This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

There’s plenty of talk about how tapping into the Hispanic fanbase is key for MLS success in the competitive world of professional sports. Though besides some translated American news Hispanic coverage of MLS is slim. Inasmuch Jose Miguel Burgos, 26, took up the mission. Chilean-born, Chicago-based Burgos is the man behind MLS en Espanol, a Spanish language site for MLS fans that launched last year.

With little to no handle on Spanish, and knowing from reading the likes of Pablo Neruda that sometimes translations can’t convey the whole meaning, I let first-time TIAS contributor (and reader of Spanish) L.E. Eisenmenger handle it, sitting down with Burgos to work out the full story.

Their best translation after the jump…

you can contribute too. write to thisisamericansoccer@gmail.com to add your story to the Diary Project

Click HERE for the full story…

NYC high school soccer caught in controversy over which season to schedule girls

In the New York City public schools, the boys’ soccer season is in the fall, and the girls play in the spring. It’s been that way for 28 years. There’s not enough fields, not enough coaches, not enough referees, not enough time to have them both in the same season. Or at least that’s what a lot of people think.

Three female soccer players think otherwise, and with the help of the New York Civil Liberties Union, they threatened to sue the NYC Department of Education, using Title IX and charging that they were being discriminated against. The female student athletes allege that by having to play in the spring, their competition was limited to their own league (because the rest of the state played in the fall). Their spring club soccer commitments interfered with the high school season, and college recruiters were getting a better look at the teams playing in the fall–all issues the boys (and indeed most girls throughout the state) did not have to deal with during their fall season. All of this was noted previously in several sports, in 2006, in a report by the city’s elected public advocate comparing boys and girls sports in the city’s PSAL leagues.

To avoid being sued, the DOE agreed this week to move the girls’ soccer season to the fall beginning in August and through at least 2011. End of story? Not for everyone… Click HERE for the full story…

MARK IT DOWN EDITION

“If you took a map of America where Obama is strongest and laid it over a map of where soccer has its biggest appeal, you’d see an incredible overlap… The blue states on both coasts are very soccer-friendly as well as huge areas of support for Obama, where as the center of the country is full of people who are the enemies of soccer and Obama — white, 50-and-over guys who listen to talk radio and only care about football or basketball.” –Joe Roth, via the LA Times

Click HERE for the full story…

Major League Soccer unveiled a newly redesigned MLS Cup trophy, created by Tiffany & Company and named for American soccer stalwart Philip F. Anschutz

“We are in the sports business,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber began on a chilly Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan. “But it is nice to have breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Like rock concerts on the morning “news” shows, jokes are tough at 8:30AM, but Garber knew that, continuing, “I think I’m the tenth person to use that joke this morning, so I didn’t expect much of a giggle.”

Details and photos of the trophy after the jump…

Click HERE for the full story…

Another day passes, another American soccer club partners up with a European counterpart. But I didn’t want this one to just pass. Because this time it is Rush Soccer. Once a tiny club in Colorado, Rush is now 33,000 players strong with 20 clubs across the nation (that’s not a map of democratic states up there, but states in which Rush has a member club). Former national team player Tim Schutz, who has coached and played at just about every level of the game, is the president of Rush. Oh, and they want a MLS team under their brand.

If you didn’t know before, it’s quickly appearing to be a youth soccer world of “Rush against them.” After the jump President Schutz takes a phone call to make sense of the mother of all clubs.

Click HERE for the full story…

a local breath

before the global exhale

and the emulsifying

late-summer light I love.

Click HERE for the full story…

I wasn’t sure Frank Dell’apa would want to talk to me. Like most I presume, I heard via du Nord that he was being moved at the Boston Globe, where he has been a sports reporter since 1989, from covering his preferred beat (Revolution and international soccer) to the Celtics. To be moved from soccer to basketball would be a promotion to most, but not to Frank, not to his loyal readership. It would be understandable if he just didn’t want to talk about it for a number of easy to deduce reasons.

But he said yes. And as with his decades of reporting, we are all the more lucky because of it. And for the digital time capsule of this here site, it kind of comes with perfect timing (sorry Frank). It is just that for a man who has spent his life in sports journalism chasing soccer this unexpected career tangent elicits perspective, which begs to be gathered up, marked down, and reconsidered as we determine the future—-journalism and soccer, observers and participants. Our conversation is after the jump. Click HERE for the full story…

Welcome to the Designated Players.

I know you have been holding your breath.

What’s that?

After those-half-ass-viral-campaign-teaser-banners? What, a few new prominent links?

Please. Lame.

That is one way to look at it. Click HERE for the full story…

Sooner or later the party ends up in their room. Join the fun later this month.

—-

coming soon to the sport of the internet

—-