Youth Soccer: AYSO Video & the Shadowy Practice of Sub-Letting Public Soccer Fields
With the Hawthorne-based American Youth Soccer Organization cranking up its season, the nonprofit group has released a video expousing its positive, "everybody plays" philosophy aimed at parents whose kids have just started playing.
With AYSO increasingly becoming as much a part of America's fall culture as college pointy-ball football, this should be mandatory viewing for parents.
Staying with the rec soccer theme, there was a well-researched story in The L.A. Times Sunday about local soccer league dons profiteering off public fields. Read it here.
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About 100 Percent Soccer
Sportswriter Nick Green has written the 100 Percent Soccer column since 2005. The blog of the same name began in 2007. A native of England, he began writing about soccer in the mid-1980s and in 2000 permanently exchanged a seat in the stands for one in the press box. He lives six miles from Carson's Home Depot Center, home of the Los Angeles Galaxy, Chivas USA and the training headquarters for U.S. Soccer and is married to a long-suffering soccer widow. Join Nick on FaceBook.
I have a feeling that AYSO is passed it's peak and will never have the cultural significance of college football. So many other higher level leagues and clubs have come along and other sports are now drawing away young athletes. From the 70s through the mid 90s, everyone played the everyone plays game of AYSO. Since then club soccer and AYSO Plus have drawn away the best players, now there are signature leagues, and community soccer leagues like the one in Little Saigon and Laguna Niguel's league that is replacing AYSO's troubled region there.
The little video was nice but the article does a good job of pointing out how a system where everyone is equal is often corrupted by someone at the top who is more equal.