With World Cup, all eyes on Brazil: Our View
On the southeast side of Wausau, where the old city dump used to be, 57 acres will one day be the home of 15 soccer ...
With World Cup, all eyes on Brazil: Our View On the southeast side of Wausau, where the old city dump used to be, 57 acres will one day be the home of 15 soccer ... Check out this story on wausaudailyherald.com: https://www.wausaudailyherald.com/story/opinion/2014/06/12/with-world-cup-all-eyes-on-brazil-our-view/10360441/
Daily Herald Media Editorial Board Published 1:32 a.m. CT June 12, 2014
Tourists pose with a U.S. and Brazilian flag ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday. (Photo: REUTERS/Eddie Keogh )
On the southeast side of Wausau, where the old city dump used to be, 57 acres will one day be the home of 15 soccer fields and a host of other amenities. It is a long-planned project that is still in the works, and it will be great.
Across the region, already, youth soccer leagues are in full swing, with teams of young players in knee pads chasing the ball up and down the field in more or less organized fashion, depending on the team and the players' ages. At worst, it's tremendous exercise. At best, it's a lot of kids' first experience with the demands and rewards of competing with a team.
At a time when youth participation in team sports has been declining, soccer has increased its share. There were more than 3 million registered youth soccer players (those ages 6 through 17) in 2012, and more than 53,000 in Wisconsin, according to U.S. Youth Soccer.
Some 5,450 miles south of Wausau, in Sao Paulo, the 2014 FIFA World Cup will kick off today with a match between Brazil and Croatia. The World Cup is the largest sporting event in the world, period, and billions upon billions of people will be watching.
Anything that brings that much of humanity together is valuable, and worth paying attention to.
Sure, soccer doesn't inspire the devotion in most Wisconsinites of that other game called football. The U.S. is not accustomed to being an also-ran in international competitions, and the American team's draw — it starts out in the "group of death," meaning a set of early opponents that make it very hard to advance — will make even getting out of the group-play round difficult. (We don't want to write an obituary for the U.S. team before the tournament starts, but it's a bad break.)
But at the start of the massive international event that is the World Cup, we keep thinking about the 6-year-olds who are just now learning how to dribble and pass on the fields across central Wisconsin. Maybe we will have a chance to see one of them competing for the U.S. team in the 2034 World Cup.
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