Soccerhead: An Accidental Journey Into The Heart of The American Game (2006)
This book is a light-hearted history of a youth soccer team and its quest
for the elusive “perfect season” in the soccer-crazed suburbs of Washington,
D.C. But it is also a many-layered look deep inside the life and times of
the 21st Century American Star Child. Often hilariously funny, it veers
sharply from one chapter to the next to take on issues of modern parenting;
children’s health and psychology; the politics of kids’ sports; and the
multibillion-dollar industry that is youth athletics.
The College Park Hornets formed when they were in
Kindergarten, and played together for eight seasons – bonded by their love
of a mysterious game that their coach and most of their parents knew almost
nothing about when the “accidental journey” began in the autumn of the year
2000.
They are the sons and daughters of lawyers and carpenters;
Democrats and Republicans; Latino immigrants, African-Americans and white
middle-class suburbanites – Catholics, Baptists, Hindus and Protestants.
They come from private and public schools, bungalow enclaves and leafy
subdivisions. At home, they speak three different languages. On the field,
they speak the world’s language. Were it not for soccer, they never would
have met, much less become friends.
Soccerhead examines what all of this might mean for
the future of an increasingly “poly-cultural” nation now permanently
enmeshed in the role of global leader. For this simple game is now a
full-fledged social movement – the second largest participation sport in the
U.S. after basketball and a unifying center of American life, the new “town
square” for some 20 million families who build their social calendars and
weekend plans around soccer seven months a year. For the kids, it is the
“prep school” for global citizenship and a passport to a future unlike any
their parents ever knew.
In alternating chapters, Soccerhead explores the
fractious history of the game in America from the 19th century to the
present day, the far-reaching impact of Title IX and its role in fostering
the “Youth Sports Boom” of the 1970s, and the significance of soccer’s
governing rules and philosophies. Amid a cacophony of government alarms
about adolescent obesity, diabetes and attention deficit disorders,
Soccerhead also takes a hard look at the “dark side” of kids sports in
the age of supervised “play dates” and hyper-organized pay-for-play leagues.
