re: I have a World Cup question for the MSB soccer fans

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For 39 years he has run a series of youth soccer camps in cities across the nation. In the beginning his camps were attended almost entirely by boys. But when the US women’s team won the 1999 World Cup, which was held in the US, something changed. The number of girls wanting to come to the camp boomed. Now enrolment at his camps is more than 50% female.

The reason is Title IX, a law passed in 1972 to provide educational equality to females. One of the law’s biggest impacts is in college sports, where universities had to stop handing the vast majority of their sports scholarships to males. Soccer was a cheap beneficiary – an easy sport to operate. And as more colleges offered soccer scholarships to women, more and more girls began to play.

“We hadn’t had that cultural bias of having a great men’s program in our country,” said Julie Foudy, a star on the US team that won the 1999 Women’s World Cup. “It takes a while to change a cultural mindset. We benefit here in the United States to have a history that wasn’t gender-biased.”

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