Former Shropshire man Mark Ellis’s letter from his home in Arizona

Football, American style

Blog: I am not going to get into a lengthy diatribe about correctly naming the game soccer or football, suffice to say in the privacy of my home and around other like-minded individuals it is football, and when out and about with Joe Public it is soccer.

Having sworn it would never happen when I first moved here (along with many other things), I find myself slipping Americanisms into my daily speech, such as soccer, cookies, candy, hood, trunk, etc… and most of the reasons for doing so are pretty sad.

Generally it is to avoid the cries of “how quaint, did you just call that a bonnet?”, or “say that again, I love your accent”, or “why don’t you guys just wise up and call it soccer?”. I could go on.

Interestingly, there was one good reason. When my daughter first started at pre-kindergarten at around two-and-a-half years of age,  she stopped speaking when she was away from my wife and me. This lasted about three months until we figured out that she was confused by the difference in language being used in our house and school and didn’t want to appear foolish by saying the wrong thing. So we now use Americanisms with our best British accents.

Anyway, back to soccer as it is a major part of the Ellis family’s life. William, our son plays for the Sereno Soccer Club, based in Phoenix, Arizona. It is one  of the best U-17 club teams in the US.

William Ellis, 17, playing the real game at the Regional tournament in Boise, Idaho

Having grown up in rural Shropshire the whole concept of club sports was completely alien to me so we had to learn fast. The biggest lessons are to accept you’re going to be substantially poorer, and that every weekend and holiday will be soccer, soccer, soccer.

I didn’t know anyone who went into professional sports when I was at high school, but my understanding is that you are picked up by a club very young, trained hard, and either make the grade by your late teens or are dropped. It is very different in the US.

The majority of players going into Major League sports (American football, baseball, basketball, soccer…) are drafted from college. As a result the goal for any aspiring athlete here is to be recruited by a top college. To do that you have to travel the country to tournaments where they might be seen by college coaches or their scouts.

At U-9 my son’s team started traveling to California, Nevada, and New Mexico for tournaments. Since then, as the boys got older, the distances traveled have increased with trips to North Carolina, Hawaii, Florida, and Massachusetts in the last couple of years.

It is not an inexpensive proposition but as parents (and here you could substitute “mugs” for parents) there is always a possibility that your child will be recruited and receive a college scholarship. ‘Possibility’ is the important word there, I wish I could use probability, but we have to wait and see.

This week, starting June 20th, is a big college recruiting week in the west United States. The boys won the U-17 Arizona State Cup which qualified them for Western Regionals in Boise, Idaho starting on Monday. The goal is to win Regionals and progress to Nationals.

So, I will continue to hold on to my roots and call it football, eat biscuits, buy petrol, and open the bonnet. But, after 18 years of living here, old habits die hard. I still occasionally walk up to the right side of the car to drive. Or the wrong side.