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Racial Diversity in WA Youth Soccer

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    Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
    ... or a dumb@$$
    While possibly ignorant, i believe it does raise the issue of how to execute. It is often easier said than done.

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      Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
      While possibly ignorant, i believe it does raise the issue of how to execute. It is often easier said than done.
      Execution is especially hard when you do absolutely nothing. Some things to do:

      US Youth Soccer Commits to diversifying the game
      Outreach to communities of color to invite players in
      Financial reforms to make participation accessible to more families
      Financial reforms to make the coach licensing process more affordable and convenient. Right now it keeps people of color and women out due to cost/logistics. I think NWSL is now arranging for free C licensing course for players to get more women coaching. That's the kid of thing we need
      Leagues and Clubs need to commit to diversity
      Racial sensitivity training for refs
      Racial sensitivity training for club coaches and admins

      Clubs could start with sensitivity training even if US Youth Soccer does nothing. Seattle clubs could combine for training and share costs if they want to do more than performatively post on social media

      Comment


        Study finds racial bias in sportscaster commentary about soccer -- of course kids face bias from coaches

        https://www.theguardian.com/football...all-commentary

        Racial bias is a clear and significant problem in English football commentary, according to a groundbreaking study that found players with lighter skin are regularly and overwhelmingly praised for intelligence, work ethic and quality compared with those with darker skin, who are reduced to physical and athletic attributes.

        The study has been carried out by RunRepeat, a Danish research firm, and is the first aimed at understanding whether the football media talks differently about players depending on their skin tone. More than 2,000 statements from commentary on 80 games across the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga and Ligue 1 were analysed.

        RunRepeat ratio-adjusted its numbers to account for the fact there were 1,361 comments about lighter-skinned players and 713 about darker-skinned players and found the former group more widely praised for intelligence (62.60%), hard work (60.40%) and quality (62.79%). Commentators are also 6.59 times more likely to talk about the power of a player if he has darker skin and 3.38 times more likely to reference his pace.

        The study also found that 63.33% of criticism from commentators in regards to the intelligence of a player is aimed at those with darker skin, while the figure for quality is 67.57%.

        RunRepeat’s findings are timely given the focus on racial discrimination and inequality generated by the Black Lives Matter movement and the study has received the backing of the Professional Footballers’ Association, which has called on the football media to be more considerate in how they speak about and analyse players in order to break longstanding and damaging stereotypes.

        “To address the real impact of structural racism, we have to acknowledge and address racial bias,” the PFA’s equalities executive, Jason Lee, said. “This study shows an evident bias in how we describe the attributes of footballers based on their skin colour.”
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        RunRepeat’s research took six months and centred on 20 games from each league in the 2019-20 season. Only English-language commentary was analysed in order to avoid errors caused by inaccurate translations and this was sourced from seven broadcasters: Sky Sports, BT Sport, FreeSports, beIN Sports, TSN, NBCSN and ESPN. The focus was on commentators and co‑commentators who speak as games are happening, and not on studio pundits. About 5% of the commentators and co-commentators were from a BAME background.

        In the commentary analysed by RunRepeat, 643 players were referenced and each was designated a skin-tone value between 1-20 based on those assigned in the database of Football Manager 2020, the latest version of the popular computer game, with 1-11 classified as “lighter skin tone” and 12-20 as “darker skin tone”. RunRepeat focused on skin tone because it felt focusing on race would lead to misidentification.

        A total of 2,074 commentary statements were collated and split across 11 categories, with the differences in praise, criticism and references to intelligence, quality, hard work, power and speed the most startling. As the report states: “Players with lighter skin tone should receive the same proportion of comments about, for example, their intelligence or their work ethic as players with darker skin tone. The fact this is not the case across a large sample size indicates there is bias in the way the media discuss players based on the colour of their skin.”

        The Guardian has seen a selection of the commentary statements collated and analysed and in isolation they appear harmless. For instance Sheffield United’s Billy Sharp is praised for how “cute and clever” he is, and Real Sociedad’s Alexander Isak is criticised for poor “decision taking”.

