One of the common notions floating around American soccer and its competitiveness (or lack thereof) on the world stage usually boils down to something like: “If our best athletes chose soccer as their sport at a young age, we would be very good at soccer.”
As an aside, there are even some astoundingly stupid arguments against this premise. Really, if a country with the wealth, resources and population of the US, creates the deepest talent pool of the best athletes available for a single sport, it’s likely to become pretty good in that sport.
Anyway, it’s pretty much accepted that soccer is rarely the first choice of the best American athletes. It’s probably not even the third or the fourth choice. But it’s with this backdrop that we found this story mildly interesting.
It’s about a kid named Tanner Clay. And he has opted to play soccer at the collegiate level instead of football. And he was apparently good at both. This summer he was part of Real Salt Lake’s youth team that lost in the final of SUM Cup to DC United’s squad in a penalty shootout.
In football, Clay set a school record for receiving yards this season with 1,248 yards. According to the piece: “Stanford was one of the colleges looking at Clay before this football season started, but colleges backed off when they learned that Clay was more interested in soccer.”
“Looking at” is pretty vague and doesn’t mean he was a shoe-in to get a scholarship offer. Additionally, the school he chose for soccer, College of Charleston has been to the NCAA tournament just once since 1996*.
On the surface that might seem peculiar to pick a soccer program with unspectacular recent history over one of the top academic institutions that just happens to also have one of the top football programs in the country right now. But if the decision is to play soccer, then Clay has to choose from the soccer options before him.
We don’t want to read too much into the nuances of the decision. Moreover a single data point doesn’t tell us too much and, frankly the US still needs more Juan Agudelos than kids going to play college soccer. But Clay is an outstanding athlete and he picked soccer. So those kids are out there.
[*Oops. C of C made this year's tournament. So that would bring the total to twice and also imply they are presently pretty decent in soccer.]
I don’t know. I have seen some pretty cute
Stanford chicks when I visited.
Visited a friend at the University of North Carolina. Driving around, we made it over to Duke’s campus. Night and day with the ladies when it came to being around Tar Heels v Blue Devils.
Well you know what they say out here on the left coast: “9 out of 10 girls in California are beautiful, and the other one goes to Stanford.”