Cold Comfort For Soccer Fans – Winter Isn’t The Ideal Season For High School Soccer — Until You Look Closer

By Clay Kallam

I don’t get it. It’s rainy. It’s cold. Nobody wants to come watch. Why is soccer a winter sport?  – G.A., Lafayette

This question comes up periodically, and it’s worth answering again, because on the surface it makes almost no sense.

Major League Soccer plays in the summer, because, you know, the sun shines. It’s warm. It’s nice to be outside. You don’t have to bundle up to be a fan. And in fact, it used to be that most high school soccer was played in the spring or in the fall, because, well, the weather’s a lot nicer in those seasons than it is in January.

And even though about 50 NorCal schools still cling to spring and fall soccer seasons, the rest practice and play in the winter for a variety of reasons.

One reason is money — soccer championships in the winter are an opportunity for the California Interscholastic Federation and its sections to generate some income by selling playoffs and playoff tickets to media and fans.

Otherwise, the only two winter sports are basketball, which of course does well, and wrestling, which isn’t the attraction it once was. By shifting soccer to the winter, there’s some money to be made at the local and regional level, and maybe even more should a state soccer championship ever come together.

Another reason is participation, as without soccer in the winter, there are fewer athletic options available. Basically, the true winter sports are basketball and wrestling, and not only are basketball rosters small, very few girls are interested in wrestling. So by shifting soccer to the winter, more opportunities, the logic goes, are opened up.

(There’s one problem with this on the girls’ side, however — the two most popular girls contact sports (volleyball, for example, is a non-contact sport) are soccer and basketball, and by having them in the same season, it forces the relatively smaller number of girls interested in contact sports to make a difficult choice.)

But perhaps the biggest reason is one that really can’t be overcome: field space. In the fall, football chews up a lot of available fields every day, as many schools have three teams and more than a hundred boys in the program. In the spring, baseball, softball and lacrosse, not to mention track and field, occupy a lot of green space.

Add soccer to the mix in either season, and at most high schools, there’s simply not enough room to have every team practice. (I worked at a small private school where three teams in three different sports would practice on the same football-sized field at the same time, and it’s fair to say it didn’t work out well for anyone — especially when the soccer team, say, played at home.)

The transition of soccer to the winter was also aided by the increasing number of schools that have switched from grass to all-weather fields. Though the initial expense of artificial turf is relatively high, the maintenance cost is much lower, and the greater availability for interscholastic sports and P.E. make it a good investment — and makes it a lot easier to schedule games in January and February.

All that logic is well and good, but it doesn’t really help on that 45-degree Friday night game when the wind is howling and rain is coming down in sheets. Everyone’s cold and miserable, and it’s certainly not as much fun to play as it would be on a nice October evening or April afternoon. But given the realities of finances and field space, don’t expect a change — the best option, sadly, is to just buy warmer clothes.

This was a regular SportStars Magazine column called Behind The Clipboard. Clay Kallam has been an assistant athletic director and has coached numerous sports at a handful of high schools throughout the Bay Area. To submit a question for Behind the Clipboard, email him at claykallam@gmail.com.

PHOTO: Carondelet’s Chelsea Bailey dribbles against Monte Vista during a 2016 match in Concord. Photo by Phillip Walton