Congrats to Coach Nico Arellano on being voted SYSA Competitive Girls Coach of the Year
SYSA Competitive Boys Coach of the Year
Congratulations Seattle United coach, Drew Torkelson!
SYSA Recreational Boys Coach of the Year
Congratulations goes to Shorelake coach, Matt Calcavecchia!
SYSA Recreational Girls Coach of the Year
Congratulations to LVR’s Ben Raker!
FIFA 20 XBOX Tournament
Join SYSA's eTournament for XBOX!
Good Afternoon, SYSA Families,
We hope that each of you are all in good health during the current pandemic. We miss having all SYSA players, coaches, and families out playing soccer this spring, but remain positive that everyone will back out again, just as soon as it's safe to do so.
To help our players keep in touch with their neighborhood friends and the rest of the SYSA community, SYSA is launching our very first FIFA 20 XBOX eTournament. We hope this will be the first of many in the future, pandemic or not!
We have set up a registration page on Google Docs to collect all relevant participant information.
The registration deadline is APR 22nd (Wednesday). REGISTER HERE
The number of games depends solely on the total number of registrants. If you have an XBOX and the FIFA 20 game, it's easy to get involved. Spread the word to your friends in our soccer community and register today!
The format will be as follows:
-Regional group play based on your neighborhood rec club (3-4 game minimum).
-Winners from group play advance to the "Citywide" knock-out rounds & finals.
-Players will need to contact their opponents (via eMail) and arrange the time of their games.
-All games must be played by a deadline (date will be indicated in the schedule).
-Game results must be recorded by taking a screen shot/photo of the final result and sending it to the Tournament Director (via eMail).
-Open to all ages and skill levels.
For more information, click here.
Let's get playing!
SYSA Back Yard Soccer Initiative
Covid-19 might have stopped teams training and games for now. But it hasn’t stopped your chances of getting touches on the ball and working on your skills! Lets get out in the back yard and play!
So we are looking for all SYSA players (coaches and parents welcome to join in as well) to film your best foot skills and/or juggling tricks, post them with the #backyardskills and tag us. Bonus points for any extra creativity!
We will pick a winner each Friday until we can get back on the field. The winners will receive a $50 adidas gift card.
To win you must:
-Follow us on both Facebook & Instagram
-Wear your favorite teams jersey
King County's kids don't get outside enough, report shows.
Despite our reputation as a bastion for physical fitness and the outdoors, fewer than one in five children in King County get the recommended hour of physical activity per day, according to a report set to be released Tuesday.
Jon Solomon of The Aspen Institute, which partnered with the University of Washington and King County to administer the study, called it a “crisis.” And it only gets worse for less-affluent communities and those who don’t speak English in the home, particularly in South King County.
Barriers found through focus groups, talking with community leaders and a survey of 1,038 5th-to-12th graders in the county include implicit bias among players and coaches, a lack of transit access to green space and a region stretched thin by its explosive growth.
King County gets an overall “D” grade in “getting kids active through sports, play and outdoor recreation.” Twenty-two percent of boys and 16% of girls are getting 60 minutes of play per day. On average, King County youth are getting the recommended amount of activity 4.18 days per week, while those whose families don’t speak English in the home average 3.65 days and children from less-affluent families average 3.68.
Rather than a crisis, Casey Sixkiller, the county’s chief operating officer, sees an opportunity. The county has already seen success with programs such as Trailhead Direct, which expanded this year to connect hikers to nine trailheads using public transit. And it has provided $2.4 million for 36 other programs this year through the Youth and Amateur Sports Grant (YASG).
“The tragedy here would be if we took the report and didn’t build on the foundation that we’ve already laid, and take the opportunity where people want to collaborate and work together,” Sixkiller said. “We want to make sure we leverage this moment.”
The report lays out a path forward.
Since 2010, King County has seen the third-highest increase in the country in foreign-born residents, but it hasn’t kept up with the cultural influx.
“We did hear a lot in our focus groups about a cultural mismatch,” UW researcher Julie McCleery said. “Both not being able to navigate systems or field reservations or signing up for activities because it was in English, but also some confusion about how participation works in the U.S. … It’s more of a separate system that one has to learn how to negotiate, and the system has some cultural biases built into it.”
Children in families that don’t speak English in the home were three times less likely to participate in organized sports. The study found immigrant families had a particularly difficult time navigating a system in which registration forms and scholarship information, if available, are only in English.
