Photos of SAS Soccer Park, Cary, N.C.,
are at the bottom of this page.
I have been playing sandlot soccer since I was eight years old in 1965, back then there not being any youth soccer leagues like there are so prevalently now, love soccer still, understand the nature and tactics of soccer, appreciate the poetry of soccer, support soccer as a sport whenever possible and yet as a life-long soccer aficionado who happens to be a native-born American it seems like the future of American soccer is fair-to-middling mediocre at best to almost-dismal at worst.
I really don’t think it’s because of the ingrained culture of more typical All-American sports such as baseball or American football or basketball or even NASCAR racing, nor do I think it’s because soccer is "boring" since televised poker and billiards have become hugely popular recently and to me nothing is more boring than watching other people play cards or shoot pool nor do I think it’s because of any prejudice against soccer because it’s more of a world sport and the French and other countries we also don’t usually like politically happen to also play it as their national sport.
I have pondered why American soccer hasn’t succeeded in becoming more popular than it is, and have reached two main conclusions.
First, even though ABC and ESPN have tried to give soccer more exposure, especially the US women’s world cup team and women’s college soccer and the national pro men’s soccer league, their efforts have been half-hearted at best.
When they have had games on, they’ve given very little gratis collateral advertising on other shows within their network family, e.g. you never saw an ad for any games appear on say, Monday Night Football, let alone paid or cross-traded advertisements on other networks’ shows. To be able to find and actually watch what nationally televised soccer games were on required real effort on the part of the fan, an effort which a real fan would make of course but which the casual fan who is the future of the sport wouldn’t bother with, which meant that unless a potential casual fan just happened to surf into a game in progress they wouldn’t have otherwise had a clue that it was on right then.
Second, what television coverage was given, has been given in the past, flat-out sucked from a technical production point of view. Most coverage by most local television stations of most local high school football games is better than the seeming one/two camera coverage that the networks have given national games, and the on-screen graphics and flash info are often done better on cable system community access programs
Shame, shame, shame ESPN and ABC! Really, guys, if you’re going to bother to spend a quarter to half a million dollars to do live coverage of a nationally televised soccer game, can’t you afford the extra twenty thousand for the overhead of a couple of extra cameras or a couple of thousand for some decently researched and blueprinted graphics?
If you have a difficult time finding out when or even if a televised soccer game is on and if when you do find it the production values are so pitiful as to be truly sad and when those two factors are mixed in with a lack of longer-term vision to promote the sport as exhibited by the first two examples, then you have a recipe guaranteed to keep the sport of American soccer marginalized at best and headed for the dustbin of other also-rans at worst.
Considering the sheer number of young people playing the sport, who have been gradually increasing in playing the sport in terms of percentage of population and in sheer numbers since the 1980’s especially, you’d think that there would now be a base of support in place in the millions of that desirable 18-to-34-year-old demographic that television and other advertisers so desperately want to reach that ABC/ESPN(one and the same, as you know)/Etc would have gotten a clue by now as well as their advertisers that actually pay the bills that hey, if "we spend a little money now and do things right, giving coverage to American soccer that is at least as good as the coverage we give to say, professional bowling, then not only will the popularity of soccer grow but our overall revenues and profits will grow right along with it?".
Nike, Phil Knight & Co., are you listening, Good & Intelligent & Business-Savvy Gentlemen that you are?
Locally,
CASL/Capitol Area Soccer League
has such huge popularity and so many young people wanting to play in its youth leagues that our beloved Wake County Commissioners have a hard time finding enough tax money to build enough soccer fields (they are relatively expensive to create and even more expensive to maintain once built, admittedly) for its future taxpayers to play on.
Even when our local political fathers bite the temporary bullet and spend the money to build a world-class or something very close to it as "SAS Soccer Park" in Cary just a couple of miles from my home where the recent "College Cup", the NCAA Division 1 Women;s College Soccer Championship was held this past weekend and which was also the home of the former Carolina Courage women’s professional soccer team before they folded last year, even when many new soccer pitches and facilities are built, demand for them is so great that they’re soon booked up solid for years in advance.
Yet the national television networks continue to treat American soccer not just like a poor-relation stepchild but one which is so ugly that it needs to be kept locked up in the basement as well? Why?
Cary, North Carolina having the highest per capita income of any city in North Carolina and its world-class soccer facility bearing the name (they bought the naming rights after it was built, trust me, they can afford it) of
SAS Software, SAS being the world’s largest privately owned software firm
and consistently ranked as either the best or one of the top three employers to work for in the US, is representative of the demographic that advertisers want to reach, yet there is no professional league soccer team to play in it now. Why?
Speaking of this past weekend’s College Cup women’s soccer championship which has held at SAS Soccer Park, it was one of if not the most exciting women’s final ever played because of or in spite of depending on your point of view, that controversial to say the least “penalty kick” rule.
When two teams play their absolute hearts out, when both teams leave blood and guts on the field for 110 minutes of relentless combat, it’s a crying shame that the outcome of the battle, eerrrr, game should come down to a best-of-five at-least-partial-if-not-mostly-luck-of-the-draw five one-on-one duels five players against their opposing team’s goalie five shots from twenty feet away instead of being decided by sheer force-of-will flow-of-the-continuous-game attrition, yet anyone who watched the game and the resulting tie and the resulting penalty kick shoot-off couldn’t deny that the PK shoot-out was indeed high drama, was riveting to the extreme.
My sense of soccer purism aside, it will be slight "rules adjustments" like the imposition of the sudden-death penalty kick shoot-offs along with better production values and better promotion on the parts of the televising networks that, hopefully, maybe, might be the rescue if not salvation of American soccer after all, in the end, in and for the future.
Photos of SAS Soccer Park, Cary, N.C.,
Click on each image to see a larger version of the photo
Photos of SAS Soccer Park, Cary, N.C.,
Looking down the entrance driveway towards SAS Soccer Park stadium complex
The field after the College Cup championship game, December, 2004
Looking at the goal from the Penalty Kick spot that decided the 2004 NCAA
Women's College Cup Soccer Championship
Midfield shot of The College Cup tournament logo
Midfield shot of The College Cup tournament logo
The empty stands still ring with echoes of cheers, jeers and gasps of
the outcome
of the game
The pitch after the game, looking southwards
A soccer ball for Titans Of Old to play with
Leaving the stadium facility . . . my first home when I was a small child from
1957 through 1961 was directly across the street, at the corner of Trinity
Road and East Chatham Street where the self-storage place now sits.
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