Another view of the Libertyville indoor facility, looking at the 2 soccer fields. Note the good size of the main field. This is the kind of facility that Champaign/Urbana is crying for--or, anyway, I'm crying. 

Shot from the second floor balcony of the indoor sports facility in Libertyville, IL--suburb of Chicago. Note the 2 soccer fields right beside 2 basketball courts. The facility also had a climbing wall, restaurant, and other neat features. The turf on the soccer fields is outstanding and plays almost like real grass. 

Sean Defending in Central High vs. Uni Soccer Game

This was a tough game for Central High. The smaller University High played us a very good game on their small field and nearly beat us. The best aspect of the game for me was being high up in a bleacher, looking down on a beautiful field on a sunny day, which led to some great digital images. Typically, photography of youth and high school soccer is fraught with ugly backgrounds: chainlink fences, parking lots, and the ever present bright blue PortaPotty.


A good use of what we in cinema studies would call "offscreen space." What could that shadow represent? Note my son Sean is showing how to concentrate for a header, in spite of the big forward from Uni High bearing down on him. 

6000+ Soccer Balls

Ok, some of you may already know about Google's Image search option, which allows one to search the web and return only images, thumbnails and links to the original image and web page. Well, did you know that you can search on "soccer balls" and get over 6000 Soccer Balls!

Besides the obvious soccer ball product advertisements, there are some interesting snapshots and folk images of soccer balls in action.

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