Self-study activity:
Watch this BBC video clip about the popularity of youth soccer in the US and answer the questions about it.
The activity is suitable for (strong) intermediate students.
1 How many weekends a year does the family devote to soccer?
2 How much do they spend on every tournament they go?
3 How long do they spend travelling every week?
4 Is Kendra a housewife?
5 Does she regret the time she spends on this soccer thing?
6 How have they met their friends?
To check your answers, you can read the transcript below.
Come on hey!!! Come on, get going, get your back, get your trunk…
Soccer in Virginia is like religion. It has dramatically changed our life. If you had told me seven years ago that we would be spending the kind of money we are spending on soccer, that we’d devoting twenty-five, thirty weekends a year, I probably wouldn’t have believed you, I really wouldn’t have. Soccer is definitely a thirty-hour a week commitment.
The games, they can be in another state. Every tournament we go to is a minimum of five hundred, six hundred dollars for that weekend.
The larger car pool is essential because if you had to do this every day it would be a killer. Where they practise from right here is over an hour one way, it’s five or six hours three times a week. We got a car so that we could participate in the car pool.
I enjoy the time we spend with our children. My husband and I both work and we try when we are not working to be with our children and this facilitates that. The children are here for such a short time with you. I don’t know what we’d rather be doing if we weren’t spending time with them.
We made it with time to spare. It’s six nineteen because I rock.
There is no community center any more. Virtually all of the friends we socialize with, we’ve met them through soccer. If we were outside this bubble, and we weren’t in the soccer community any more, we wouldn’t be spending the time we were in their company. You know, I know we hear the argument sometimes that children are over-programmed, that there’s too much. I don’t think so. I think it’s time well spent.
Sure there are days when I just roll my eyes, shake my head and go ‘oh my gosh’, but we’ve got it down to a science and we really, really enjoy it.
Proud the way you worked.
Thank you.
