In soccer, unlike basketball, there aren’t a lot of scholarship dollars.

BY Mark W. Wright | The Undefeated |

It was time to have “the talk.” We both knew it. Max’s sunken shoulders said everything his quivering lips couldn’t.

We’d just gotten home from a fourth night of training, and our drive on this rainy and cold night was a bad one. They were all bad, actually. The practice fields are 35 miles from home, and it’s typically an hourlong drive through rush-hour traffic.

The 90-minute training session is probably the easiest part of his day. After school, he jets home for a quick snack and gets into the car. The only window to do schoolwork is after practice — usually for two to three hours after a shower and dinner.

Five months of this routine had taken its toll on my then-15-year-old son. Soccer, the game he’d played since before he could walk — his Jamaican soccer-mad dad used to roll a miniature soccer ball on mom’s pregnant belly — was hardly fun anymore. It felt more like a job.

“Honey, we can talk about this tomorrow — it’s late,” my wife told me as I tried to engage him in conversation.

Max stood there, hunched over on the kitchen counter, his eyes welling up and pellets from the AstroTurf field falling off his loosened cleats. The boy was hella tired — we all were.

“Do you still want to do this, Max?” He looked away, then up at the ceiling. “I … I mean … yes,” he said, his voice trembling. “I’m just tired.”

“The talk” was almost exactly two years ago. As a player in the U.S. Soccer Development Academy (“DA” for short), Max is in the top tier of youth soccer in the country. As he’s gotten older, playing on too many teams to remember, and has grown in stature and in ability, soccer has become a real option as an avenue to college.

Now almost 17 and a rising senior, Max is a center forward/midfielder on a U16/U17 team that earned a playoff spot in the recent DA Summer Showcase and Playoffs competition in Oceanside, California. Being there, particularly as a playoff team, was a big deal for Max’s 5,000-member Carolina Rapids Soccer Club, which hasn’t fielded a playoff team in five years.

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