Concerns About the State of High School Soccer

[Guest]

to the original poster, ignore this negative creep who posted #4 and #5. if I had a dollar for every time he calls an op "stupid", would be a millionaire. funny thing is, without ops, he'd have f*ck all to do all day.

and what does " copa america in the 80's" have to do with high school soccer today, you stupid old man? absolutely nothing. and the op never said he/she was worried about their player getting injured so why all the name calling and mockery? the concern about injury came from a different post (#3).

what the op did say since you apparently cannot process text is that they are questioning why the quality of hs soccer is so bad and whether there is any recourse to change that. you have an answer to that jerk? because i don't. at least nothing that is practical.

curious how this plays out in england? is the quality any better?

Woke word salad bs.

HS Soccer doesnt need to be fixed so your pathetic, unathletic, petite child can play. Its fine. Go find some other bs woke cause to fix.

[Guest]

High School ball is not just about the playing aspect, there's just something about walking down the halls the day after a big win and having your peers cheer you on. There's a sense of identity and pride you just don't get from playing for club. Is it the highest standard of soccer? Definitely not, but it offers so much more to the person than just the sport. Something that Club will never be able to replicate. Love it or hate it, you cannot deny it.

[Guest]

Previous two posts are lame. Any merit your arguments (and I do think there are interesting points of discussion buried under a bushel of drivel there) are negated when you have to go ad hominem and start making things up about the original poster. The whole "I disagree with you and I will prove you are wrong by making things up about your kids and saying he or she is a terrible soccer player and you are a bad parent and you don't know anything about soccer" trope is infantile but it gets recycled so often around here. It tends to make me think that the person saying it is just a miserable sap who is projecting about his or her own disappointments. But to the the point being made here - I guess I don't really know that do I? I wonder what drives people to collect their dopamine hits that way.

It's disappointing to me that anytime a person tries to start a meaningful discussion around here there are people who immediately denigrate the topic and the person posting it. People trying to converse with a community about a topic their family is involved in doesn't mean that they are helicopter parents or narcissists - that's an invalid leap of logic to assume so. If you don't enjoy the topic, just move on. Don't be such a "snowflake" and throw a tantrum where you are so dysregulated you have to make things up to support your bitter worldview


My two cents re: the original topic - I think the issue is driven by the diverse amount of experience on high school soccer teams. A typical high school teams gets a mix including the following:

• A handful of kids who have many years experience at higher levels of soccer
• Kids who have plays rec soccer for many years or lots of non-club soccer with family and friends
• Kids who are really good athletes but lack organized soccer experience
• At some schools - a handful of Kids who aren't highly talented athletes and/or lack organized soccer experience but are exploring the sport and team experience and/or helping fill an otherwise empty role.

Schools in expensive zip codes (hello pay to play inequity issues) or ones that have high concentrations of people who immigrated from cultures that place a high value on soccer and are larger schools tend to skew towards having more of the first two bullets. The more those three variables decrease, the higher the concentration of the latter two bullet points on a team.

School soccer is fascinating to me to see how that different mixture of player types is managed. It's hard for a lot of higher level club teams to maintain a disciplined possession based style. It's spectacularly challenging to keep a school based team from going long ball only, even when the coach is pushing that. It's a reflexive tendency for most people to feel like they need to move forward if they have the ball and space. It takes a long time for players to understand they can hold the ball, they can play it backwards, they can make the defenders come to them instead of the opposite. It takes a lot of training and experience for most to overcome the intuition of always being direct in a game.

I see high level players who look to be lost out pitch at times because they are making off ball movement that would be totally appropriate on their club team but puts them totally out of sync with their school team. The best of these players learn to understand this, adjust to the different dynamic, coach and build up their team and often switch to a position that is not their preferred spot to help organize the team (like a forward playing CB or MF to "quarterback" the team (to use another sport's euphemism)).

