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Elite Soccer?

August 5, 2014

Every four years, the Winter Olympics brings obscure cold-weather sports to American homes; and a few months after that, the World Cup brings the world’s most popular game to the American conscience and conversation.

Predictably, those who don’t understand or don’t like soccer ridiculed the sport, while the sport’s devotees ignored ugly blemishes on the face of the “beautiful game.”

It’s my hope that those who play or coach school-based soccer, or who aspire to, saw the spacing, the strategy and the one-on-one skills of soccer at its highest level on its biggest stage. It really is beautiful!

But I wish even more that those who play or coach school-based soccer, or hope to, will ignore the feigning and the flopping. Grown, athletic men seemed to be tripped up by the slightest push or pull, and then tumbled with comical force, and then trembled dramatically as they held their head or gripped an ankle with both hands.

Oh, there were times when the shoves were real and forceful and the injuries were real and painful; but the vast majority of the players who fell were faking both incident and injury.

At times last month I thought I was watching World Wrestling Federation actors, not World Cup athletes. And in that regard, I prefer our high school version of the world’s highest profile sport.

Half Empty or Half Full

December 11, 2012

After an absence of decades, eight-player football has been reintroduced to Michigan high schools during recent years. When enough schools sponsored the program, the MHSAA responded with a four-week playoff in 2011.  The number of schools sponsoring the sport grew in 2012, and more growth is expected for the 2013 season.

Like almost everything that occurs in life, what has benefited some schools is not seen by others to be in their own best interests.

Advocates of the eight-player game include those schools whose declining enrollments couldn’t support the eleven-player game.  Football has returned to some communities and has been saved from the brink of elimination in others.

However, as two and soon three dozen Class D schools opt for the eight-player game, the remaining Class D schools that sponsor football find themselves in disrupted leagues and forced to travel further to complete eleven-player football schedules; and they must compete against larger teams in Division 8 of the eleven-player MHSAA Football Playoffs.

In fact, the growth of the eight-player game among our smallest schools has resulted in more Class D schools qualifying for the MHSAA Football Playoffs than ever before.  In 2012, an all-time high 44.0 percent of Class D schools that sponsor football qualified for either the single division eight-player tournament or Division 8 of the eleven-player tournament.  This compares to 42.2 percent of Class C schools, 44.9 percent of Class B schools and 41.6 percent of Class A schools that sponsor football and qualified for the 2012 playoffs.

Some see the eight-player game as the savior of the football experience in Class D schools.  Others see it differently.