Fifty teams of 6- to 9-year-old Magnolia Soccer Club members squared off in the Interbay Soccer Stadium for the 2007 Mod World Cup on Sunday, Nov. 4.
Mod stands for modified, explained soccer-club president Doug Broadbent as a group of kids played three-on-three in a 12-minute game without goalies. The U8 and U9 games are 20 minutes long and include goalies. No scores are kept during the U6 to U9 games in the World Cup, he said. "We don't keep score until they're 10.
"This is the end of the season," Broadbent said of a schedule that began in September. There are 451 boys and girls in the U6-U9 division, and each of their teams is named after a country, he said. Each age group also starts out their matches with a parade onto the field.
"It's all about fun," according to Broadbent, who added that the league takes steps to prevent crazed soccer dads and moms from acting up during their children's games.
"For each one of our teams, we elect a lollipop supervisor," he said of team members who first shake bags of suckers as a warning to loud parents.
If the warning doesn't do the trick, the lollipop supervisor will stick a sucker in the parent's mouth so they'll have to shut up, Broadbent explained with a grin. It rarely comes to that. "In my seven years of coaching, there's only been one lollipop given out," he said.
The fields for the kids' games are smaller than normal, and they were marked out with Day-Glo orange and yellow markers for the World Cup games. "We partner with Seattle Pacific University and Parks to rent this every year," Broadbent said of the stadium SPU set up in conjunction with the city.
Soccer is making inroads in American sports, and while professional teams are struggling, soccer is the number-one game played by amateurs, he said.
In fact there are more Magnolia kids playing the game than neighborhood children playing Little League Baseball, Broadbent said with some pride. "My goal for these kids is having them have fun so they'll come back [to soccer]," he said.
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