How does a kid in America learn to play soccer?
He can’t play much of a pick-up/street game with friends because there are no streets in America. There are suburbs. Street games are for basketball, often in a tough urban center or under a roof. Spaces for free soccer pitches have been long turned into parking lots. (People need room for their SUV’s) But suburbia has its own limitations – it is spread out. One could perhaps bicycle from home to home but walking is usually frowned upon. Local schools usually bus their students in. When you’re on the bus, you ain’t walking. And you ain’t playing street soccer. And, so with pick-up games eliminated, one looks to the organized game. That is run by a plethora of occasionally coordinated youth clubs. Clubs charge fees to play and that often negates a possibility of the poorer kids joining the club. Still, that isn’t the worst problem with these youth clubs. The worst and perhaps the only significant problem here is that coaches at these small clubs don’t know and don’t want to know the gam
