Soccer’s Shifting Sands
November 27, 2012
US Soccer has created “Development Academies” for high school age soccer players that prohibit those players from competing on their high school teams. This has created a nationwide gnashing of teeth to which I contributed in this space on March 9, 2012 – “US Soccer Gets a Red Card.”
It now appears that the effects of US Soccer’s exclusionary policy have been felt in Michigan, as a new cast of characters played leading roles in the MHSAA’s recently completed Lower Peninsula Boys Soccer Tournament and the Michigan High School Soccer Coaches Association’s team rankings tilted from the southeast, home of the state’s two US Soccer Development Academy programs, and toward the west and north.
Divisions 1, 2 and 3 of the MHSAA boys tournament lacked a southeast team in the Finals; and the soccer coaches association did not rank a southeast team in the top two of Divisions 1 and 4, in the top four of Division 3, and in the top eight of Division 2.
Certainly, one year's results is not a trend; there could be other factors at play here. And it’s also true that some folks are not alarmed, saying any student lost to the US Soccer Development Academy opens up a spot for another student to play for his high school team.
Perhaps that’s so. Still, it is disconcerting that US Soccer now plans to descend to an even younger level of athlete for its boys development academy and to start a similar program for girls soccer.
Enhancing Public Health
August 29, 2017
Due to overuse injuries from sport specialization that is too early, too intense and too prolonged, youth may be increasingly susceptible to sports-related injuries; but school sports themselves have never been safer – for obvious reasons:
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Equipment is the best it’s ever been.
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Coaches have never been better trained in health and safety.
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Practice and competition rules have never been more safety conscious.
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Officials have never had more authority to penalize unsafe play.
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Medical care and insurance has never been as available as it is today.
Our objective is not merely to keep making school-sponsored sports safer and safer year after year. In school sports – educational athletics – we also have the objective that students learn habits of a healthy lifestyle they can carry into adulthood.
In this way, school sports mitigates some of the damage of youth sports and contributes to the general good, to improved public health in America.
All that we do has that goal, and it’s a finish line we have not yet crossed.