The kids who get recruited because they are good athletes but lack soccer experience - You can see they are fast and coordinated. But you can also tell their discomfort on the ball and they often have a desire to be incredibly direct. You can also see traits from other sports being applied - basketball kids often intuitively know how where to position themselves when defending both on and off the ball and can have a good sense of off ball movement on offense. But they also go into a wide meg-able stance when defending 1:1 and lack confidence to hold the ball or execute the right pass even if they know what would be ideal. And sometimes they reflexively throw down some heinous picks that would have been fine in basketball but are card-able on the pitch. Toning down the blocking and use of arms is hard for an experienced American football player to minimize in the heat of the moment.

The nuance and skill of making a tackle the right way (even an intentional, illegal one) is an incredibly high level skill that requires an insane amount of experience for most players to execute correctly. Think of all the dynamic internal and external variables you need to process to initiate and execute a good tackle and how quickly you have to do it. It's kind of like hitting a 90+ MPH fastball - you don't really have time to consciously think about it, you just have to react in a reflexive and controlled manner that is born of innumerabaly repetitive prior experiences that honed one's nervous system to a perceptual processing and motor planning ability that would not exist otherwise (full disclosure: I can't and probably never will hit a 90 MPH fastball - but that's what I imagine is going on when I watch MLB players) But many of these players don't know what they don't know and lack the muscle memory experience and judgement to be able to execute such maneuvers in a way you are used to seeing in higher level soccer. The doesn't mean they won't try it, because most of these kids are playing their hearts out trying not to disappoint their team and coach. I am not saying they shouldn't go in for challenging tackles - they'll never develop the skill otherwise - but sometimes there is a bit more mustard on the endeavor than there needs to be.

The challenges described above just get exacerbated the further you move down the bullet point list I made up of player types. You get less experience, less skill, less athleticism but a commensurate level of passion and desire to win and a drive to try their hardest. And probably less emotional composure and regulation in the heat of the battle. Throw in some indignancy from trash talking and a perceived injustice from hard fouls committed against themselves or their team. All these ingredients conspire to make for a way more physical and, frankly, dangerous game.

To the point of the game being more physical in the past at the higher(pro and national) levels in the past. I am no expert on that but that is my impression as well. But those guys were professional level athletes. If they laid someone out or went in studs up, they were doing it intentionally the majority of the time and or were making a decision to risk causing a hard foul. To me, that is very different from the dangerous fouls I often see high school soccer that are often caused by high effort, low composure, low skill, and limited experience and knowledge.

I imagine the refs may have a tendency to swallow their whistle more because they don't want to be be blowing it every 30 seconds when they are shepherding a game full of kids with low experience and the whole thing just snowballs. That creates a league culture that becomes desensitized to more physical play. That carries over, even if it's two teams playing that are private schools and public schools in high rent districts that are stocked with players who do have plenty of experience and skill.

So there's my "Guns, Germs and Steel" level dissertation on why school soccer is more physical. Didn't set out to type that much. What do you think? Does that make sense? Am I missing key issues? Am i an alcoholic tiger mom who is trying to make up for a psychologic scar branded upon my twisted self image that resulted from being slighted by a rival 4th grader in the Clallam County Grange Association Produce Display competition in '89? I guess I can't know that answer to the latter until the truth is extolled upon my by random internet trolls who are fueled by invalid extrapolations. As for the former questions, I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Thanks for the state of the union.

[Guest]

Previous two posts are lame. Any merit your arguments (and I do think there are interesting points of discussion buried under a bushel of drivel there) are negated when you have to go ad hominem and start making things up about the original poster. The whole "I disagree with you and I will prove you are wrong by making things up about your kids and saying he or she is a terrible soccer player and you are a bad parent and you don't know anything about soccer" trope is infantile but it gets recycled so often around here. It tends to make me think that the person saying it is just a miserable sap who is projecting about his or her own disappointments. But to the the point being made here - I guess I don't really know that do I? I wonder what drives people to collect their dopamine hits that way.

