At Play | Findings

What have we found so far?: reporters have written on soccer in Texas since the Progressive Era. Soccer has provided Texans a place where people connect the United States to the world. Football soccer came to central Texas in English through Galveston before other soccer players moved north to flee the violence of the Revolution in Mexico. Soccer organizers managed to put racial boundaries back into play, making temporary use of baseball stadiums in the off-season and during away games, providing a temporary place where Jim Crow laws were not so rigorously enforced, allowing players and perhaps fans to make their way past some of the more rigorously policed color lines in Texas. Universities, national guard divisions and military bases provided a key institutional and associational base for soccer in San Antonio and Austin between the 1920s and 1960s, with bases hosting friendlies with Mexican first division teams.  In the 1930s, repatriation pushed ethnic Mexicans out of public spaces in the United States, soccer associations persisted and deepend their connections to San Antonio and its Mexican communities.  World War II wiped out most public discussion of soccer in San Antonio and Austin. After WWII, San Antonio and its military bases became a key recruiting region for the Monterrey (NL) soccer club, a pattern that continues to this day. In the 1950s, military bases and ethnic Mexican soccer associations became the key places where soccer could be found in central Texas.  In the 1960s, pick-up games on university campuses became the image of soccer in Austin.

Soccer began again in central Texas in the 1970s. In 1971, the YMCA became the first institution to provide soccer as an option for youth recreation in Austin. In 1973, current player Phil Friday with the help of the City and the YMCA drafted the bylaws for the Austin Municipal Soccer League four years later, women formed the first women’s league. In December 1977, Austin Independent School District voted to make soccer a varsity sport[MJR4] . IBM opened up its fields for league games, providing a place alongside Zilker Park and Disch Field where British and European engineers could find organized soccer. By the early 80s, Motorola, AMD, IBM and Samsung fielded teams in the Austin Municipal Soccer League. The accompanying construction boom drew Mexican and Latin American migrants; they – in turn – built up the American Soccer Association. Soccer’s return to central Texas was part and parcel of the Sunbelt’s economic boom, making soccer both homegrown and imported.

Carlos Flores and I identified four cohorts among the interviews, reflecting the time period they started becoming consciously involved in soccer. Interviews with people who started playing in the 70s make the international roots of soccer in central Texas very clear, as interviewees started playing in Great Britain, Mexico and Colombia. The democratizing impact of soccer in U.S. public schools came through in the 1980s, as women mentioned their start in middle school and YMCA leagues. The build-up for the 1994 World Cup brought soccer to many people’s attention. This broad awareness pushed the emergence of the first generation of people who started playing as adults, either taking up the game after watching their kid’s leagues or being recruited by college acquaintances and co-workers to join a soccer team. The most recent cohort is made up of players who started playing as children in the United States, and their stories sound very similar to the international cohort of the 1970s, except that they grew up in the United States.

In 1914, reporters with the Statesman proclaimed soccer the sport of the future. In 1920s, La Prensa played with the notion that soccer could become the most popular sport in Mexico and the United States. I am confident in saying that these reporters did not expect women’s soccer to be the most popular sport among children under the age of 12 or that recreational soccer might become the largest single adult sport association in Austin and perhaps Texas, only falling below running in the number of enrolled participants. That said, the absence of broad visible commercial spaces dedicated to for-profit soccer might be familiar to these pundits.  They might also alternative and international appeal of soccer might still resonate with these writers. They might also take comfort that in the interviews with the youngest cohort, playing soccer had become an unquestioned part of growing up in Texas.