Our club team played a game on peden last year. Peden isn't that great for soccer the way it's currently built. The field is too narrow and needs to be changed to grass for soccer to be played there on a consistent basis. It's a joke we don't have a NCAA team though. With how popular soccer is becoming in America the sooner we get a team the better. I'm curious if Akron makes any money on their team with how well they do.

I'm skeptical that they could make money, but I openly admit that I don't know anything about their average attendance.

Yes. While a student in the mid-60s I watched their games. Their field ran behind and paralleled Peden's east stands.

I know at some point in the past five years they led the country in attendance. Proabably in between 3000-5000 people at the games. I agree that as long as title IX is in place and we still have football we won't have a team. We would need to add probably 2 more women's teams to pull it off. I think attendance wise we would do very well. OU has a large international community that I'm sure would love going to soccer games. Also just walking around campus there are a lot of American kids who wear soccer jerseys around and seem to be interested in it. Which will continue to grow as soccer becomes more popular in the U.S.

When I played soccer for O.U. in the mid 1970's we were already a poor stepchild to other sports.

1 scholarship,which was split 3 ways.

My last season,our coach was a volunteer.

No money for the 2 week preseason meals or housing.
Pretty much the whole team lived in a rented house.We lived on mac and cheese and PB&J.
We were pretty good at the time,so a lot of schools wanted to scrimmage us.
We'd play anyone that would give us a meal in their cafeteria.

We'd sneak into the football locker room after practice to get at their lemonade machines.

The hand writing was on the wall that soccer,as a Varsity sport,probably wasn't going to be around too much longer.

One factor that hasn't been discussed too much are Parents and Friends as primary influences on kids and sports participation today. Just north of fifty, I am old enough to remember growing up in a working class town in north central Ohio where you played the sport that fit your body type, whether you liked it or not. You didn't want to let your friends down who depended on you. In the big suburban schools, they have lots of bodies to draw from, but this is not the case in rural schools or small cities. Some of the vaunted football programs from my high school days barely field teams today.

Summer camps and traveling teams can greatly help a young person progress, or burn them out. While at one of son's practices, I spoke with an organizer of tournaments who was on his way to a national symposium of sports retailers to discuss why high school sports participation has dropped. Unless you are really a prodigy, endless camps and traveling squads can burn one out. Most kids today don't see a college scholarship or professional career in their future. Football is especially vulnerable to this as one neighborhood kid told me, "Football is hard and rough, why would anyone want to play it unless they are going to make lots of money?" I tried to explain it to him, but it fell upon deaf ears. He is hardly the exception.

By 2026, I think the consolidation factor as mentioned in previous posts will certainly take place in college football. Soccer, basketball and Lacrosse continue to grow. After coming back from Mass last Sunday morning, I prepared to turn on Meet the Press only to find that all NBC related networks (12 in all which was news to me) were carrying the final Sunday of England's Soccer Premier League. Could anyone have imagined that happening in 2006? What will it be like in 2026? College football consolidation will surely happen by then. Who will be left standing in the MAC, Sunbelt, CUSA etc?