SHERIDAN — The “beautiful game” has captured people’s interest around the globe, including in Sheridan, due to the FIFA World Cup.
The Warehouse Gastropub hosted a watch party for the US game against Wales Monday. Nearly 50 people were at the establishment to take part in the game. A round of applause and cheers occurred when the United States’ Christian Pulisic passed the ball to Tim Weah and put the ball in the back of the net in the 36th minute to go up 1-0. The mood dampened when Wales’ Gareth Bale scored on a penalty kick in the 82nd minute that led to a 1-1 draw.
Many fans watch the World Cup, not just people who are die-hard soccer fans every year.
A Morning Consult poll, conducted in April, shows soccer has grown over the years. Thirty-two percent of American adults said they consider themselves soccer fans, including 7% who said they were “avid fans.” The survey also found 54% of respondents were interested in soccer, a greater share than other sports such as the NBA, NFL, college basketball, tennis, NHL, MLB or golf.
“My son really loves soccer, so he’s kind of motivated me to watch a little bit more soccer,” Jason Wille said at the Warehouse Gastropub. “It’s the first time in eight years that the US has been able to make (the World Cup). That’s obviously good for us.”
Wille said he follows up on how the Colorado Rapids of Major League Soccer are performing, but said the World Cup is primarily all the soccer he watches.
“Hopefully it will be good for awareness of soccer. As for Sheridan, the community around here loves soccer. So I’m hoping that everybody kind of embraces it,” Wille said.
The Sheridan Storm, the community’s Under-16 team has gained a lot of traction and performed well in a tournament in Norway in August.
Wade Kinsey is a former soccer player and current head coach of the boys team at Sheridan High School. He’s also on the Sheridan Storm board.
“When I played for the Storm, there were never enough kids for one age group. I was one of the only kids my age that played club soccer. I always had to play up and play older kids or the kids younger than me had to play up as well,” Kinsey said.
Those days are long over. The Storm organization in some instances has three full squads for a single age group. Kinsey said the interest in youth soccer is positively affecting the high school soccer program.
“I’m expecting 60 boys to come out for the high school team this year. We also keep more players on our team roster than any other team in the state,” Kinsey said. “We’re one of the few teams in the state that has what we call a ‘junior varsity 2 team.’ We try to schedule additional games just for them. In previous years, Kelly Walsh High School was the only team that could even schedule games with us. We have so many kids, and it’s an awesome problem to have.”
Kinsey is a third-grade teacher at Woodland Park Elementary. He put the US World Cup match on the screen for his students to watch as they did school work. For many of them, it was their first exposure to “big time” soccer.
“This could be the sort of thing that kicks off this next generation of kids that really want to play soccer,” Kinsey said.
For Kinsey, now 35 years old, one of his first memories of soccer was when the US hosted the men’s World Cup in 1994. Those games gave birth to Major League Soccer the year before.
“I remember my father coming back from Chicago on a work trip and he bought me a Chicago club jersey. That’s when I was like, this is becoming a thing,” Kinsey said.
Kinsey also credits the 1999 women’s World Cup hosted in the US as another soccer boom. The US defeated China on penalty kicks in a sold-out Rose Bowl Stadium to win the tournament.
The US can seize another opportunity in 2026 when it hosts the World Cup along with Canada and Mexico. Kinsey said it will come down to how the Americans perform at those games that will dictate the size of the soccer wave that follows.
Soccer growth is up in Sheridan and beyond. If Kinsey had his way, the sport will continue on its upward trend.
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