saturated the US market already. There's barely any room left for them to grow domestically.
It's not that I don't think communications technology will change the world. When there have been improvements in communications or travel technology, it has always changed the world. It's just that, while physical interactions are changed very quickly by technology, deeply held social attitudes come around more slowly. I'm partial to this one from the German physicist Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." I think his point about scientific attitudes applies to attitudes in general.
That's also another good quote I like to look at once in a while. But I don't think the two ideas are opposites. People are always going to be biased in one way or another. My point was only that in the future people will be more willing to continuously adjust their ideas based on the constantly changing world around them. This doesn't apply to everything a person believes. But it is much harder not to reflect on the validity of your own ideas when constantly interacting with other people's ideas. The invention of the printing press was similarly monumental. Of course it didn't solve everything, and even ended up causing many problems, but European society before it and after it were worlds apart. And I fairly certain the internet spreads information a little faster than Gutenberg's old printing press.