Some
random thoughts...
* Football is the cash cow of high school sports and often funds every other sport with the exception of boys basketball in some cases. Therefore more time and energy is devoted to making football a success because so much else depends on it financially... quite possibly even the soccer teams in many cases.
* Soccer does not have a specified "night" for games. Football has Friday night lights - end of the tradional work week, a time for family activity. Soccer plays on Saturdays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays - It's not like one can say, "It's ___day, let's go see the soccer team play" because they may or may not be playing that day and the casual fan probably doesn't know the schedule.
* Soccer can be gruelling. Summer camp, fall season, indoor season, spring season and start all over again. It's tough on players, maybe tougher on parents and let's be honest, only the most diehard of fans wants to watch the game 12 months out of the year.
* Soccer 12 months a year is decidedly different than most other sports. Aside from baseball I know of no other sport that has a second season (club soccer) during the school year.
Baseball / softball hold winter hitting leagues and there are a couple of fall leagues for baseball / softball as well.
There is no spring football in Ohio. Yes, there is weight lifting, a by-product of football, but it is not exactly a spectator sport in most instances and is definitely not football.
There is no fall or spring basketball... until the AAU circuit or " National" High School tournaments get underway in early summer.
Soccer seems to be omnipresent and therefore there is no down time to allow for "missing" the sport and no lead-in time to eagerly anticipate its return. It's just there. Always.
* JV matches generally start at 5:00 and varsity matches at 7:00 p.m. for weeknight games. People are getting off work, rushing home, rushing to other activities, trying to get supper. Students are just finishing with other practices or meets and have yet to do homework, eat supper, shower...
In our area, the youth soccer matches begin at 6:00 or 6:15 and do not conclude until 7:00 or 7:30... after the varsity match has already begun. The kids have homework, need to get supper, need to shower and many young ones are in bed by the 8:30 finish of the varsity match. If the darn youth matches were not scheduled at the same time as the high school matches attendance just might pick up a bit.
And if your stadium/field is not lighted you must move start times up when daylight is lost as fall closes in further exacerbating the problems noted above.
Again, a decided advantage for football is Friday night games that start at 7:30 - everyone gets home, has supper or tailgates, there is no school the next day, homework can wait, the kids don't have to get up the next morning so they can stay up later.
* The misconception that soccer hurts traditional sports and therefore if support is withheld it might cause soccer to fail.
The decision to play soccer is made at a young age. One cannot simply go out for soccer as a high school freshman without previous playing experience and expect to enjoy success. It takes time to acquire the necessary foot skills and fundamentals. I have seen some try to come out without having recent playing experience and without exception they have crashed and burned.
Football might lose a DB or WR now and again but baseball and track are much more likely to lose athletes to club soccer than football is likely to lose athletes to soccer.
* What soccer has in its favor is that it costs a lot less money to field a soccer program than it does to field a football program. A school like Upper Scioto Valley that has struggled to field a football program could well turn to soccer instead. It would be financially prudent to do so.
Other small schools (some in Putnam Co., for example) have soccer teams but no football teams. They have begun playing soccer games on Friday nights. Those crowds are beginning to grow and it could become something special in time. Some of these schools hold homecoming festivities around a soccer match much like football playing schools hold homecoming around a football game.
* The biggest factor is simply that most Americans do not have a point of reference for soccer and therefore have little appreciation for the game.
TV does not do justice to the game but is in fact often times better than attending a game in person. I have taken people to soccer matches and have had them sit there utterly bored to tears as they have not appreciated the action on the field - not because they held an inherent dislike for the sport but because they just didn't understand what was going on.
* Passion - way too much of it in soccer. So much that the casual fan referred to in the paragraph above is sometimes further alienated due to lack of understanding the obsessive nature of some fans. Soccer parents are among the absolutely worse spectators in the sports world. I don't know if it is the concept of too little scoring that creates the adversarial atmosphere in the stands or if perhaps it is the non-stop action. I have often thought soccer, high school soccer, would be better off from a fan perspective if there were timeouts and quarter breaks so the spectators could settle down and regroup.
* I think that kind of sums things up - in short, soccer is an alien game to Americans. Probably much the same as hockey is perceived by many or... curling, for that matter. The apathy toward the game is probably more a result of it being misunderstood and therefore underappreciated than disliked.
Only time can solve this aspect of the problem - time for second, third, fourth, etc. generation soccer families to arise and broaden the potential base of soccer fans that would have an inclination to attend soccer matches.
