For all the stick that we give Seattle weather, we really are quite fortunate. Never, in my entire youth, was the weather so bad during soccer season that I had one of my team’s games cancelled. But, as I’ve found out on this trip, there are places in the country that aren’t as lucky, and sometimes special measures have to be taken to ensure that soccer can continue despite mother nature’s wrath. Probably the best example of this I’ve seen is Milwaukee, where I experienced the world of indoor soccer for the first time.
It started out with a national team game. I had gotten wind a couple days earlier that the USA futsal (indoor soccer) team was playing France in a friendly the day I was there. So, after the World Cup’s opening match, I walked across town to the Milwaukee School of Engineering for the match. The first thing that struck me was how well attended the match was. While I had heard of futsal before, I had never heard anyone in Seattle talk about it, nor had I ever seen a match. But this game packed the (admittedly small) hockey arena of MSOE, with people having to stand on the concourse because all the seats were taken.
The match itself was quite entertaining. The smaller field and reduced team size made for a much faster pace of play, and it was the perfect setting for the showing off of each player’s skill on the ball. In a way, it was like hockey, with teams setting up their offense in the “attacking zone” like they do in hockey, and with the USA bringing their goalie up to be an extra attacker in the final minutes in search of an equalizer. In the end, however, the French emerged with a 5-3 victory.
During the match, I spoke with Forest Richter, a member of American Outlaws Milwaukee. He described the city as “thirsty for soccer.” Milwaukee’s most recent pro team, the Rampage of A-League (the USA’s second division at the time), folded in 2002. Several attempts to get an MLS franchise in the city in the last twenty years have also failed. Despite this, Milwaukee has a rich soccer history and a thriving indoor soccer scene. Brian McBride, a US soccer legend, started his career out with the Rampage, and the current coach of the United States futsal team, Keith Tozer, was the longtime coach for the Wave, Milwaukee’s indoor team. During this time, he was very active in the community, always willing to talk to fans and win them over to indoor soccer, making the sport’s popularity bigger in Milwaukee than it is in many other areas of the country, as was evidenced by the large crowd at the USA-France match.
In many ways, the thriving indoor scene is brought on by the climate in Milwaukee. The harsh winters make playing outdoors year-round impossible, and makes the maintaining of full-sized outdoor fields difficult. Because of this, the city of Milwaukee has very few outdoor fields, especially compared to its (richer) suburbs. This in turn has led to the game becoming a sport for the suburbanites, with the city high school teams constantly struggling against their suburban counterparts and the city teams in the local adult leagues struggling to find spaces to practice and play outside.
There are those spearheading a charge to change this, however. Quite by chance, I stumbled across James Moran as I was leaving MSOE. James is the founder and leader of the Milwaukee Soccer Development Group. The purpose of MSDG is to both show people that they can play soccer on any open space of grass (they don’t need a fully-marked field to play outdoor soccer), and yet at the same time to get more land from the city to create more fields, particularly so that the (largely Latino and African American) city teams in the local adult leagues have a guaranteed place to play. The ultimate goal is to make playing soccer affordable for everyone in the city, and to get the city teams on a level playing field with those from the suburbs.
To do this, MSDG organizes events throughout the Milwaukee area to increase interest in soccer. The one James was promoting at the futsal match was SoccerFest 2014, an event to “promote diversity, sustainability, health and wellness, and fair play” through soccer. The event featured mini-games (footgolf, soccer tennis, etc.), a skills competition, a 3v3 tournament, and “the cage”, a 1v1 game inside a small cage. James told me that he was extremely happy with how supportive the city had been for the event, saying that they had gotten great publicity on the internet and on TV, and that he’d even gotten someone from the Mayor’s office to help promote it. In the end, Moran believed the event had been a success, calling it “one of the best days ever,” and was even more blown away by how much Milwaukee has embraced the World Cup this past month.
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