For girls in New York City who love to play soccer, monumental changes have taken place, largely thanks to the Downtown United Soccer Club and the beautiful new fields at Pier 40. In the 1980s, city girls played soccer on rocky dirt fields, in a patchwork of different T-shirts, with parent referees, if they were lucky. Back then, there were no travel teams for girls. But today, within the Cosmopolitan Junior Soccer League, there are dozens of girls’ recreational teams, as well as competitive travel teams.
The Downtown United Soccer Club is holding tryouts for their travel teams in a club that boasts the best coaches in New York City, including several Olympic Development Team coaches, a college coach from the N.Y.U. womens’ soccer team and a professional woman sports trainer from the prestigious Velocity Sports Performance Center (a national speed and power training program).
Several of the players who started at Downtown United have gone on to be accepted in top colleges with athletic scholarships, and others are on prestigious Super-Y League teams, which include the top 1 percent of players in the country.
Tryouts for Downtown United girls’ teams are June 3, 6 p.m.-8 p.m. at the Pier 40 courtyard field at the west end of W. Houston St. at the Hudson River. The rain date is June 4, 7 p.m.-9 p.m. For more information, call 917-941-1480. The league is open to all girls in any of the five boroughs, Westchester and New Jersey.