        But along with the piece of commentary that focuses on how “fit and strong” Real Madrid’s Ferland Mendy is, they harden the view of black athletes being less intelligent and hard‑working and able to succeed only because of their “God-given” physical and athletic attributes. That leads to racism, including the lack of opportunities black former players receive in coaching, management and at boardroom level.

        “Commentators help shape the perception we hold,” said Lee, the former Nottingham Forest, Charlton and Watford forward. “It’s important to consider how far-reaching those perceptions can be and how they impact footballers once they finish their playing career.

        “If a player has aspirations of becoming a coach or manager, is an unfair advantage given to players that commentators regularly refer to as intelligent and industrious, when those views appear to be a result of racial bias?”

        It will be intriguing to see how the football media, and broadcasters especially, react to the study. Sky Sports already holds sessions with its presenters, reporters and commentators in which the importance of the language they use to describe athletes from different backgrounds is discussed. In conjunction with the PFA, extra sessions have also been held in regards to the language staff use when specifically discussing any stories and issues concerning Black Lives Matter.

        Comment


          Yahoo Sports is doing a series on the least diverse youth sports, which includes soccer.
          highlights after the link...

          https://sports.yahoo.com/the-privile...150024228.html

          This is a story about opportunity.

          It begins in Columbia Heights, a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington D.C., where elite soccer opportunities barely exist. But several years ago, on a lively field behind a public charter school, Precious Ogu clearly deserved one.

          She glided past helpless middle schoolers that afternoon, unaware of where the sport she loved could take her. She didn’t know much about high-level youth soccer; didn't know how to progress beyond after-school games. Fortunately, an onlooker did. Amir Lowery, executive director of the Open Goal Project, connected her with a travel program. Precious, the Black daughter of a Nigerian mother, showed up to try out. And she remembers being “shocked.”

          She’d grown up surrounded by people of all hues, including many who looked like her. Soccer, she’d soon find, looked different.

          “It was pretty much all white girls,” she says.

          Soccer, in its purest form, is the most accessible and racially diverse team sport in the world. But American soccer is not. It’s disproportionately white and upper-middle-class. Doug Andreassen, the former chair of a U.S. Soccer diversity task force, recognized this decades ago. He’d look around a country home to tens of millions of non-white people. Then he’d look around soccer boardrooms, and out onto fields, and wonder: “Why doesn't soccer in America look like America?”

          The superficial answer is obvious. Participation requires money. Soccer’s diversity problem, at its core, is a socioeconomic problem. And in America, after centuries of racial oppression, socioeconomic problems are race problems. In 2017, the median non-Hispanic white household owned $171,700 in net wealth; the median Black household owned $9,567. White America controls soccer, just as it controls so much else.

          But the full answer is more complex. It’s rooted in a uniquely American youth sports industry built around economic and social capital. The industry fuels a sprawling soccer network that excludes minorities and perpetuates the power of those white men in charge.

          “This,” Lowery says, “is systemic racism in soccer.”

          Once upon a time, soccer was a working-class sport. It still is in many countries. A century ago, it was in the United States. Early amateur teams sprung out of ethnically diverse urban areas. Semi-pro leagues came and went.

          In the 1960s and 70s, however, soccer’s tectonic plates began to shift. Universities developed programs. The North American Soccer League formed and wooed foreign stars. Pelé arrived. George Best and Johan Cruyff followed. Mainstream interest in the sport percolated. Demand for youth soccer soared. But there was no infrastructure. No supply to readily meet demand.

          Elsewhere around the world, supply comes from professional clubs. Most youth soccer systems exist to develop professional players. In the U.S., the NASL wasn’t financially stable enough, so a youth system had to fund itself. The burden fell to parents.

          “Pay-to-play” clubs proliferated. The American system burgeoned around those who could afford it. It became an unchecked industry that exists less to develop players and more to make money for anybody who can get in on the scheme.

