UT Soccer

The UT Woman's Soccer team has had several successful seasons and Mom and I had remarked several times over the past few years that we ought to go to a game. We went to a game many years ago - back when the kids were small and the team was playing at a level just above Intermurals. It was free, played on a PE field and we sat on the grass - until it started raining.

These days, it is an official NCAA sport, and they play at the Mike Myers stadium on the campus - a facility used solely for track and soccer (and bigger than 90% of the University and College stadia in the country). Friday night's opponent was arch-rival A&M, it was a pleasant evening, and Senior Citizens got in for four bucks, so we went.

Now if you know me well, you know that I am not fond of crowds and traffic jams, and we live in a Primo crowd and traffic jam city (as I write this there are 65,000 people at the ACL Music Fest in Zilker Park and 100,000 up the road at the UT-Arkansas game). Stay at home, stay at home! The traffic was manageable because after all these years of attending Woman's Basketball at UT we have worked out a back-road route to get down to the campus. In the evening, there is ample parking, so everything was cool there. We were there with only about 4,000 of our closest friends, but the traffic patterns aren't too hot at Myers, so it got a little confining for my taste.

They are working hard to make UT Soccer family-friendly. There were blow-up bouncing castles and slides and such in one end zone for the kiddos, tricycle races and youth team scrimmages at half-time. It looked a lot like minor-league baseball. Bring the kids and everybody have a good time.

Oh, and the game itself was okay. UT appeared to be the better team - though the game ended nil - nil (notice the clever use of soccer talk) after regulation and two overtimes. No shoot-outs at this level. But frankly you can see a lot better on TV. So perhaps the most interesting aspect of the evening was sitting in the (hard, hard) stands, listening to all the socializing going on around us. Parents in front of us explaining that they were not going to pay $7.50 for hamburgers and $4.00 for cokes (got to make up those Senior discounts somehow); the guy to our right hitting on four young ladies, explaining why they should join him and his three buddies; the women behind us who had no clue about soccer, but it was a good chance to catch up on the latest gossip.

And yes, we did leave at half-time. It was fun, but one half is about my limit of crowd and traffic events for a while. We'll do it again in 2012 or so.