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Message: [QUOTE="Chuck, post: 2532706, member: 1646"] I believe that US Soccer needs to get quantity and the quality will follow. They need to keep the game fun and popular enough that the better athletes stick with soccer rather than moving to other sports as they get older. Quantity will help ensure that the best athletes start playing and continue to play rather than being pulled away. My kids play in an area with tons of quality soccer options, but we lose kids to other sports every year. Only 1 was a very strong player, but other top athletes went right to baseball/basketball/lax. I think the parents think it's a finesse game. My son's non-soccer friends are pretty surprised how much contact there is when they come to see his team. I'm a bit surprise about the perception of inner city players and field space, at least as far as latin areas are concerned. For reference, I live in a Fairfield County-like area with some of the higher wealth in the country. Through our league as well as MAPS (for a couple of our teams) and tournaments, we play about 25% of our games against some pretty tough towns. The bigger (and poorer) cities often have really nice fields that are paid for by the county or state. Check out this field in [URL='https://www.essexcountyparks.org/parks/riverfront-park']Newark[/URL]. When we play those teams in our town, they will often carpool or even take school buses. Their kids often have uniforms that look like they were passed down over the years, but that's what I did as a kid, even in high school. I do agree that soccer's penetration into black communities is nearly non-existent. Despite playing teams from towns that have a large black (both American or African) populations, there are never more than one or two black kids on the team. We play two clubs from Newark regularly. One is 100% Brazilian / Portuguese, the other is somehow all white. That's a big miss by US Soccer and something I don't think they are really doing anything about. [/QUOTE]

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