"Soccer mom": why soccer?

...why not football mom, baseball mom, or basketball mom?

Soccer mom, as far as I can tell, is an American term made popular during the 1996 presidential elections, used to describe a key demographic - mothers who, by spending lots of time shuttling their children to and from soccer practice, demonstrate that they were concerned about their children. Other attributes often associated with this demographic are suburban, married, busy, drives a minivan/SUV and so on.

What puzzles me is the choice of sport in the term: why soccer? Globally, soccer is an extremely popular sport, but there are many sports more popular than it in USA, and I imagine this would extend to after-school activities. I see that in Canada there's the equivalent term hockey mom which makes more sense.

Was the term coined in a place and time where soccer was a more natural choice? Is soccer a more prominent sport in the after-school world? Or was there some other historical accident?

Solution 1:

As an American mom whose kids I shuttled to and from soccer (along with their dad, who played basketball in HS/college), I would like to give an opinion.

Baseball/football/basketball are the big three here. When my kids were very, very young, the sport for little kids was tee-ball, a version of baseball/softball where the ball is not pitched but sits on a tee as does a golf ball (taller, of course). After tee-ball, a child would graduate to "Little League", which was "the" game for kids (esp. boys, but girls, too) to play (and as adults to softball). At about that time, soccer was hitting the US in a big way. A lot of the emphasis on young children's sports shifted away from tee-ball and little league to soccer, probably because tee-ball is still more demanding for a child's coordination than soccer, and out of a desire to join the rest of the western world in their preoccupation with the sport.

The largest category of soccer in the United States in terms of participation is boys' and girls' youth soccer. Soccer is one of the most played sports by children in the United States.

Unfortunately, in the beginning, this children's sport was mainly one of the upper and middle classes, a very important demographic for politicians, as women vote more often than men, and the upper and middle classes more often than the lower. So, an appeal to "soccer moms" was supposed to help win elections.

Unfortunately, in trying to decrease the popularity of certain politicians in the eyes of these women, opposing party candidates painted an uglier picture of "soccer moms".

Although I did shuttle my kids to soccer, I was not a soccer mom any more than my husband was a soccer dad. They played other sports in season, and I never felt harried, though we did indeed have the minivan.

In 1967 there were 100,000 people playing soccer in the US; by 1984, that number had grown to over 4 million. Girls high school soccer experienced tremendous growth in playing numbers throughout the 1970s and 1980s—from 10,000 in 1976, to 41,000 in 1980, to 122,000 in 1990.

Solution 2:

In Europe and pretty much the rest of the world, the game is called football. In the US there's already the national sport, football, which the rest of the world calls "American football" hence the term, soccer, was adopted in the US.

The US national sport is (American) football
_{(see edit correction below)}

American football as a whole is the most popular sport in the United States; professional football and college football are the most popular forms of the game, with the other major levels being high school and youth football.

But as we all know, it's a tough rough game. You need to be physically strong, heavy, and fast on your feet. It helps if you are over 1.90 m too. It's a game of strength, coordination, speed and brutal force; so it's fair to say that traditionally it is a man's game. It's one of the first sports that American dads would teach their sons, a sport where father and son(s) could bond.

As a result, moms and daughters could feel excluded, and if a son (for whatever reason) disliked or was terrible at football he could always turn to baseball or basketball. When soccer finally caught on in the US, it was initially played by girls. As testified by this article in the New York Times dated 1996.

A soccer mom who is proud to be one

^{By DONNA GREENE Published: December 1, 1996}

WHEN Deborah Slaner Larkin of Pelham, an advocate of sports for girls, hears ''soccer mom,'' she cringes. The term, she says, does not do justice to those who are making a difference in their daughters' lives.

A member of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and the mother of a 5-year-old, Ms. Larkin feels strongly about the benefits of sports. She is on the board of the Westchester Fund for Women and Girls [...]

We also are the people who are on the field. Most of us are not coaches, although some are. I coach my daughter's soccer team. Other moms are there in force watching. They see the condition of the fields, they see how the coaches coach, how the other parents react. They see how often their kids get to play. So they know a lot of what is really going on.

Finally there was a team sport which involved speed, necessitated excellent coordination skills, nifty footwork, and you didn't need to be built like a brick wall. In fact some of the best international football (soccer) players in the world are under 1.80m, and if you recall Maradona, arguably the most charismatic and talented player since Pelè, is only 1.65 m tall.

While soccer grew in popularity also as a boy's sport, I believe the term, soccer mom became established. She could chaperone her children, sons and daughters, to games and training practice. She no longer needed to rely on her husband to teach their son to play a manly sport, she could kick a ball just as easily and score a goal, besides her husband probably knew next to nothing about soccer unless he had watched South American TV sports channels.

