This article directed its focus on soccer in the South. Reading this article brought some eye-opening points and things that I would never have thought about. In the introduction it starts off with how soccer started to expand in the United States. Typically, efforts for the sport to expand was focused on the Northeast and Midwest regions of the United States. Reasons behind why the sport was not taking off in South was because of how rural it was and segregation. Also, a lot of its major cities lacked European immigration where the sport could have taken off. The sport only started to take off through the seaports of the region. The sport first took off in New Orleans in the nineteenth century since it was the largest city in the south at the time.
In 1908, the first recorded match in Atlanta took place. It was the newly formed Atlanta club against a new team from Lithonia, Georgia. This was a union affiliated team and most of the players were Scottish and Welch players. Although it was not really the first match between the two since the first game took place in 1907. This game took place in DeKalb County.
There is so much I can write about, but I am only giving out some of the information provided from the article. This article as a whole shocks me because I never once thought about sport and its history in the south. What I can reflect on from this reading is how important sport is in U.S history. I never realized its rich history in the region. I honestly believed that its history was more recent. But the fact that it dates to the nineteenth century is astounding. I hope to learn more about in the U.S and it influence.
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