          “The way the model is right now, the consumer seeks out soccer and buys it,” says Ed Foster-Simeon, CEO of the U.S. Soccer Foundation. And consumers who can afford it, the ones with generational wealth and disposable income, are largely white.

          Cost is the sturdiest barrier that can make soccer inaccessible. Registration fees at many top youth clubs are four figures. They’re also merely a fraction of the necessary investment. Uniforms, tournaments, equipment, transportation, camps and specialized trainers all comprise what Lowery calls “the hidden soccer economy.” Some parents report paying five figures annually. For many Black families, who on average make $26,416 less than non-Hispanic white families, those prices can be prohibitive.

          “There's so much untapped potential in these communities. But if it costs $1,500, 2-grand a year for a 12-year-old to play soccer, that's just not feasible for a large number of people,” says Brandon Miller, a goalkeeper for the United Soccer League’s Charlotte Independence who co-founded the USL Black Players Alliance.

          The increasingly common solution has been scholarships. Many elite clubs now waive fees for underprivileged kids, or fully fund their eldest teams. But “scholarships are not the answer,” Andreassen says. Others agree. Former U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati points out that some clubs essentially subsidize scholarships by charging more in younger age groups.

          “It's a taxation of a broad base,” he explains.

          And while it chips away at one barrier, it neglects many others.

          The parents who could pay lived in suburbs. The industry, therefore, grew in suburbia. And for talented teens like Precious Ogu, that’s problematic. The nearest elite club is 45 minutes away. Practices begin at 8:30 p.m. on weekdays. Her single mother works nights and doesn’t drive. No teammates live nearby.

          The pipeline isn’t just economically inaccessible. It’s geographically inaccessible as well. Yahoo Sports analyzed the locations of 161 elite youth clubs that comprised U.S. Soccer’s Development Academy. In 2010, the average median household income of the ZIP codes in which those 161 clubs are based was $80,950 – more than $30,000 above the nationwide median at the time, and the equivalent of around $96,400 today. Some of the best American soccer players ever grew up hours away from a club that could offer valuable coaching and access to showcase events. Their parents shuttled them to and fro. But for every parent that could, there are many that can’t.

          Time is a resource. Schedule flexibility is an offshoot of socioeconomic class. “I think about when I was the president of a [Virginia youth] club in the ‘90s,” Foster-Simeon says. Parents who volunteered were “white-collar workers who could say to their boss, ‘I'm leaving early on Tuesday and Thursday 'cause I'm coaching my kid's team.’ If you're an hourly wage worker, you don't have that kind of flexibility.”

          For Precious, the only solution is Uber. Open Goal, a non-profit aiming to bring soccer to underserved communities, funds her travels. Many kids without similar support simply can’t play.

          “These are the invisible barriers that have taken too long for us to recognize and address,” Foster-Simeon says. “There are structural and historical barriers to participation.”

          They largely affect poor families in inner cities. And poor families in inner cities are disproportionately families of color.

          Reciprocally, Black people are underrepresented in 132 of those 161 ZIP codes housing Academy clubs. Those who do grow up in suburbs, like USWNT star Crystal Dunn, are often the only Black players on youth teams. Those raised in cities often aren’t able to latch onto the game.

          “If I had stayed actually in the city,” Dunn said on a recent panel, “there’s a good chance I wouldn’t even be playing this sport.”

          Precious sometimes returns home from practice after 11 p.m., with homework still to do. She wakes up the next morning before 7 a.m. She still maintains straight-As. And she’s excelling on the soccer pitch. Division I colleges have been in touch. She initially worried she couldn’t compete with the suburban girls, then quickly realized she absolutely could.

          But along the way, she encountered another type of barrier. On the field, she adapted quickly. Off, she wondered: “How am I gonna make friends?” Most of her new teammates went to private school. They were nice, but talked about private school things. About lake houses, fancy restaurants.

