US Soccer - Maybe the future isn't all doom and gloom
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by user Alex Holowczak
Simply, soccer has a "stigma" in America.
I have the same problem with chess at school. It is my responsibility to get people to play for the school, and write match reports for school assemblies, etc. Yet, there are some people that tell me not to put their name down. I only ever record the winners, so it's not as if I'm going to say, "Alex Holowczak lost pathetically in 9 moves..." So I have to find cunning ways around it. People like to play it, but don't like others to know they play it.
That situation is comparable to US Soccer. Like chess at my school, it is a minority sport. If a Professional Football player told some people, he would get laughed at (by the majority), as if it were a cop-out of not playing the more traditional games (MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL).
In both situations, the parties concerned are actually quite good. My school is the fourth best in Birmingham (England, for those who don't know), and the USA are in the top 10 in the world (albeit, that is misleading (as previously discussed), but you get the idea). Yet still people would be afraid to say, "I play soccer!"
So like most people in school, they know it exists (heck, with the amount I write notices/reports for it, they must get a bit peed to say the least), but don't really care about it. Similarly, a lot of Americans know they are good at soccer, but again, are not interested (apart from once every four years).
Yet, in my school, chess is slowly losing that stigma, mainly down to increased participation from people that have no other non-sporting activities to do. Also, the club that is ran on a lunchtime is always keenly attended whenever it rains.
So if chess can recover at my school in the space of one generation (seven years of course, age 11-18), perhaps US Soccer can do the same in a generation of people (average life expectancy is about 80 for the US).
So if the USA are the 2086 World Champions, you heard it here first!
Date
Wed 07/05/06, 5:08 am EST