It's disappointing to me that anytime a person tries to start a meaningful discussion around here there are people who immediately denigrate the topic and the person posting it. People trying to converse with a community about a topic their family is involved in doesn't mean that they are helicopter parents or narcissists - that's an invalid leap of logic to assume so. If you don't enjoy the topic, just move on. Don't be such a "snowflake" and throw a tantrum where you are so dysregulated you have to make things up to support your bitter worldview


My two cents re: the original topic - I think the issue is driven by the diverse amount of experience on high school soccer teams. A typical high school teams gets a mix including the following:

• A handful of kids who have many years experience at higher levels of soccer
• Kids who have plays rec soccer for many years or lots of non-club soccer with family and friends
• Kids who are really good athletes but lack organized soccer experience
• At some schools - a handful of Kids who aren't highly talented athletes and/or lack organized soccer experience but are exploring the sport and team experience and/or helping fill an otherwise empty role.

Schools in expensive zip codes (hello pay to play inequity issues) or ones that have high concentrations of people who immigrated from cultures that place a high value on soccer and are larger schools tend to skew towards having more of the first two bullets. The more those three variables decrease, the higher the concentration of the latter two bullet points on a team.

School soccer is fascinating to me to see how that different mixture of player types is managed. It's hard for a lot of higher level club teams to maintain a disciplined possession based style. It's spectacularly challenging to keep a school based team from going long ball only, even when the coach is pushing that. It's a reflexive tendency for most people to feel like they need to move forward if they have the ball and space. It takes a long time for players to understand they can hold the ball, they can play it backwards, they can make the defenders come to them instead of the opposite. It takes a lot of training and experience for most to overcome the intuition of always being direct in a game.

I see high level players who look to be lost out pitch at times because they are making off ball movement that would be totally appropriate on their club team but puts them totally out of sync with their school team. The best of these players learn to understand this, adjust to the different dynamic, coach and build up their team and often switch to a position that is not their preferred spot to help organize the team (like a forward playing CB or MF to "quarterback" the team (to use another sport's euphemism)).

The kids who get recruited because they are good athletes but lack soccer experience - You can see they are fast and coordinated. But you can also tell their discomfort on the ball and they often have a desire to be incredibly direct. You can also see traits from other sports being applied - basketball kids often intuitively know how where to position themselves when defending both on and off the ball and can have a good sense of off ball movement on offense. But they also go into a wide meg-able stance when defending 1:1 and lack confidence to hold the ball or execute the right pass even if they know what would be ideal. And sometimes they reflexively throw down some heinous picks that would have been fine in basketball but are card-able on the pitch. Toning down the blocking and use of arms is hard for an experienced American football player to minimize in the heat of the moment.

The nuance and skill of making a tackle the right way (even an intentional, illegal one) is an incredibly high level skill that requires an insane amount of experience for most players to execute correctly. Think of all the dynamic internal and external variables you need to process to initiate and execute a good tackle and how quickly you have to do it. It's kind of like hitting a 90+ MPH fastball - you don't really have time to consciously think about it, you just have to react in a reflexive and controlled manner that is born of innumerabaly repetitive prior experiences that honed one's nervous system to a perceptual processing and motor planning ability that would not exist otherwise (full disclosure: I can't and probably never will hit a 90 MPH fastball - but that's what I imagine is going on when I watch MLB players) But many of these players don't know what they don't know and lack the muscle memory experience and judgement to be able to execute such maneuvers in a way you are used to seeing in higher level soccer. The doesn't mean they won't try it, because most of these kids are playing their hearts out trying not to disappoint their team and coach. I am not saying they shouldn't go in for challenging tackles - they'll never develop the skill otherwise - but sometimes there is a bit more mustard on the endeavor than there needs to be.

