Girls (and Boys) Just Want to Have Fun

The “F Word” has again surfaced in youth sports. That’s “fun,” of course.

As reported in today’s New York Times Peter Barston, a sophomore at Fairfield prep in Connecticut, has conducted a research project – by his own admission not scientific – that shows young athletes play sports for fun more than any other reason.

Barston began the project after taking a survey at the urging of his father, Mike, a board member of a local junior football league. He thought it would be interesting to localize the survey.

His questionnaire is a single page listing 11 reasons children might have for playing sports, including having fun and making friends to the more serious: to win and to earn a college scholarship. Like the survey he took, which was from Michigan State researchers, Barston asked the local players to assign points based on the importance of the reasons for a total of 100.

So far Barston has polled about 255 members of the Darien Junior Football League, who range from fourth grade to eighth grade, and 470 boys and girls in the same grades from the Darien basketball league. He plans to continue with other sports this spring.

The Times says: “From the mound of data he gathered, Barston found a striking pattern. No matter how he categorized the responses, the most important reason youngsters gave for playing sports was the same: to have fun. That was the top response from football and basketball players, from boys and from girls, and from players in each grade from fourth to eighth. In the basketball survey, 95 percent of boys and 98 percent of girls cited fun as a reason for playing, nearly twice the number who mentioned winning.”

The results thus far of Barston’s survey seem to mirror those of the Michigan State researchers Martha Ewing and Vern Seefeldt back in 1989. Their study of 28,000 boys and girls around the country asked, Why do you play sports? The top answer then was “fun,” followed by “to do something I’m good at” and “to improve my skills.” “Winning” did not crack the top 10.

The article reminded me of two recent conversations: one was with a woman I coached in soccer when she was 15. She left the team after 9th grade to concentrate on lacrosse and went on to play for a nationally ranked Division 1 school. But “It just isn’t fun at that level,” she told me. The other was of a friend whose daughter played soccer at a Division 1 school a year ago and did well enough to crack the starting line-up by the end of freshman year. But last year she transferred to a Division 3 school (where she was all-conference) for sophomore year. I asked her father why. “She wasn’t having fun,” he said.

The Setting of the Sol

It’s probably not a good sign when your most popular team folds less than 90 days before the start of the season.

Women’s Professional Soccer announced yesterday that it was folding the Los Angeles Sol, the 2009 regular season champion and runner-up in the play-offs. The Sol’s average home attendance of 6,300 was significantly better than the 4,600 for the rest of the league.

Commissioner Tonya Antonucci said the Sol was one of the stronger franchises in what last year was a seven-team league. Since then the league added teams in Philadelphia and Atlanta. But the Sol’s original owner, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) wanted out and gave the franchise back to WPS last November after being unable to sell. AEG owns L.A. Galaxy and Houston Dynamos of Major League Soccer as well a team in Sweden, the NHL’s L.A. Kings and several minor league and European hockey teams.

The New York Tmes reported that talks with a prospective buyer for the Sol broke down over price last weekend. Which raises the question whether it was better to have no team in a market the size of Los Angeles than a team that sold for less than the league wanted.

“It’s unfortunate when this happens to any league, but it is more amplified for a young league,” Antonucci told the New York Times. “It doesn’t speak to the viability to the L.A. market. We want to get back into L.A. in 2011.”

My old friend, Charlie Naimo, a former Medford Strikers trainer, was general manager and acting coach of the Sol, having been appointed to the latter position less than three weeks ago. "It is a sad day for the franchise, staff, players and fans," Naimo said in a press release.

League officials gave the predictable quotes about the viability of the league.

“All the team owners and members of the Board are confident that this setback will be quickly overcome by the exciting developments that the league has in store for the 2010 WPS Season,” said WPS Board Member and Atlanta Beat Chairman T. Fitz Johnson in a press release. “This includes two new franchises, the debut of a brand new stadium built specifically for WPS, a longer regular season and an even better product on the field with incoming talent from the college ranks and the many top internationals that have been signed in the off-season. Without question, this season is poised to build on our successful launch year.”

“Ownership changes are part of pro sports, particularly in a young league, and we have made solid progress in growing WPS from where we were last season,” said Antonucci. “We believe Los Angeles is a healthy, viable market for women’s pro soccer and a city where our league can again thrive with an LA franchise in the future.”

Ironically, the Sol signed three international players, including Pavlina Scasna who played for the Philadelphia Charge in the WUSA, just 10 days ago. The 19 players on the roster, including the Brazilian, Marta, considered by many to be the world’s top female player, and U.S. National Team player Shannon Boxx, will be selected by the eight remaining teams in a dispersal draft February 4. The expansion Atlanta Beat will have the first pick and will presumably grab Marta. The new Philadelphia Independence will pick second.

The Times article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/sports/soccer/29woman.html?ref=soccer

The league’s press release: http://www.womensprosoccer.com/la

The Long And the Short of It

An article in today’s New York Times reports that two German scientists and researchers at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands claim in a soon-to-be published paper that shorter players are called for less fouls. I don’t buy it.

The article says that the study is based on data compiled by Impire AG, a German company that catalogs statistics on major European sports, including seven soccer seasons of the Bundesliga (85,262 fouls) and Champions League (32,142), and three World Cups (6,440), a tally of more than 100,000 fouls. But it does not say how the fouls are broken down by size of player (or position) and gives no other details.

The story focuses on German national team player Phillip Lahm, a 5’-7” defender (who I think is a great player). “Lahm hardly has a foul called against him,” one of the researchers, Dr. Steffan Giessner, told the Times in a telephone interview. “He plays tough. People pick up on small players and say they are really tough guys.” Lahm, a defender for Bayern München, has 63 caps for Germany. (Thomas Hässler, a midfielder with 101 caps for Germany who played through 2004, is 5’-5 1/2”. He is not mentioned.)

Being all of 5’-5” I am probably qualified to address this topic and I do not agree with the researchers’ theory. On the contrary, I find that smaller players tend to get beat up more by larger players who are then not called for the fouls. Then when the smaller player retaliates, fans and other players - and often the referee - react with shock. A tall player who flattens someone from behind is being aggressive. A short player doing the same thing is called a dirty player. Maybe this is just in the club and school games and not at the professional level. But the Times article lacks specifics so it’s impossible to judge.

Here is the link to the story: http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/refs-are-gunning-for-tall-guys-new-report-asserts/

Back after a month

I know, Coach P has been pretty quiet lately – for more than a month. Not for lack of soccer news. We had the NSCAA Convention in Philadelphia a week ago (but the organization never responded to my request for information on attending), the MLS and WPS drafts and our two new pro teams stocking their rosters. Rather it’s been wedding plans (the date is set for March 13), work and house renovations – I haven’t had a kitchen for six week snow.

I’ll have more tomorrow after the HMHS Girls annual banquet. The food always tastes better when you’re state champs! I’m looking forward to seeing what is a great group of parents and kids.

Meanwhile, some things never change. Bayern München is in first place in the Bundesliga by one point over Bayer Leverkusen, which plays 1899 Hoffenheim tomorrow. At the other end of the standings, things don’t look good for Hertha Berlin, which I saw play Bayern back in ’01. If you’re a pro soccer fan, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard 50,000 Germans singing Nur Nach Hause. But Berlin has fallen since then and if they finish 16^th or 17^th will be demoted to the second division next season, an embarrassment for Germany’s capital and largest city.