BookScrutiny.com
 
The World Cup just ended and I couldn’t decide which of the one hundred plus books I’ve read over the last two years to review for the first post at BookScrutiny.com so it seemed appropriate to begin with a book about soccer. About the time that the FIFA World Cup started, my friend Jared Montz lent me a book called The Boys from Little Mexico: A Season Chasing The Amercan Dream. The Boys From Little Mexico is a Friday Night Lights style memoir of a soccer season at Woodburn High School in Oregon.
As The Boys From Little Mexico chronicles the season it also delves into questions about US Soccer, immigration, and education. The book goes into the problems of the language barrier and poverty that the Hispanic kids face. Soccer is the thing one that the kids on the team at Woodburn High have that not only gets them off the streets but also gives them an opportunity to get an education beyond high school.
The Boys From Little Mexico is a fantastic piece of journalism about the Hispanic community in the U.S. and soccer's place in that community. If you don’t understand a single thing about soccer it won’t make a bit of difference. To appreciate The Boys From Little Mexico all you need is the desire to read a great story about the power of sports to make a difference in the lives of the athletes who play them. The book does deal with immigration both legal and illegal and that may keep some readers from enjoying the book. However, from my perspective the book is more about the game of soccer being something that gives kids a better chance to succeed in life wherever they find themselves than it is a book crusading for immigrants although it could be seen that way by some.
I found The Boys From Little Mexico enlightening. As someone who played soccer through college and who now coaches I thought I had a pretty good idea of what the game was like in this country but The Boys From Little Mexico showed me that there is a whole world inside U.S. soccer that I had very little idea about. It opened my eyes to the soccer culture that is being brought across our borders as opposed to the soccer culture that I grew up in and currently coach in which is mainly white, upper-class, and suburban. It also drew my attention to the fact that kids like those in The Boys from Little Mexico are at a serious disadvantage playing the game in the United States because our system is very quick to overlook High School soccer and focus on clubs. The problem is that many kids can’t afford to play for the expensive clubs and either don’t develop their talents or get overlooked because they only play High School soccer.
At any rate I recommend the book highly to anyone looking for a good sports read but I especially recommend it to anyone with a passion for the game of soccer. If this book is read widely enough in the soccer community it may be a catalyst for change in the way that players are developed in this country.