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I grew up playing football, basketball, and baseball. I don't know that I ever saw a soccer ball before college; I don't think the game was known in southern Indiana in the 50's and early 60's. I paid a bit of attention in college because Jerry Yeagley was putting IU on the soccer map using mostly U.S. born players (which was unusual in elite college soccer back then), so it was a local interest story. Besides that, I watched a few Olympic games over the years, and otherwise ignored the sissy European game.

My attitude started to change when my daughter started playing, around 7 or 8 years of age. Based on an impressive sample size of one, I will offer a theory about people's responses to this thread: it all depends on what you grew up with. Soccer cynics will be folks, like me, who were never exposed to the game as youngsters; they remain focused on the big traditional U.S. sports. Then there will be a scattering of people who actually played themselves or, as a reasonable proxy, watched their kids play, which is the next best thing. The point is, all the big team sports are kids' games, and you need to be able to see it through the eyes of a child. If you didn't grow up with it, that's hard.

Not having played myself, I will never understand all the intracacies of soccer, but my appreciation has grown as my daughter has developed. She's now a reasonalby competitive travel player, certainly not an elite player, and I can kinda, sorta appreciate what the team is trying to do. It has become fun, which just goes to prove that even old dogs can learn new sports.

It helps that I've always been a fan of defense, and I'm disgusted with what the TV dollar has done to football, baseball, and especially basketball, which has become a nearly unwatchable parody of what used to be the greatest game ever invented. The shot clock and three point shot have ruined offensive basketball; the playoffs and interleague play have turned baseball's regular season into a fraud; football has turned into an aerial circus. I respect soccer for not selling out to television. If the people who ran the NBA or NFL were in charge of marketing soccer, the typical score would be 17-15, the Olympic women's teams would dress like beach volleyball players, and there would be an artificial play stoppage every three minutes for commercials. Good for soccer for holding out.

That said, too many high-stakes, major tournament soccer games end in PK shootouts, and calls/non-calls involving potential penalty kicks loom far too large. There are debatable calls in every sport. They loom excessively large in soccer because there is so little scoring. A bit more scoring would benefit the game, at the expense of reducing the number of upsets. That's a price I would pay; soccer purists would probably disagree.

All it would take is making the net a foot wider or six inches higher.