“Even if (programs) do have scholarships, the signs are in English,” one program leader said in the report. “The communications are in English, so families aren’t able to read and understand. … We don’t understand that we have to go to softball evaluations in order to be able to play on the team; like, we just want to sign up.”
There also is a disparity between interest in a sport and participating in it. Youth of color and white children show similar levels of interest in a range of sports. But when surveyed about 49 potential activities, white children had participated in 48 of them, while 17 — including ice skating, hockey, rowing and lacrosse — weren’t selected by a single black or Latinx respondent.
The report calls for a public-health campaign translated into multiple languages, as well as an equity tool kit to ensure programs are reflecting the communities they serve and a centralized portal for rating and reservations.
But further, 80% of children are reaching their activities by car. The report also calls on King County to expand free youth access to transit and to focus on the number of parks within a quarter-mile of a transit stop. It found while 53% of youth would consider using public transportation to get outside, 71% of King County parks were insufficiently accessible via transit on a given Saturday morning.
It’s worse in South King County, where there is less green space and fewer transit routes to them. But the Sounders’ RAVE Foundation and the Washington Youth Soccer Foundation have brought four soccer fields to Auburn and another to Burien, one recipient of YASG funding. It is public-private partnerships like those, particularly with local pro sports teams, the report also sees as potential solutions.
Women's Soccer Stars Concerned About Trauma From Repetitive Head Impact
With a new NFL season starting, concerns about head injuries in football are expected to ramp up again.
But now the discussion is expanding to women's soccer. On the heels of this summer's World Cup, researchers are preparing to study the potential toll on women from a lifetime of head impacts, including heading the ball.
Expanding research
Using the head to redirect a soccer ball, or to score a goal, is an integral part of the game. Especially as players become more skilled. In an era of increased concussion awareness, heading has become fraught with potential risk. And science exploring that risk hasn't been altogether inclusive.
"We really have needed to expand this research to include women," says Dr. Robert Stern.
He's one of the top researchers studying Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease known as CTE. Stern and others at Boston University have focused a lot of their attention on CTE's link to head trauma in men who play tackle football.
But next month, Stern will start working with former female soccer players, some well known, on a study called SHINE, which stands for Soccer Head Impacts and Neurological Effects.
Heading a million balls
Former U.S. Women's National team star Michelle Akers, now 53, was the catalyst for Stern's study.
They talked months ago about her concern for fellow aging players, and whether forgetfulness and other mental lapses were early signs of soccer-induced brain problems, including CTE. Akers and former U.S. teammate Brandi Chastain spoke on CBS about their involvement in the study.
Michelle Akers, center, is helped off the field by the training staff after taking a hard hit in the second half of the Women's World Cup Final against China at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., on July 10, 1999. Akers said she now regrets what she estimates were at least 50 headers per game during her career.
"I would not be heading a million balls like that," Akers said. "There's no way on earth I would do that again."
Stern says prior research shows there is a relationship between the amount of heading and cognitive, even chemical changes in the brain. Enough so that in 2015, the U.S. Soccer Federation banned heading for kids ages 10 and younger.
Careful teaching
Youth soccer coach Dan Pingrey has led his Seattle United girl's club team through its first year of heading.
"So how do we head the ball?" Pingrey asks his 10- and 11-year-old team members at a recent practice. "We look with what?"
"Our eyes!" the girls respond in unison.
By the time they start playing games this fall, most of the girls will be 11, meaning no more ban. At the practice on the University of Washington campus, Pingrey runs his girls through a refresher drill.
"Upper body straight!" he shouts. "Don't bend your head! Nice and easy, right to [the] forehead. Good! "
Pingrey doesn't want to see heads wobbling. Neurologists say girls can be more prone to concussion because they sometimes have weaker neck muscles that cause the head to flop and the brain to shake.
Pingrey also trains his kids to keep their elbows out. That creates a protective buffer to help prevent them from smacking skulls with another player who flies in to head the same ball.
This is the first year these girls will be allowed to head the ball in competition. A 2015 order by the U.S. Soccer Federation banned heading for kids 10 and younger.
Shahram Salemy appreciates Pingrey's care in teaching the new heading skill.
Salemy is the only parent watching practice on this day. His daughter Hannah has played since she was about 4.
"Coach is fantastic," Salemy says. "He started [the girls] with their parents at home using one of those little inflatable beach balls. Very light. Just to get them used to the motion and how to use [their] whole upper body and core and chest to generate the power. Not the neck. And I think that's a big part of the technique."
