U.S. Soccer Says No to High School Athletes: Losing the Play in Sports

Watch out Brazil, Italy, Spain and Germany. U.S. Soccer is putting the world on notice. They are getting serious about their soccer. In fact, they are demanding their best youth prospects to stop playing for their high school teams.

The intelligentsia of soccer development has condoned that U.S. Soccer bans high school play by its Development Academy players. With ridiculousness bordering on the bizarre, youth sports and American culture take another shot at defeating any real community good through sports.

It is not the story that is new. Club teams for over 30 years have trumped high school soccer. If you had any interest in getting a college soccer scholarship and playing in front of huge crowds of 20 to 25 people on a Saturday afternoon, then it was to your advantage to play for a club team.

But it is the elitist air of this new demand that slide tackles my appreciation for any benefit for the four players in the whole national system that may play professionally. Though this dictum only applies for the wealthy kids from ex-burbs who can actually pay the $6,000 a year plus travel costs to be on the clubs, it is the insane notion that sports should trump everything when it comes to developing healthy and intelligent adolescents.

U.S. Soccer should not wage war on extra-curricular sports regardless of the few players it affects. All players who lace up their spikes, and especially those parents who fork up the cash for them, think they can one day play on television.

Even with the omnipresent odds informing of any professional athletic career, let alone the diminutive soccer prospects, parents and players believe they have the next Messi, Favre and Kobe. A message from a national athletic organization of this caliber pushes reality farther away from what youth sports should be: a way to be physically healthy and foster a competitive, but social, environment.

I have a daughter who is under 10 who has four days of soccer tryouts approaching next week. The season does not begin until the fall. If she is lucky to do well on the stringent rubric, she can look forward to three months of grueling hot practices and long weekends with two games a day.

I wince at the idea that this is what soccer has become. The game I played almost every day of the good weather months on black top, grass and gym floors, with coaches and no coaches, keeping score and not, is gone.

Soccer, as much as all sports, as this parent of a young athlete is finding out, is about status and bragging rights. It is not even about winning, appreciating the game, or learning the skills to be successful. It has nothing to do with being social and gaining friends. It is only about making the next team.

We should not remove our children from playing for their local teams or high schools. I do not see kids playing baseball in the park on Saturdays, or hoops on the empty courts, or even a makeshift game of soccer at the schoolyard. At most, I see a lonely kid shooting a puck into an empty net.

Kids see sports as a formal learning environment, like school with adult supervision, drills, breaks, uniforms and discipline. Parents believe sports are as important as school with the status and opportunities they offer. With U.S. Soccer demanding this, I see a society that has lost all perspective on the real value of sports: the team and community it builds.

We have lost the play in youth sports. Making a couple of kids quit their high school team means little to anyone, but it is the message that playing for your school is not as important as your individual goals. I just hope Brazil, Spain, Germany and Italy beat the pulp out of the U.S. for its elitist and insensitive drivel of a rule.

You can follow James Dugan on facebook and on Twitter @jamesduganlb. Purchase his new book through Amazon What Baseball Teaches: A Poetic Odyssey into 2008 Season of the World Champions Philadelphia Phillies