Team USA should look outside of the classroom

As players from the Ghana side celebrated at the whistle and the hopes of the USA soccer team sifted through our hands, the temporary fans we had become were left to wonder what just happened. What was this crazy sport we had thrown ourselves into? Do we really care about soccer or just the three letters on the front of the jersey? Wouldn’t we root for any American team that has a chance to napalm the self-esteem of countries that make better cars?

If you just found yourself nodding, you may have also realized just how spoiled we really are. Americans can show up to just about any international competition and be relatively successful. That’s just what we do. In the Olympic Games, we have Americans that are competitive at every random sport: gymnastics, swimming, beach volleyball, skiing with a rifle. This was no more evident than in the last Winter Games when Team USA went to the gold-medal game against the Canadian hockey team. To Canadians, they expected their team to be there because hockey is the more popular of their two sports and that is a humility we just don’t understand.

The concern I had after the Ghana defeat was similar to leaving a party in which you were embarrassingly overdressed. You can only see a team give up the first goal of the game so many times before you start to wonder if they go into every game more confident than they should be.  Mike Tirico and Alexi Lalas previewed USA’s “next opponent”, Germany, before they had even taken the field against Ghana. Frat guys yelled angrily at the television in the bar every time Team USA didn’t score. Much of the American run through the World Cup, its reception and reaction seemed overly privileged- or as I began to think of it- “colleged”.

We are at a point now in our society that, for better or for worse, going to college is expected, instead of a privilege. Soccer in America, like almost every other sport, abides by the philosophy that the best players should first play in college. Clint Dempsey, Maurice Edu, Carlos Bocanegra, Oguchi Onyewu, Jay DeMerit and Robbie Findley all played for a college team. This makes our athletes better at algebra and dissecting frogs, but does this make them better athletes?

The answer is an overwhelming “no” and if you disagree name a top soccer player in the world that has a higher education. Go ahead, check Wikipedia. You will find stories of Wayne Rooney, growing up in the slums of Liverpool and at the age of 10, signing “schoolboy terms” to play for Everton FC. You might find out that Lionel Messi was nominated for FIFA World Player of the Year at the same age Americans can legally drink. My favorite player in the Cup, Germany’s Mesut Ozil, was born in an industrial town the same year I was and made his professional debut before I graduated high school.

The problem with our college system is that by the time our athletes play professionally they are years behind the rest of the world. Rooney was just 17 at his first start for Everton while Dempsey started playing in the MLS at age 21. That difference of four years is essentially robbing our players of one World Cup and increasing lineup turnover. Check out the long list of current players that will be over 30 by the next World Cup: Tim Howard, Bocanegra, Onyewu, Steve Cherundolo, DeMerit, Dempsey, Donovan, Hercules Gomez and Edson Buddle. Yep, that’s pretty much Team USA.

So what do we do? The answer, not so surprisingly, may lie in a Disney movie. One of my favorite movies growing up was 1995’s “The Big Green”. It stars Steve Guttenberg and LOST’s John Terry, perfecting his role as a drunk, abusive father. “The Big Green” is about a group of misfits in Elma, Texas who are taught to play soccer by their attractive new British professor and end up winning the regional championship. Here are some choice lines:

“We don’t play soccer - it’s for foreigners.”

“Well its kinda like kickball mixed with that there hockey.”

“America is a place where you can be anything.”

Fifteen years later, all these assumptions still exist. The movie uses these typical stereotypes in making a championship team from essentially the scrap heap of soccer talent. They have girls, little kids, fat kids and most importantly, Juan, the new student whose family migrated from Mexico. The team they ultimately defeat looks a lot like all the teams I saw playing high school soccer: nerdy white kids with parents wealthy enough to buy the team sandwiches for away games. Actually, it looked a lot like this year’s national team.

For the future of soccer in America to be bright, we have to rid ourselves of the educated, upper-class stigma. We have to be willing to go out and find talent in low-income neighborhoods, where kids play on dirt or against the side of a barn because that’s all they have. These pockets of America are all-too-often overlooked athletically outside of basketball. I want more moments like Donovan’s goal against Algeria and I hope that goal inspired a young kid somewhere in the Bronx or North Dakota or Greensboro and I hope we find him. After all, I’m just a spoiled sports fan.