Posted on 06/05/2023 5:42:22 PM PDT by montag813
Old guy beats young guys at soccer.
Sean Garnier for Coppel (Old Man Soccer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwF189SHLSc
Small point, but it was a team of UNDER-15 boys, so mostly 13 and 14 year olds. And they weren't an All-Star team, either, they were from the FC Dallas academy.
They only played 40 minutes. Extrapolating to normal 90 minute match coverts 12-0 into 27-0.
U15 means the boys were under 15 as of the cutoff date for that particular year, looking ahead. Before 2016, U.S. youth soccer followed the school calendar, which made sense because so much of U.S. youth sports is organized through the schools. Starting in 2016, U.S. youth soccer switched to a calendar year basis, which is simpler but which also means that some of the kids you’re playing with on your school team will be in different age groups for club soccer.
Anyhow, U15 now means that players were under age 15 as of December 31. This makes them U15 for the upcoming year, which is the year that they turn 15. A U15 team will therefore consist of 14 and 15 year old players. By the end of the fall season, some of them will be pushing 16.
No, the FC Academy team is not an “All-Star Team.” It’s much higher level than that. Any informal rec league can have an All-Star team; the term means nothing. The Academy programs are the elite youth development programs run by the MLS clubs and U.S. Soccer. These are the elite players who will be playing D1 soccer in a couple of years in college. Many will eventually go pro. In Europe, the soccer clubs run professional development leagues for high school age players. The closest thing to this in the U.S. is major league baseball signing high school grads directly, bypassing college ball.
The Academy players are elite athletes. If they played football or basketball, some of them would be attending fake high schools that are basically pro training camps, and they’d already be getting big bucks under the table. They’d be evaluating college offers based on how much NIL money they can make as a “student athlete.” Soccer in the U.S. doesn’t have that kind of cash to throw at teenagers, but that’s the level of the Academy players.
Yes, the FC Dallas Academy team beat the USWNT in a scrimmage some years ago. I’ve seen photos from that game. The boys are all a head taller than the women. They aren’t boys any more; they are early maturing young adults. Boys of this age are already physically dominant over women. The thugs prove this every day in American cities.
All the top women’s teams around the world regularly scrimmage elite 15 and 16 year old boys teams, and they all lose from time to time. That seems to be the last age at which adult women can hang in with highly athletic young men on a reasonably competitive basis. The women would get blown off the field by a quality men’s college team, let alone a professional team. The top women’s teams schedule these kinds of scrimmages because they’re the top women’s teams in their respective countries and they can’t find peer level practice competition unless they play the elite boys. It’s the same reason top women tennis players practice regularly against men. (But they sure don’t enter any men’s tournaments, because what would be the point?)
Women’s athletics have to be taken on their own terms. Girls shouldn’t be told they shouldn’t play sports because they’re never going to be as big or fast or strong as the men. This is why girls and women’s athletics must be kept separate. It’s a class based competition. Welterweight boxers don’t get into the ring with heavyweights.
What I can never understand is why some men who have always been happy to cheer for U.S. women swimmers, gymnasts, ice skaters, and track stars in the Olympics turn around and dump on U.S. women soccer players. This has been going on for a long time, well before the Megan Rapinoe types started fouling the nest.
The only theory I can think of is that there is one huge difference between soccer and swimming, gymnastics, Olympic skating, track, etc. In those other sports, the U.S. men also excel. In soccer, the USWNT is one of the best in the world, and always has been. (They’re unlikely to threepeat in the upcoming Women’s World Cup, but that’s another story.) But U.S. men’s soccer is a long running embarrassment internationally. This leads to the casual statement that the U.S. women are better than the U.S. men — which they are, in terms of class competition. And that’s all it means. The USWNT wins championships, not every time but often enough to be the big dog in international women’s soccer. The USMNT has to battle, scrape and get lucky to get through group play, and it’s no threat to win anything major. Get over it, people. Your manhood shouldn’t be threatened because the USWNT is best in class.
Megan Rapinoe turned an All-American success story into a lightning rod. Shame on her. And the woke commissars are rolling every major institution in the country, not just women’s soccer. Even the NFL and NBA are proclaiming solidarity with the rainbow flag. But that’s another story.
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