The challenges described above just get exacerbated the further you move down the bullet point list I made up of player types. You get less experience, less skill, less athleticism but a commensurate level of passion and desire to win and a drive to try their hardest. And probably less emotional composure and regulation in the heat of the battle. Throw in some indignancy from trash talking and a perceived injustice from hard fouls committed against themselves or their team. All these ingredients conspire to make for a way more physical and, frankly, dangerous game.

To the point of the game being more physical in the past at the higher(pro and national) levels in the past. I am no expert on that but that is my impression as well. But those guys were professional level athletes. If they laid someone out or went in studs up, they were doing it intentionally the majority of the time and or were making a decision to risk causing a hard foul. To me, that is very different from the dangerous fouls I often see high school soccer that are often caused by high effort, low composure, low skill, and limited experience and knowledge.

I imagine the refs may have a tendency to swallow their whistle more because they don't want to be be blowing it every 30 seconds when they are shepherding a game full of kids with low experience and the whole thing just snowballs. That creates a league culture that becomes desensitized to more physical play. That carries over, even if it's two teams playing that are private schools and public schools in high rent districts that are stocked with players who do have plenty of experience and skill.

So there's my "Guns, Germs and Steel" level dissertation on why school soccer is more physical. Didn't set out to type that much. What do you think? Does that make sense? Am I missing key issues? Am i an alcoholic tiger mom who is trying to make up for a psychologic scar branded upon my twisted self image that resulted from being slighted by a rival 4th grader in the Clallam County Grange Association Produce Display competition in '89? I guess I can't know that answer to the latter until the truth is extolled upon my by random internet trolls who are fueled by invalid extrapolations. As for the former questions, I look forward to reading your thoughts.

This post is longer than my Senior thesis.

[Guest]

QUOTE=Guest;n4698101]

Thanks for the state of the union. [/QUOTE]

My fellow Americans, I’m here to tell you that the state of soccer is strong. Rory has been fired, the Sounders won their first playoff game, and Crossfire is still the best. We do have opportunities to be better. High School Soccer may be fun and it may be passionate but it is not the beautiful game. I talked with Natalie, a local high school student that plays center attacking mid. She tells me that her team could be scoring more goals if her teammates made quality passes through the midfield.

[Guest]

High school soccer is great. The quality can depend on the conference your school is in. For example, go to a Ballard high game, and you'll see a bunch of ECNL SU kids playing against against other SU kids at other Seattle high schools and generally the quality is fine and risk of injury isn't off the charts

[Guest]

Previous two posts are lame. Any merit your arguments (and I do think there are interesting points of discussion buried under a bushel of drivel there) are negated when you have to go ad hominem and start making things up about the original poster. The whole "I disagree with you and I will prove you are wrong by making things up about your kids and saying he or she is a terrible soccer player and you are a bad parent and you don't know anything about soccer" trope is infantile but it gets recycled so often around here. It tends to make me think that the person saying it is just a miserable sap who is projecting about his or her own disappointments. But to the the point being made here - I guess I don't really know that do I? I wonder what drives people to collect their dopamine hits that way.

It's disappointing to me that anytime a person tries to start a meaningful discussion around here there are people who immediately denigrate the topic and the person posting it. People trying to converse with a community about a topic their family is involved in doesn't mean that they are helicopter parents or narcissists - that's an invalid leap of logic to assume so. If you don't enjoy the topic, just move on. Don't be such a "snowflake" and throw a tantrum where you are so dysregulated you have to make things up to support your bitter worldview


My two cents re: the original topic - I think the issue is driven by the diverse amount of experience on high school soccer teams. A typical high school teams gets a mix including the following:

• A handful of kids who have many years experience at higher levels of soccer
• Kids who have plays rec soccer for many years or lots of non-club soccer with family and friends
• Kids who are really good athletes but lack organized soccer experience
• At some schools - a handful of Kids who aren't highly talented athletes and/or lack organized soccer experience but are exploring the sport and team experience and/or helping fill an otherwise empty role.

