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New Choice: Club or High School Soccer
I'm not normally a reader of the Sports section, but this headline caught my eye this morning: Girls' choice: club or high school team.
It's about the Capital Area Soccer League now offering club-level soccer for girls in the spring when high schools around here field their own soccer teams. So from now on, many girls are going to have to make what I expect will be a gut-wrenching decision and pick one or the other.
My daughter is four so we're not close to having to deal with this yet ... if we ever have to deal with it. I understand the desire to get these players to be the best they can be. Perhaps the club level offers more serious competition than what's found at some high school. And for homeschoolers this is a great move I'm guessing. And apparently more college recruiters are watching club-level sports than high school level (though the article notes that there are really no big scholarships for kids who play something other than football or basketball).
But I think the girls who choose the club level over the high school team will lose out in a way. A soccer player at Leesville said it best in the story:
"Nicole Jewell, an all-state defender for Leesville Road, said there are benefits in playing on the high school team.
"It is so much a community," she said. "With club, you go to a national
tournament and play great and nobody is there except coaches and your family.
"With the high school team, you are playing for the community and classmates. You walk up and down the halls and people are excited and happy for you. Teachers talk to you about it. There is all this fan support. It makes you feel like you're doing something important."
Sarah Lindenfeld Hall
Sarah is in charge of content for TriangleMom2Mom.com and writes about family-friendly events, local moms groups and other topics for the site.
She lives in Raleigh with her husband and three-year-old daughter. Sarah has written for newspapers since she was a teenager living in snowy Central New York. After graduating from the University of Virginia, she traipsed a bit around Europe and Mount Airy, N.C., before settling down in the Triangle. She moved here in 1999 to take a job with The News & Observer. She once aspired to play flute professionally. More recently, her daughter started crying when she played it.
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Comments
Hmmmmm.....if a boy's team was started that competed with fall high school soccer or heaven forbid, football - let's just disenfranchise these young women some more, why don't we? As a late 70's beneficiary of Title 9 for girls' sports, I am fortunate, but at the same time disappointed at the snail's pace of progress. As the mother of three school age daughters, my time for dealing with this type of issue for them is nigh - and this seems to take us two steps backwards. My tactic will be to keep my daughters out of the fray, and be thankful we DO have choices for sports participation, even if that involves tough decisions. The young player quoted above is wise beyond her years (I am even proud for her parents!), I loved hearing her sense of community and perspective - because after all, it is what our young women feel that counts in this debate, isn't it?
Even without the club and highschool seasons at the same time, it is hard to do both. Both means devoting so much time to a single sport year round. The idea a pre-professional kids, specializing in one skill to such a degree is not what I think childhood should be about. Kids need time to explore lots of different skills and activities. I'm obviously in the minority, though! (Full disclosure: My daughter will have played all four years of highschool and club sport, and may play Division I in college.) I almost think it is better to have ONE season of sport (club OR school) than year round playing.
Separating kids into highschool verses club teams is like separating kids into public verses private schools. I think homeschoolers should be allowed to play sports in their local public schools anyway!