The United States of soccer

Soccer in the United States has never truly taken off, although it is the most widely played and watched sport worldwide. 

In the U.S., it remains in the side margins of the sporting world. Football, basketball, baseball, tennis and even hockey have more coverage and cultural clout than the global game of soccer.

The story of Andrew Yule, who played soccer for Wasson High School three years ago, is a tale of the tenuous nature of the sport in the U.S. A goalie whose talent could have propelled him into professional soccer in almost any other country, Yule no longer plays the game.

Yule, who threw himself into soccer at Wasson, had always been athletic. He felt a lot of pressure from his friends to play football and basketball because “they were always the cooler sports,” he said in an e-mail interview.

By the time high school came around, he was a “single-sport athlete” who totally devoted his time to basketball, playing in spring and summer leagues when the Varsity season was over. 

This devotion would eventually lead to his crossover into soccer. He remembers that he “could tell [he] was getting burnt out on basketball, and was looking for something to do.” Brett Derickson, the soccer coach at Wasson, was “always encouraging me to join the team,” he said.

“Most of the time I just turned him down and went back to basketball,” he remembered. Derickson persisted. 

“He was supposed to come out for the team in his freshman year,” Derickson recalled. “We had a bet that if I beat him in a game of one-on-one basketball, he’d join the team in his sophomore year. If I lost, I’d have to read a very humiliating note to my class about how fantastic of an athlete he was!” 

“He destroyed me!” said Derickson with a laugh. Despite this, Yule joined the squad and “asked Derickson if [he} could play as a goalie, not an outfield player, because [he] was so much taller and bigger,” he remembered.

“I was the only keeper that tried out, so I automatically made the team,” he said. Wasson, he said with a laugh, “never had a reputation for being very good, so Derickson kicked our butts during the season. It was one of the hardest-working and most determined teams I’d ever been on.” 

The first season was highly successful by the previous standards of Wasson soccer as the team became the first to make a playoff push in the school’s history. Yule earned individual honors of athletic honorable mention and led the state of Colorado in saves. 

Next year, Yule returned to basketball, but wasn’t there for long. “I’d done so well in soccer that my head just wasn’t in basketball anymore. Once my interest faded, my coach got frustrated and eventually kicked me off the team,” he said.

He returned to soccer, where he now felt “comfortable.” He played indoor soccer in the spring and once again took on the goalkeeper position. For a second time, he led the state in saves and earned an honorable mention. At the end of the 2006-2007 season, he was averaging 9.27 saves per game and 3.45 goals per game.

“He was good after one season of Varsity soccer, I mean really good!” said Derickson, who watched Yule play basketball and saw his potential to be a great soccer player.

“Here’s a kid who is 16 or 17 years old, is taller than nearly everyone else in school, and has hands bigger than my face,” he said. “I took him to one of our soccer practices, and put him in goal. We gave him gloves and taught him basic technique.”

From then on, it seemed a fairytale story come to life. Using his huge hands, the student snatched the ball clean out of the air from two feet above the eight-foot tall frame. He could claw away shots that seemed powered by the lightening of Zeus or the hammer of Thor. Derickson would tell his players on the sidelines that their goalkeeper was “not normal.” He was “something special,” and the coach encouraged them to watch and learn. 

“At one point he led the entire state of Colorado in saves,” Derickson says. “As a walk on, from the basketball team! He had no sense of the game at all, tactically. He’d make a mistake, we’d tell him what he’d done wrong, and we’d never ever see the same mistake again. It was remarkable.”

Yule was offered a soccer scholarship to attend Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He declined the scholarship, but attends Mines regardless. He is currently majoring in chemical engineering, expecting to graduate in 2011. If he had been involved in soccer from an earlier age, Derickson said, he “could have gone professional, without a shadow of a doubt.”

Derickson, who also teaches social studies at Wasson, wears a striped tie and well-pressed button-down shirt. He worries that beer will go to his gut and that his age is starting to show. He maintains his lean figure by playing in the local adult soccer league and by regimented daily running. 

He comes from a family that utterly devoted itself to soccer. His two older brothers were involved in the game domestically at very high levels – with the eldest going on to play Division 1 soccer. 