          “I would be scared to approach any of them, or try to start a conversation,” Precious says. "I felt like I just didn't fit in.”

          This, to Foster-Simeon, is the “overlooked” puzzle piece. “You can create a great opportunity for a kid in a middle-class, suburban club,” he says. “But if you've not spent any time thinking about what that means to that child culturally,” then the child can struggle. They experience microaggressions. Elite clubs, in this sense, can be culturally inaccessible too.

          Especially, players of color say, because many white coaches don’t understand this cultural divide. They can’t understand poverty and the mental challenges that accompany it. Roberts, the USL defender, grew up with Black and Latino teammates. He remembers a coach benching a few “because of their attitude.”

          “But he's not understanding that my friends are struggling at home, because they're not getting enough food,” Roberts says. “And yes, we take it to the field, but it's never us disrespecting a coach. But sometimes coaches just don't understand us – because they're not us.”

          So barriers beget more barriers. A predominantly white system produced overwhelmingly white leaders. A recent FARE report found that across Major League Soccer, out of 229 head coaches, assistant coaches, majority owners and top club executives, 7.4% are Black; 5% are Latinx; and 87.6% are white. In the National Women’s Soccer League, the corresponding numbers are 0%; 1.1%; and 98.9%. The report’s authors called the findings “alarming.”

          Representation is often valued for its inspirational faculties, and with good reason. Humans gravitate toward role models who look like themselves.

          But representation is also about diversity of perspectives.

          “The people that are making the power decisions,” Miller says, “don't have diverse views, and therefore don't make diverse decisions.”

          The people in charge of fixing flawed systems are the very people whom those systems benefit.

          Comment


            Good article and explains why soccer is still a 2nd tier sport in the US. Hope Solo May or may not be a bit crazy, but she is correct when she says soccer is a suburban white girls sport. For boys, it’s football and/or basketball. Until soccer can start attracting the best athletes from those sports, the country won’t succeed. Need to try and develop a culture similar to basketball where kids just go play pickup (for free) at parks for as long as they are allowed to, whether that’s when the street lights go on, parents call them home, or cops kick them out of the park because it’s closed. When is the last time anyone has seen a non-adult directed pickup soccer game? I think things like Futsal and Panna are important. Play it on tennis courts, basketball courts, parking lots, etc and make it fun and entertaining. My kids are soccer nuts, but they’d rather meg someone on the parking lot than hear about how they need to play it out of the back on a beautiful turf field. That’s a lot of rambling/soap boxing but...

            Comment


              Import African parent-less children who display talent.
              Have the MLS be predominately black like the NBA despite blacks only being 15% of the population.
              profit?
              also BLM!
              Wakanda!!!!!!

              Comment


                Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
                Good article and explains why soccer is still a 2nd tier sport in the US. Hope Solo May or may not be a bit crazy, but she is correct when she says soccer is a suburban white girls sport. For boys, it’s football and/or basketball. Until soccer can start attracting the best athletes from those sports, the country won’t succeed. Need to try and develop a culture similar to basketball where kids just go play pickup (for free) at parks for as long as they are allowed to, whether that’s when the street lights go on, parents call them home, or cops kick them out of the park because it’s closed. When is the last time anyone has seen a non-adult directed pickup soccer game? I think things like Futsal and Panna are important. Play it on tennis courts, basketball courts, parking lots, etc and make it fun and entertaining. My kids are soccer nuts, but they’d rather meg someone on the parking lot than hear about how they need to play it out of the back on a beautiful turf field. That’s a lot of rambling/soap boxing but...
                Pick up soccer is huge for developing creativity. We lived in another state when my kids were younger and they played pick up every single day at lunch recess for years. That seemed just as valuable as any coaching, honestly. You need both.

                Comment


                  Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
                  Import African parent-less children who display talent.
                  Have the MLS be predominately black like the NBA despite blacks only being 15% of the population.
                  profit?
                  also BLM!
                  Wakanda!!!!!!
                  Ok, Trumper.

                  Comment

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