Soccer - "The Un- American Activity"

Again, I think you're wildly overstating the percentage who leave this with a bad taste in their mouth, Bub. There are more good results in this than a kid reaching the top level of his/her sport. There's also a better chance that this kid is hanging out with other youths who are less likely to find trouble than the kids who have all this time on their hands.

You see the kids who burn out. I just as often see kids who thrive under this.

And again, I think those in our profession take an especially dim view of this because of having to deal with youth sports parents at their worst. It's easier for us to mail-slot this as a totally bad thing.

 

And the same could be said for soccer, unless you ignore the toughness aspect and just pretend it doesn't occur.

Black eyes, bruised ribs, bruises on the thighs, ankles busted up. Spikes in the calf. A hard tackle that takes out the ankles. A slide tackle from beyond (sort of like getting blindsided, except you don't have pads on). I slept with ice packs on my feet a few times and the Mineral Ice was kept in constant supply.

Football works for just as many kids as any other sport. You break it down to coaching and I don't disagree. I just don't see how you can discount one sport and argue that it is less physical than another (however, I would agree that baseball is about the least physical out there).

 

It also costs a lot less. Towns can have leagues with 20-30 soccer teams. Most towns can afford to have one football
team per age group that plays other towns. And that's a good point about not feeling overmatched. You can have a
completely inferior team lose by 3-4 goals. In football, completely inferior team not only loses by a lot more it ends up
with a few injuries.

 

CONTACT - The first time you see that "flash of light" at point of contact is what separates men from boys.

There is not much that develops more mental toughness in a kid than when he has to make his first "live one on one  contact" tackle.



It may sound corny but its true - Football teaches kids who are knocked down to get back in the race-- much like life.  

 

I played football and I didn't meet a bunch of bigger sad sacks of slovenly loserdom anywhere other than the football field. I was a running back. I came away more injured playing soccer than I did in a sport where I was done up in pads.

Then there were the days of pick-up games in the park where I didn't wear pads.

Sorry, Boom. But to make the broad claim that football holds some sort of "knock down get back in the race" while other sports don't is so severely narrow-minded that it exposes your entire point of starting this thread.

 

Crass is right.

If anything, I think someone who plays competitive soccer for the first time -- given its silly foo-foo perception -- would be really shocked how much physical punishment players take. And the mettle Ragu talked about in reference to football, would need to be conjured to play soccer too, especially when you add in the conditioning element.

So does soccer, Boom. So do about 100 other sports.

And I can see where you're going with this, then why do they dive? It's gamesmanship, the same reason wide receivers occasionally dive in the NFL to draw pass interference, or a basketball player pulls a little bit of overacting after some contact in the lane. What's the difference?

I dislike it in all sports, but the copyright on toughness isn't confined to football or any other one sport. Nor is the copyright on flopping like a little bitch to get call. Really, only baseball is immune from that.

 

It was an annual joke in our high school to see the football players (who apparently turned into men during their first contact drill) go out for our wrestling team... only to quit a week or two later because they couldn't take it. It was too tough.

 

I would echo that any sport -- any activity -- can teach you toughness. If, say, auditions weren't tough, why is the classical music world suffering with its own performance-enhancing drug scandal? (Google "classical music" and "beta blockers.") Toughness doesn't necessarily get taught by having your face shoved into the ground by some fat guy.

Heck, if you want a sport that teaches you toughness, baseball could definintely apply, because no sport is better at teaching you how to deal with and recover quickly from failure. I say that because in other sports, the action moves fast enough to give you a chance to make up for your mistake, but baseball gives you longer to think about it.

As for soccer, my two oldest (son and daughter) have learned plenty of lessons of toughness in soccer. Given how out of control kids are when they're younger, there are tons of teeth-rattling collisions going on, with no pads. Funny story -- in first grade, my oldest son got knocked down hard for the first time in soccer. My wife was ready to pull a Jeff George's mom to go get him. I was yelling, "Get up!" (He got up. But another kid later in the game did need to be carted off, after he got flipped upside down and landed on his head thanks getting a follow-through to ankles.) If Donovan McNabb's mom had seen some of the action at youth soccer games, she might have never allowed him to play soccer, either.

 

On the youth level the amount of injuries is probably about the same.
A couple years ago when my buddy's kid was playing 5th-6th grade
football he said that soccer had more injuries.
But once you get to high school, football is a lot more physical.
You can easily get knocked out cold with a legal hit in football.
In soccer you get a yellow card for making contact with a foot
or leg if the other guy doesn't have the ball.