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Message: [QUOTE="Chuck, post: 1806344, member: 1646"] It depends on the demographics. My kids play in Union City (mostly Dominican now, not Cuban), Newark (mostly Brazilian now, not Portuguese), and Passaic, plus a couple questionable Rockland County towns, to name a few. Those cities take their soccer pretty seriously, but they are usual Latin American, not African American. I think Montclair is the only town we play that has a quarter or more African American players. Re the Sirius XM discussion, I think it's more likely that the clubs are afraid to tell the parents they need to go to those towns. My experience with facilities is the opposite. The best facilities that my kids play in at a U11 level in Northern NJ are almost always our "city" or lower socio-economic teams. Newark has some great fields (and some kick-arse Portuguese/Brazilian teams). They just have more resources that trickle down to the parks departments. My suburban town (which would probably be considered wealthy) has horrible fields. We have 25 teams in our town travel club and they pretty much practice on a sand lot and the playing field is also used as the youth football practice field. A referendum to turf our fields was shot down for health and tax reasons (mostly the tax reasons) and we're now back to square 1 on improving the fields in a different way. The towns surrounding us are some of the wealthiest in the nation and they aren't much better. My son is not as happy with his team this year and wants to try out for a couple of the academies around us. I'm trying to talk him out of it. I think it's just because he has a lot of new kids with the age changes. They look like they'll be a solid team so I think he'll be happy. He will never be on the A team of one of those academies. Those are the kids that should probably be playing at that higher level. A couple of the academies now have 4 teams in certain age groups. I saw one of the top academies has a girls team in a D flight of our 2nd level league. That, to me, is just a money grab. [/QUOTE]

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