The majority of AJA boys\u2019 sports teams are overpopulated. Occasionally the school needs to create a junior varsity in addition to the varsity team in order to meet the demand. The boys soccer team has the opposite problem \u2014 they have not acquired the number of players needed to qualify for having a team. This issue in boy\u2019s soccer has persisted since 2018. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shortly after Athletic Director Coach Rodney Zimmerman sent out an email requesting for students to show their interest in spring sports, sophomore Edan Eyal sent out a \u201cBoys Soccer Interest\u201d google form to all of the High School. It included a \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d option to respond to the question \u201cWould you join the boys soccer team if they had one for the spring this year?\u201d The form totaled 27 responses, but only 5 of them were \u201cyes.\u201d Therefore, as in previous years, there is not an active boys soccer team his year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the students who filled out \u201cyes\u201d on Edan\u2019s interest was senior Sam Fogelson. Sam, who has played soccer in other schools for around seven years, hoped to play again this year. When asked why he thinks most of the people who filled out the form said \u201cno,\u201d Sam said, \u201cI just think there\u2019s more boys who prefer to play baseball.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Senior Josh Asherian said, \u201cI would play soccer if there was a team. But, given that there\u2019s only 40 boys in the school, and soccer is at the same time as baseball, we don\u2019t have enough kids who want to play.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The total amount of players on the baseball team is so numerous that a lot of them end up on the bench the majority of the game, but the soccer team continues to lack half the players necessary for the field<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n The two sports share a season, and most of the boys interested in playing a sport in general seem to prefer baseball. Senior Elliot Sokol, who is on the baseball team, shared that although he \u201clikes soccer as a sport,\u201d he prefers to play baseball on the school team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Junior Jordan Steinberg noted that while he doesn\u2019t have any interest in signing up for the soccer team, the baseball team does have a lot more players than essential to have on a team. The total amount of players on the baseball team is so numerous that a lot of them end up on the bench the majority of games, but the soccer team continues to lack half the players necessary for the field. \u201cWe have 19 kids for baseball and we only need 11,\u201d Jordan said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Freshman Ari Shapiro prefers baseball, but he said, \u201cIf I got cut [from the baseball team], then I\u2019d play soccer.\u201d Pace Kaplan, another freshman, argued against having baseball cuts and that \u201cif you volunteer and say you\u2019d only play soccer if you got cut, then you\u2019re going to end up having to play soccer.\u201d He explained, \u201cYou should either fully commit to one or both sports.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n While students have the ability to sign up for both soccer and baseball, most of the students who like both do not want to participate in two sports simultaneously. Sophomore Mikey Wilson concluded that he just \u201cwouldn\u2019t want to have to go to both practices.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yered Wittenberg, a senior who filled out the form as \u201cyes,\u201d said he doesn\u2019t think the school can change the fact that \u201cmore kids want to play baseball.\u201d Sophomore Ohad Dan, who also filled out the form as \u201cyes,\u201d agreed with the fact that baseball has a much higher level of interest in the High School, but he sparked the idea of possibly having a team by recruiting Middle Schoolers. Last year when the girls soccer team was just under the number required to have a team, they were able to assemble enough players when they added a couple of Middle School girls to the mix. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Senior Leah Houben, who played on the girl\u2019s soccer team last year, noted that not only did including the Middle school girls allow for them to have a team, but it also \u201cespecially conditioned the eighth grade players into playing with the High Schoolers a year in advance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the possible inclusion of Middle School boys who are willing to play soccer with the High Schoolers, AJA could potentially have a chance at having a boy\u2019s soccer team once again. However, at this time, the boy\u2019s soccer team seems to be as lacking enough players this year as it has in the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Lack of a Boy\u2019s Soccer Team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103,"featured_media":1891,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","entry","rows"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/goal-no-ball.jpeg?fit=1280%2C896&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1885"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1892,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885\/revisions\/1892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}