Soccer: The "Other Sport" in America

This is a story about a conversion experience, about growing up in Oklahoma, where God invented football (and still watches all the games), and following the sport with some passion (crying as a boy when the Oklahoma Sooners lost) and and then moving on to college (Oklahoma State--and crying more frequently when OSU lost), but having the then seemingly uneventful introduction to the world's sport when international students introduced me to soccer one day when it rained and we kept playing, and it rained some more and we kept playing, and we finished out the game in complete and happy abandon in 3 inches of Oklahoma mud: now that's how you slide tackle! Later, much later, in fact when I was about 33 years old and my daughter was 7, I was asked to coach her Champaign Park District soccer team. Knowing nothing about soccer except the friendly pick-up games at OSU, I caved in when the Park District made it clear that there simply wasn't a coach for MY DAUGTER'S soccer team. By God that would not stand!



at some point my son started playing -- note that mud is a constant

And so, one thing leading to another, here I sit, 10 years later, with an absolute love of soccer, having coached, played, and volunteered a decade toward the "other sport" in America, feeling that, as we all say, soccer is going to be really big one day in America.

Robert Baird