In his many years of coaching and playing, Pingrey says he hasn't seen too many circumstances where a header has caused a concussion. But he acknowledges, it can happen.
"A ball kicked by a goal keeper," says Pingrey, "a long distance, high, and [a player] gets under it and heads it wrong, that's going to rattle someone."
And although it's a relatively rare occurrence, he'd rather be cautious.
"Anything we can do now, to help minimize potentially those types of injuries or types of diseases long term, let's do it," Pingrey says. "It doesn't take that much more effort as a coach to put in the effort to teach the kids how to do it right. How to do it well. Not [to] be afraid, which allows them to be more confident and let them do it correctly."
Despite his efforts, there's still some fear.
"I'm really worried about getting a concussion," says 11-year-old Seattle United player Sienna Connell. "Just like I've heard about soccer being the most common sport that girls get head injuries in, so that worries me."
Not enough to stop playing, which, she says, she loves.
Team parents don't seem to share Connell's concern.
Salemy says he hasn't sensed the kind of concussion hysteria that's gripped some parents of young boys playing football.
"I know [soccer] parents who have kids that are older, teenagers," Salemy says, "and what I hear from them is more of a concern about ACL injuries and knee injuries more than head injuries. We just don't see a whole lot of that. Maybe it's just the age of the kids."
Researching with an open mind
Still, 2017 research by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons found high school soccer-playing girls did have a significantly higher rate of concussions. Even more than boys playing football.
The study points to headers as part of the problem.
That's where Dr. Stern now is turning his attention. With an open mind about a subject where there's still much to learn.
"I'm one of the people who does the bulk of this research," Stern says, "and I'm not really sure, exactly, what leads to CTE and how it's manifest and what the risk factors are."
But Stern stresses repetitive head impacts of any kind, even ones that don't cause symptoms of concussions...called subconcussive....are not good.
And he hopes the 20 veteran female players signed up for his soccer study will help science inch closer to understanding the risks of playing the games we love.
King County: The State of Play
On an overcast Fall day, a group of coaches, educators, researchers, business leaders, government officials, and community members gathered at Steve Cox Memorial Park in South Seattle to discuss troubling participation trends in youth athletics and activities in King County.
According to a new report published by the University of Washington Center for Leadership in Athletics, in partnership with the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program, kids in the Seattle-King County region are not getting enough active play.
Only 19% of youth in King County meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation of 60 minutes of daily physical activity, the report concludes, falling below the national average.
When accounting for factors like gender, race, language, affluence, and ability, the disparity is even more alarming.
While 22% of boys meet the CDC benchmarks for physical activity, only 16% of girls do so. Youth of color are less likely to participate in organized physical activity than their white peers. Participation barriers adversely affect immigrant communities and families that don’t speak English at home.
Dr. Julie McCleery, the primary investigator on the report, articulated the urgency of the problem to the crowd at Steve Cox Memorial Park:
“The benefits of physical activity are so well founded and reach into all aspects of a child’s life, including improved cognition and mental health, school attendance, and even better grades,” McCleery said.
“Physical activity, along with social and emotional wellbeing, is a cornerstone of healthy, whole-child development, and merits the community’s prioritization and investment.”
Dr. Julie McCleery, principal investigator on the State of Play: Seattle-King County report, addresses the crowd at Steve Cox Memorial Park. Sept 10, 2019
The Respect Campaign
The Respect Campaign is an initiative to improve the playing environment for our youth players to enhance both player and character development. SYSA is committed to providing an enjoyable experience for all. So Join us in elevating our standards.
Mission Statement
The Respect Campaign aims to change the climate of youth soccer and elevate our conduct as players, coaches, spectators, and referees to a higher level by:
Implementing programs and practices that improve the environment of the game-on the field and sidelines.
Infusing our culture so that everyone—players, parents, coaches, directors, staff— treats each other with respect, and
Embracing diversity—by striving to understand others’ perspectives, even those most different from our own.
2018 SYSA Award Winners
Congratulations to the following award winners for their outstanding efforts in 2018 in support of the kids in SYSA!!
Girls Competitive Coach of the Year Olivia Lee (Seattle United)
Boys Competitive Coach of the Year Abdella Hussen (Seattle United)
Girls Recreational Coach of the Year Jose Martinez (Beacon Hill)
Boys Recreational Coach of the Year Bassim Bowidar (Lake City)
Volunteer of the Year Stacy Heilgeist (Ballard)
Administrator of the Year Jon Carver (LVR)