What is interesting is how the term, soccer mom, has, in such a short space of time evolved from being one of praise, to its present day derogatory meaning.

From Urban Dictionary, its most impartial definition (edited on my part)

Soccer mom
A middle-aged, upper middle-class woman (usually white) and lives in the suburbs who devotes her life to her children. She carpools, drives them to soccer and little league; volunteers at their school, does snack days, and play dates. Most of them end up driving their children away by not letting them express their selves and immediately putting down anything that they find important. They are usually Christian and this can be shown around their house, in most of the cases I have found the children end up being atheists. They [soccer moms]drive in their mini vans and suburbans with their fancy coffees and cell phones.

That mom that is driving like a maniac to pick up her kid from school and cart them to soccer practice is a soccer mom.

EDIT

For the downvoter. Why is the term called Soccer mom and NOT Basketball mom, Baseball mom or Hockey mom? Because soccer is a relatively new sport in the US, although its roots were formed as long ago as 1860, it saw a dramatic decline in popularity in the 1920s. Americans had to wait until the 60s before it began to regain support. American soccer girls teams in the US have existed since the mid 70s but only began flourishing in the 1990s especially when it was decided that the US would host the Fifa World cup in 1994. As I mentioned previously, initially, soccer was embraced by American girls as a competitive team sport, American men and boys still tended to view soccer as being a sports for wimps, extolling the virtues of (American) Football as the sport par excellence.

Wikipedia states:

Soccer in the United States
In 1967 there were 100,000 people playing soccer in the US; by 1984, that number had grown to over 4 million. Girls high school soccer experienced tremendous growth in playing numbers throughout the 1970s and 1980s—from 10,000 in 1976, to 41,000 in 1980, to 122,000 in 1990.

The 1970s and 1980s saw increased popularity of the college game. Women's college soccer received a significant boost in 1972 with the passage of Title IX, which mandated equal funding for women's athletic programs, leading to colleges forming NCAA sanctioned women's varsity teams. [...] The growth of the women's game during the 1990s helped increase overall interest in soccer in the United States. The number of women's college soccer teams increased from 318 in 1991 to 959 in 2009

Finally, the statistics in the Wikipedia article suggests that soccer's unstoppable rise in popularity is no longer confined among the middle-class youth, but has cut across gender, ethnic, income and class barriers.

The largest category of soccer in the United States in terms of participation is boys' and girls' youth soccer. Soccer is one of the most played sports by children in the United States. In 2012, soccer was the #4 most played team sport by high school boys, and soccer overtook softball to become the #3 most played team sport by high school girls. As of 2006, the U.S. was the #1 country in the world for participation in youth soccer, with 3.9 million American youths (2.3 million boys and 1.6 million girls) registered with U.S. Soccer. The number of high school soccer players more than doubled from 1990 to 2010, giving soccer the fastest growth rate among all major U.S. sports

EDIT 2

Until yesterday I was unaware that (American) football is not considered to be the national sport. Despite it being on the whole the most popular sport in the United States [and] "As of 2012, nearly 1.1 million high school athletes and 70,000 college athletes play the sport in the United States annually" That special honour is reserved for baseball.

But not all Americans would agree as the executive editor of Slate, Josh Levin, boldly claims, "If the United States had an official sport, what would it be? Baseball can call itself the national pastime until the sun burns out, but the correct answer is good old American football."

If you're into sports, I recommend clicking on the article, it has a fun map of the different official state sports in the USA including a few surprises too!

Solution 3:

Soccer Mum (in UK, Australia and NZ) originated as a mildly derogatory term for mothers who spend much of their time driving to and from home and soccer (or other sporting activities), often in large four drive/SUV cars which never see dirt roads. (Source wiki.answers.com)

The Origin of the Term "Soccer Mom"

The earliest record of the term “soccer mom” being used to describe the woman mentioned above is in 1995. Susan Casey was running for the Denver City Council and decided to use the slogan “A Soccer Mom for City Council”. Casey’s platform was built around the idea that women were capable of having a profession and raising a family.

Apparently the idea was a popular one in Denver. Casey won her election with 51% of the vote.

National Politics and Soccer Moms

The following year the term soccer mom made its way into national politics, but the Republican party didn’t define it quite the same. Bob Dole was squaring off against Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential race, and at the Republican National Convention Dole’s media advisor Alex Castellanos dropped the soccer mom bomb into the national media’s lap.