* Football is the cash cow of high school sports and often funds every other sport with the exception of boys basketball in some cases. Therefore more time and energy is devoted to making football a success because so much else depends on it financially... quite possibly even the soccer teams in many cases.
* Soccer does not have a specified "night" for games. Football has Friday night lights - end of the tradional work week, a time for family activity. Soccer plays on Saturdays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays - It's not like one can say, "It's ___day, let's go see the soccer team play" because they may or may not be playing that day and the casual fan probably doesn't know the schedule.
* Soccer can be gruelling. Summer camp, fall season, indoor season, spring season and start all over again. It's tough on players, maybe tougher on parents and let's be honest, only the most diehard of fans wants to watch the game 12 months out of the year.
* Soccer 12 months a year is decidedly different than most other sports. Aside from baseball I know of no other sport that has a second season (club soccer) during the school year.
Baseball / softball hold winter hitting leagues and there are a couple of fall leagues for baseball / softball as well.
There is no spring football in Ohio. Yes, there is weight lifting, a by-product of football, but it is not exactly a spectator sport in most instances and is definitely not football.
There is no fall or spring basketball... until the AAU circuit or " National" High School tournaments get underway in early summer.
Soccer seems to be omnipresent and therefore there is no down time to allow for "missing" the sport and no lead-in time to eagerly anticipate its return. It's just there. Always.
* JV matches generally start at 5:00 and varsity matches at 7:00 p.m. for weeknight games. People are getting off work, rushing home, rushing to other activities, trying to get supper. Students are just finishing with other practices or meets and have yet to do homework, eat supper, shower...
In our area, the youth soccer matches begin at 6:00 or 6:15 and do not conclude until 7:00 or 7:30... after the varsity match has already begun. The kids have homework, need to get supper, need to shower and many young ones are in bed by the 8:30 finish of the varsity match. If the darn youth matches were not scheduled at the same time as the high school matches attendance just might pick up a bit.
And if your stadium/field is not lighted you must move start times up when daylight is lost as fall closes in further exacerbating the problems noted above.
Again, a decided advantage for football is Friday night games that start at 7:30 - everyone gets home, has supper or tailgates, there is no school the next day, homework can wait, the kids don't have to get up the next morning so they can stay up later.
* The misconception that soccer hurts traditional sports and therefore if support is withheld it might cause soccer to fail.
The decision to play soccer is made at a young age. One cannot simply go out for soccer as a high school freshman without previous playing experience and expect to enjoy success. It takes time to acquire the necessary foot skills and fundamentals. I have seen some try to come out without having recent playing experience and without exception they have crashed and burned.
Football might lose a DB or WR now and again but baseball and track are much more likely to lose athletes to club soccer than football is likely to lose athletes to soccer.
* What soccer has in its favor is that it costs a lot less money to field a soccer program than it does to field a football program. A school like Upper Scioto Valley that has struggled to field a football program could well turn to soccer instead. It would be financially prudent to do so.
Other small schools (some in Putnam Co., for example) have soccer teams but no football teams. They have begun playing soccer games on Friday nights. Those crowds are beginning to grow and it could become something special in time. Some of these schools hold homecoming festivities around a soccer match much like football playing schools hold homecoming around a football game.
* The biggest factor is simply that most Americans do not have a point of reference for soccer and therefore have little appreciation for the game.
TV does not do justice to the game but is in fact often times better than attending a game in person. I have taken people to soccer matches and have had them sit there utterly bored to tears as they have not appreciated the action on the field - not because they held an inherent dislike for the sport but because they just didn't understand what was going on.
* Passion - way too much of it in soccer. So much that the casual fan referred to in the paragraph above is sometimes further alienated due to lack of understanding the obsessive nature of some fans. Soccer parents are among the absolutely worse spectators in the sports world. I don't know if it is the concept of too little scoring that creates the adversarial atmosphere in the stands or if perhaps it is the non-stop action. I have often thought soccer, high school soccer, would be better off from a fan perspective if there were timeouts and quarter breaks so the spectators could settle down and regroup.
* I think that kind of sums things up - in short, soccer is an alien game to Americans. Probably much the same as hockey is perceived by many or... curling, for that matter. The apathy toward the game is probably more a result of it being misunderstood and therefore underappreciated than disliked.
Only time can solve this aspect of the problem - time for second, third, fourth, etc. generation soccer families to arise and broaden the potential base of soccer fans that would have an inclination to attend soccer matches.
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