Schools in expensive zip codes (hello pay to play inequity issues) or ones that have high concentrations of people who immigrated from cultures that place a high value on soccer and are larger schools tend to skew towards having more of the first two bullets. The more those three variables decrease, the higher the concentration of the latter two bullet points on a team.

School soccer is fascinating to me to see how that different mixture of player types is managed. It's hard for a lot of higher level club teams to maintain a disciplined possession based style. It's spectacularly challenging to keep a school based team from going long ball only, even when the coach is pushing that. It's a reflexive tendency for most people to feel like they need to move forward if they have the ball and space. It takes a long time for players to understand they can hold the ball, they can play it backwards, they can make the defenders come to them instead of the opposite. It takes a lot of training and experience for most to overcome the intuition of always being direct in a game.

I see high level players who look to be lost out pitch at times because they are making off ball movement that would be totally appropriate on their club team but puts them totally out of sync with their school team. The best of these players learn to understand this, adjust to the different dynamic, coach and build up their team and often switch to a position that is not their preferred spot to help organize the team (like a forward playing CB or MF to "quarterback" the team (to use another sport's euphemism)).

The kids who get recruited because they are good athletes but lack soccer experience - You can see they are fast and coordinated. But you can also tell their discomfort on the ball and they often have a desire to be incredibly direct. You can also see traits from other sports being applied - basketball kids often intuitively know how where to position themselves when defending both on and off the ball and can have a good sense of off ball movement on offense. But they also go into a wide meg-able stance when defending 1:1 and lack confidence to hold the ball or execute the right pass even if they know what would be ideal. And sometimes they reflexively throw down some heinous picks that would have been fine in basketball but are card-able on the pitch. Toning down the blocking and use of arms is hard for an experienced American football player to minimize in the heat of the moment.

The nuance and skill of making a tackle the right way (even an intentional, illegal one) is an incredibly high level skill that requires an insane amount of experience for most players to execute correctly. Think of all the dynamic internal and external variables you need to process to initiate and execute a good tackle and how quickly you have to do it. It's kind of like hitting a 90+ MPH fastball - you don't really have time to consciously think about it, you just have to react in a reflexive and controlled manner that is born of innumerabaly repetitive prior experiences that honed one's nervous system to a perceptual processing and motor planning ability that would not exist otherwise (full disclosure: I can't and probably never will hit a 90 MPH fastball - but that's what I imagine is going on when I watch MLB players) But many of these players don't know what they don't know and lack the muscle memory experience and judgement to be able to execute such maneuvers in a way you are used to seeing in higher level soccer. The doesn't mean they won't try it, because most of these kids are playing their hearts out trying not to disappoint their team and coach. I am not saying they shouldn't go in for challenging tackles - they'll never develop the skill otherwise - but sometimes there is a bit more mustard on the endeavor than there needs to be.

The challenges described above just get exacerbated the further you move down the bullet point list I made up of player types. You get less experience, less skill, less athleticism but a commensurate level of passion and desire to win and a drive to try their hardest. And probably less emotional composure and regulation in the heat of the battle. Throw in some indignancy from trash talking and a perceived injustice from hard fouls committed against themselves or their team. All these ingredients conspire to make for a way more physical and, frankly, dangerous game.

To the point of the game being more physical in the past at the higher(pro and national) levels in the past. I am no expert on that but that is my impression as well. But those guys were professional level athletes. If they laid someone out or went in studs up, they were doing it intentionally the majority of the time and or were making a decision to risk causing a hard foul. To me, that is very different from the dangerous fouls I often see high school soccer that are often caused by high effort, low composure, low skill, and limited experience and knowledge.

I imagine the refs may have a tendency to swallow their whistle more because they don't want to be be blowing it every 30 seconds when they are shepherding a game full of kids with low experience and the whole thing just snowballs. That creates a league culture that becomes desensitized to more physical play. That carries over, even if it's two teams playing that are private schools and public schools in high rent districts that are stocked with players who do have plenty of experience and skill.