Castellanos suggested that Clinton’s team was using soccer mom demographics to win the election. His description of a soccer mom was somewhat different than Casey’s. Castellanos defined a soccer mom as an “overburdened middle income working mother who transports their children to soccer practice, to scouts and school”. Regardless of the meaning, the term “soccer mom” was a hit with the media, which began using it in print and on television.

Since that election soccer moms have become a definitive segment all their own, that are as prevalent in politics as they are in pop culture. Though it’s been used as the punch line of jokes and an angle for marketers, soccer moms now proudly bear the label like a badge of honor. Here at Avila Creative Soccer we salute you soccer moms.

Source

Solution 4:

As other answerers have noted, “soccer mom” emerged as a demographic term because of politics. It referred to a particular type of voter: a female parent engaged in her child’s or children’s extracurricular activities, usually married or divorced, usually suburban, and usually middle class or upper middle class.

But why were these demographic features associated with soccer instead of some other sport—or with no sport at all? And why did politicians care about this particular demographic anyway?

Why Soccer?

In the early 1990s, soccer was still a fairly new organized youth sport in much of the United States. There were certainly leagues—even professional ones—stretching back to the early 1970s, but the primary youth and high-school sports at that time were baseball, football, basketball, swimming, track, and (in the north) hockey for boys; and basketball, volleyball, swimming, and track for girls.

The established sports drew the best athletes, in part because they offered a future in athletic competition in middle school and beyond. But the intense competitiveness of Little League baseball and Mighty Mite or Pop Warner football—with their unrelenting pressure to win, to play through injuries, and to endure aggressive coaching and heckling from bad-behaving adults—repelled some parents.

To people in the rest of the world, where soccer is the drama king of sports, it may seem astonishing that the impetus for grown-ups in the United States to organize youth soccer leagues and to enroll their kids in them was in large part a reaction against the win-at-all-costs mentality of the established youth sports. Even in the late 1990s, when I enrolled my kids in youth soccer programs in northern California, the league placed considerable emphasis on the “friendliness” of the games: Spectators were not supposed to criticize their team, the opposition, or the referees; everyone who showed up was supposed to play a roughly equal number of minutes; and winning was supposed to be less important than trying hard and having a good time.

Thus, in 1995 a “soccer mom” had not merely chosen to be deeply involved in her children’s athletic endeavors as a fan and chaperone; she had also made a conscious choice to put them in a newish alternative sport that she had probably not played herself as a child and that rejected the perceived ethos of the traditional sports.

Accurately or not, political strategists attributed these characteristics to women in the “soccer mom” category: active, devoted to parenting, affluent, protective, optimistic, open-minded (in the sense of being willing to try new things), and likely to vote. Though race was not an explicit part of the standard description, I suspect that “more likely than not, white” was an implicit element of the demographic description as well. But economic class was far more relevant to the category than ethnicity.

The connection to a sport (as opposed to no sport) is significant, I think, because sports in the United States are viewed as being a down-to-earth, all-American activity for kids. A “piano mom” might have most of the same aspirations for and involvement with her children as a “soccer mom”—and in fact many real-world soccer moms are also piano moms—but U.S. society at large might suspect a piano mom of effeteness, or at least of harboring dubious priorities; and it's important to remember that politicians were actively courting "soccer moms" in the 1990s, so it wouldn't do to portray them as having even remotely suspect credentials.

When I was a child, the notion of “PTA parents”— parents who cared so much about their children’s success in life that they attended interminable monthly Parent–Teacher Association meetings held in their children’s elementary school lunchroom/auditorium—was a popular label. The labels change, but the habit of trying to pigeonhole blocs of likely voters persists.

Why Did This Demographic Receive So Much Attention?

The simple answer to this question is that political strategists viewed “soccer moms” as being a swing-vote demographic. A classic expression of this view appears in an interview with Tipper Gore (wife of then–Vice President Al Gore) published in the February 1997 issue of Mother Jones magazine:

Q: I understand that you are a real “soccer mom.” During the last [1996] campaign, we heard a lot about soccer moms—swing voters who voted for Carter [in 1976], Reagan [in 1980 and 1984], and Clinton [in 1992 and 1996]. But that’s a slightly different group, because you wouldn’t have voted for Reagan.

A: Thank you.... It is me to a certain extent. Not that I have voted anything but Democratic—I haven’t. But now that you have explained that, I can go back to wearing my soccer mom button.

Labels like “soccer mom” and “Joe Sixpack” are self-perpetuating, and never have more than a very crude relation to the complexities of real people. But they catch on because they simplify reality and have a superficial appearance of insight. Ultimately, “soccer mom” no more defines a monolithic demographic of striving, suburban, hands-on parents than “Volvo-driving brie-and-chablis crowd” accurately identifies a monolithic demographic of affluent liberal poseurs.