Are you a pro-sports writer? That was an awesome post.
For those of us who know nothing of soccer, how is it that 13 and 14-year-old boys teams from random schools beat the female pro-soccer players, and that seems to happen around the world, not just in the US?
How? Make the experiment yourself. Round up some attractive, 20-something young women and challenge them to walk down city streets in the wrong part of town late at night. Keep stats on the results. I think you will find that the teenage boys have a decisive edge.
The game that the USWNT hecklers always cite was a scrimmage -- it's starting to be more than a few years ago -- against a U-15 Academy team in Houston. U-15 means that the boys were under 15 years of age as of the magical cutoff date. (U.S. Soccer used to use August 1 as the cutoff, in order to more or less match up with the age groups in the schools. In 2015, the date was shifted to January 1, so it's now a calendar basis, which means that club teams and school teams draw from overlapping but not identical cohorts.) I.e., the U-15 teams will consist of players who are turning 16 in the "U-15" season.
The Academy players are the elite players in the top developmental programs. They are typically sponsored by and affiliated with the local professional soccer clubs. They are the U.S. equivalent to the much more extensive European club system, in which the professional leagues sign the top youth players to professional contracts while still in secondary school.
With variations, the same thing is done in other sports. In football and basketball, a lot of money is floating around under the table, and top players are in club programs that are thinly veiled professional development operations. Sometimes the "students" attend specialized "high schools" that are just athletic training mills with some academic window dressing to give them fake diplomas. I don't have much contact with those circles, but some years ago I worked with a woman whose son was an elite hockey player, a goalkeeper, who at age 15 was in close contact all the top college and professional scouts. His "club" team consisted of guys from a quite extended geographical area, who attended what was basically a boarding school, lived with host families during the week, and came home occasionally on weekends. The same sorts of things are done with elite gymnasts, swimmers, and youth athletes in other sports as well. These are the guys who, in football and basketball, are the five star recruits who used to get paid under the table to attend college and who now get NIL money. There's not that much money in U.S. soccer, but give it time. This is how much of the rest of the world develops its pro soccer players.
Anyhow, elite male athletes at that age aren't kids any more. They are all early maturing, which is a huge factor in youth sports where puberty is king. The top athletes at that age are already strapping young adults; most of them are already at their full height, although they will add a lot of muscle in the next few years.
You know. Those guys. The guys the coach at your alma mater is trying to recruit, and the coach just hopes he doesn't get caught cheating.
The elite male athletes at this age are already bigger, faster and stronger than adult women. The top women's teams around the world scrimmage "boys" teams about this age because they want to play stronger opponents. That's how you improve. And if you are the US, or British, or Australian or German women's national team, you already have all the top women players on your squad. Where do you find peer level practice competition? You know the answer.
The women don't scrimmage against men's college teams -- at least not any of the good men's college teams -- because they would get blown off the field. Did Serena Williams practice against men? Yes, of course. Did she ever enter a men's tournament? No. Same principle.
If you've ever seen pictures of the USWNT scrimmage against the U-15 Academy team, you know that the boys were all a head taller and, just from the looks of things, much stronger. At that age, the women could still hang in enough to benefit from the scrimmage. A couple of years later, these guys would all be playing D1 soccer, and the game would have been too lopsided to be useful.
Women's sports are a class based competition. They are playing to be best in class. And that's perfectly legitimate. I have no problem rooting for U.S. women in Olympic track and field, gymnastics, swimming, ice skating, hockey -- and yes, even soccer. Just as I have total respect for lightweight and welterweight boxers and the lower weight classes in weightlifting or wrestling. We don't send women out to compete with men professionally in soccer for the same reason that Sugar Ray Leonard would never have stepped into the ring against Muhammed Ali or George Forman or whoever was the reigning heavyweight of his era. But apparently a lot of freepers think Sugar Ray should be ridiculed because he wasn't "the best," since he didn't fight heavyweights.