So there's my "Guns, Germs and Steel" level dissertation on why school soccer is more physical. Didn't set out to type that much. What do you think? Does that make sense? Am I missing key issues? Am i an alcoholic tiger mom who is trying to make up for a psychologic scar branded upon my twisted self image that resulted from being slighted by a rival 4th grader in the Clallam County Grange Association Produce Display competition in '89? I guess I can't know that answer to the latter until the truth is extolled upon my by random internet trolls who are fueled by invalid extrapolations. As for the former questions, I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Dear Idiot,

Bravo for putting it out there! Honestly, what a saga! The dramatic call for soccer reformation, like we’re out here planning some epic sporting revolution, feels like it’s missing the bigger picture. High school soccer—love it or leave it—is a glorious mishmash, a tapestry of budding athleticism, unfiltered energy, and, sure, a bit of glorious chaos.

First off, let’s keep the pure fun of it alive. This isn’t the World Cup. It’s high school! The beauty here is the sheer variety, and I think you’ve nailed it with that breakdown of the different “types.” The seasoned club player rubbing shoulders with the track star who just learned what “offside” means last week—that’s exactly what makes it so compelling. High school soccer needs that messy diversity. It’s where kids with varying skills can come together, figure things out, and—get this—actually have a little fun. Do we really need to “optimize” it? Maybe not so much.

And yeah, let’s talk about those physical games. High effort and low experience? You bet. It’s like watching a pot that’s on the edge of boiling over, and I mean that in the best possible way. These kids are charging around, hearts on their sleeves, sometimes a little over their skis, sure, but that’s part of the magic. They’re playing hard, taking risks, learning boundaries—sounds a lot like what high school itself is about.

Now, I’m no “Tiger Dad” trying to relive my own athletic glory days through my kids, and I definitely didn’t get any traumatic produce competition scars as a child. I’m just saying let’s let high school soccer stay what it is: a playground for passion and development, an arena where kids with differing backgrounds and skills have a shot to play together. If it’s not polished, that’s OK. That’s what makes it high school soccer. Keep it messy, keep it real, and maybe—just maybe—keep it as it is.

[Guest]

Woke word salad bs.

HS Soccer doesnt need to be fixed so your pathetic, unathletic, petite child can play. Its fine. Go find some other bs woke cause to fix.

If you weren't a retard who reads at a second grade level, you'd have noticed no one said anything about fixing high school soccer, just wrote a lot of words why it's the way it is.

When you keep talking about kids, it tells the world that you're either projecting about your own kid, a pedo who fixates about other people's kids physiques, or both.

[Guest]

The reasons kids play HS soccer has been stated in this thread. For our son it’s essentially a replacement for rec soccer. Something for fun with friends. It just happens to be a quality team. I do feel sad about the state of club soccer because your affiliation is to your team, not your club. There’s nothing grassroots and no one plays for the shield. Don’t know if it’s our poor soccer culture, pay to play, all of the above?

[Guest]

If you weren't a retard who reads at a second grade level, you'd have noticed no one said anything about fixing high school soccer, just wrote a lot of words why it's the way it is.

When you keep talking about kids, it tells the world that you're either projecting about your own kid, a pedo who fixates about other people's kids physiques, or both.

You are such a pu55y its hilarious.

i win.

[Guest]

High school soccer is a joke.

[Guest]

You are such a pu55y its hilarious.

i win.

Irony being that only a complete loser would type something like this.

[Guest]

Irony being that only a complete loser would type something like this.

And only a totally woke karen would respond...

[xfcrossfirexf]

It’s nothing more than a participatory sport. Which is a shame because kids from the East side mainly play at a decent level outside of school.

[Guest]

It’s nothing more than a participatory sport. Which is a shame because kids from the East side mainly play at a decent level outside of school.

Participatory sport?