I think I start to be pretty clear on all that- I just aint connecting the dots on where soccer entered the picture. Like I said- I had never heard the term "soccer mom" when I left, and soccer wasn't that popular either. It still would've been Little League baseball. How did this demographic group sieze upon soccer as their sport du jour?
It just seems to me that it would have required some form of coordination and promotion to have become (apparantly) a fact of life in 10 short years. I mean one or two families here and there aren't really enough to put together a youth soccer league. The idea came from somewhere and was promoted- there had to be enough people interested in such a thing to have created soccer leagues with teams and uniforms. And that interest would have had to cancel out Little League Baseball (presumedly- hence the term soccer mom). Who first coined this phrase? When do you remember first hearing it?
One other thing - soccer moms used to all drive minivans, and a lot still do. They're behind the big popularity rise of the SUV, though.
Well, to be honest, I don't know why they settled upon soccer, or why it happened all of a sudden. I started to hear the term bandied about shortly before the four-year mark of the Late Great Unpleasantness.
My hypothesis is that this generation of women are the first to really be the result of full post-1960s upbringing. I mean, they were schooled from the mid 1970's onward, when the liberal-social-engineer educrats had finally had their hand fully on the tiller, so to speak.
I also hypothesize that they settled upon "soccer" because it didn't already have a tradition built around it, and they could make it androgynous, "safe," non-competitive (trophies for everyone), etc. Most other children's sports in America already have a tradition built up, and breaking the old traditions then re-casting it in their squishy mold would be met with too much resistance. (Especially in ice hockey or American football, but I digress...) So, soccer was promoted to young mothers as this wonderful sport, and they enrolled their children and demanded school soccer teams and so forth. The pre-existing soccer professionals were likely to have been floored by this attention, and just so happy to have someone to coach that they didn't see the social implications.