“I’m 33 years old. I still daydream about scoring the winning goal in the World Cup,” Derickson said, taking a sip of his beer. Sitting in Tony’s Bar in downtown Colorado Springs, he looks every inch the typical American sports fan. From the surroundings, nothing less would be expected. Signed portraits of famous NFL, NHL and NBA players adorn the walls. It’s a strange place for people to talk about soccer. Hushed whispers and muted tones must be used to avoid sharp glances from the regulars who gaze at Tiger Woods as his mildly entertaining soap opera unfolds on ESPN. The big leagues dominate here. 

If you were to put Tony’s virtually anywhere else in the world, it would be packed with people watching, commenting on, drinking for, and talking about soccer. The passion would spill out into the streets. But it doesn’t, because it’s not anywhere else in the world. It’s in downtown Colorado Springs.

Here, the game of soccer is at much the level as it is elsewhere in the U.S. While it enjoys popularity and participation at youth levels, the level of competition and the standards of play are generally amateur, and the organization of the leagues and divisions where playing takes place is recreational at best.

“In order for soccer to ever grow to the levels of the other major sports, there needs to be an audience,” Derickson explained. “A huge reason for soccer lacking popularity in this country is that people genuinely have no clue about what’s going on.” 

They have no clue, he said, because “Americans are obsessed with scoring! A nil-nil final score is unacceptable in American professional sport. There has to be an all-out winner, all the time.”

Soccer lacks popularity because it draws players and supporters from a small demographic, Derickson said. Caucasians dominate the sport, playing more “traditionally American” athletic endeavours such as football, baseball or basketball. 

“Until soccer is embraced in popular culture, it will never reach the levels that it should,” said Derickson, who theorizes that soccer isn’t seen as a reliable and beneficial outlet of athletic ability in American culture.

Major sports and the athletes who play them are big business. The average annual NFL salary falls at roughly $770,000, and the NBA comes in even higher with $5.36 million. The average MLS salary falls in the $35,000 range. American soccer simply cannot compare or compete financially with the big league enterprises.

Soccer has a low profile because it has no media presence, according to Chris Ellis, the co-captain of Colorado College’s men’s soccer team.

“It’s because you can’t turn on the TV and instantly see these players in the middle of the game or advertising products,” Ellis said, his curly hair bobbing slightly as he speaks. “Soccer as a whole has taken a back seat to the other sports in the U.S. and has to be actively sought out. You have to purchase special channels in order to watch games that are on regular stations around the world. I feel the two dominant players in this problem are media channels and lack of publicity.” 

The Colorado College Men’s Soccer Head Coach is Horst Richardson. Having emigrated from Germany to the U.S. he, in his own words, “fell into the coaching position” in 1965, when he arrived at the college. At the time, the athletics department focused on football and hockey. 

“They could hardly find us tape,” Richardson recalled with the wry smile of a man whose work has come a long way since then.

Involved in the local soccer scene since his arrival, Richardson is an expert on the development of the game in the region. When he arrived, local high schools “actively tried to block varsity level programs.” This, he said, “was due to the fact that there were already local clubs in place for kids to play soccer. It wasn’t seen as necessary for the development of the game.” 

In 1968, Richardson conducted the first soccer clinic at Colorado College, with about 80 local kids showing up at Washburn Field to learn the game. He recalled that the “grass was awful!”

Structured soccer in the U.S. has always suffered from a boom-and-bust environment even as far back as the 1970s heyday of the North American Soccer League, where the New York Cosmos reigned supreme. The league folded because the Cosmos “lacked in any competition,” said Richardson. Given that they employed the services of the great Brazilian Pele and elegant German defender Franz Beckenbauer, two of the greatest players ever to play the game, this is not a huge surprise. 

In Colorado Springs the story is much the same. Since 1995, three Colorado teams have played in the United States League - the Professional Development League, the fourth tier of American soccer pyramid. These include the Colorado Springs Stampede, the original team, which morphed into the Colorado Springs Ascent. The team folded in 2001, after it left the PDL and was terminated.

In 2004, the Colorado Springs Blizzard was founded, the third attempt to create structural integrity locally. Response to the league was minimal, with attendance averaging 486 over the franchise’s two-year existence. Like the two previous organizations, The Blizzard folded. With low interest and poor attendance, the money “simply wasn’t coming in,” Richardson said. “The idea was right, the management and monetary focus was wrong.”

This local decline in professional or developmental teams is mirrored in the local recreational club game. According to Richardson and his assistant coach, James Wagenschutz, the number of Colorado-based club teams has dropped drastically in recent years; down from an estimated 400 to roughly 70 now. That drop took just 10 years, which is dramatic even by the standards of the boom-and-bust economy.

Reasons for the decline in participation vary, but among the most common is the dearth of parents willing to be involved in youth soccer, a vital level for player and league development.

“A lack of understanding on the parents’ part is huge,” Wagenschutz said. “They simply don’t understand the sport, and people always are afraid of what they don’t know.” 

This sentiment is echoed by Colorado College sophomore Emma Mitchell, who lost interest in soccer when she was younger. “My mom said if I wasn’t going to participate fully in games, then she was unwillingly to take me to all the practices and games,” she said. She no longer enjoyed the game because she “wasn’t playing in a position that [she] enjoyed.” The family’s lack of knowledge about the game led to her quitting the sport for good. 

The competitive nature of the structure in the U.S. often diminishes kids’ enjoyment of the game. “I stopped playing because I thought my coach was too competitive and it wasn’t fun anymore,” Mitchell said. 

Competition should come into play as the players become more involved in the sport. “It’s how players improve, by playing high caliber opposition and testing themselves against the best around,” said Dan Marion, another Colorado College sophomore. Dan continues to play recreational club level soccer in Colorado Springs.

However, all is not lost. Clubs in the Colorado area are moving to encourage a higher level of player development in the region, and allowing more opportunities to get involved with the sport. Chief among these are the academy systems, an effort to mirror the success of European-style soccer talent “breeding” clubs such as England’s West Ham United or Spain’s renowned Futbol Club Barcelona. All Major League Soccer clubs are required to have their own academy that focuses on developing youth players from the areas surrounding the club. The Colorado Rapids, the Colorado MLS franchise, has five levels of academy play below that of the professional team. This is demonstrated in the Rapids Academy pyramid.

Also crucial is the more localized development of academy structure, with the Colorado Rush of Littleton, Colo., and the Pride Soccer of Colorado Springs, taking the local game to new levels. Dan Marion recalls growing up in Summit County, where from elementary school up until high school, a structure was in place for kids to develop through soccer. It began with Optimist, that “encouraged participation in all sports; from soccer to volleyball and everything in between,” Marion recalled. This structure extended through high school, where “it just dies,” according to Marion. 

This is the case for most players who are not considered to be college-level. The game fizzles out, and those who remain involved in the sport have to resign themselves to disorganized leagues or to a complete lack of structure after high school. However, a recent proposal by Colorado Springs builder and businessman Jonathan Williams may change this situation. At a recent “meeting of the minds” at a locally-owned Mexican restaurant, soccer figures from the entire Front Range region gathered. They included retired Air Force Academy coach Lou Sagastume, CSU Pueblo coach Roy Stanley, UCCS coach Henry Ellis, CC’s Richardson and Wagenschutz, and U.S. Soccer Federation State Assessor and Instructor Dick Burns. They produced a simple proposal, which reads in part:

“The mission of the Continental League is to establish a string of premier adult soccer clubs along the Front Range. Each of these clubs will draw on the local soccer community in their area to unite in competition against other clubs from the other metro areas from Ft. Collins to Pueblo.” 

The league also aims to build a strong sense of local identity within each of the participating clubs, thereby establishing a loyalty and strong foundation within the local community. The idea of the Continental League is to build this foundation and then possibly grow into other states or join already existing leagues.

The group intends to maintain a cost-effective, local and diverse league in the Front Range area. Ideally, this will take place within the next year. 

The men discussed what Sagastume described as a severe “lack in a definitively American style of soccer play.” The most powerful men in the U.S. Soccer Federation and the most influential players in the American game are all influenced by either German or English styles of play, Sagastume says. America has “the largest immigrant population in the world,” he said. “These people need to be exposing themselves to current soccer players and demonstrating that multiple styles of play exist within one nation.”

Appealing to all of these communities is a challenge, as they are often minority communities already wrapped up in other sports or in poorly structured leagues. The goal is to encourage people to adapt and play with a new style that incorporates the styles of people from around the world – a truly American style to highlight star players like Yule. This would not only go a long way to making soccer accepted in America, but allow America to make soccer its own as well.